In the opening scene of the film Can’t Get Away, the camera pans across a desolate stretch of tree-lined highway. Shot in black and white, and accompanied by a haunting musical score, the message is pretty clear: Something bad is about to happen. Cut to a weed-covered field and a…
Probably every film director itches to make a Western, so let’s be thankful that, with The Newton Boys, Richard Linklater has scratched his itch. Now he can go back to making movies about subjects for which he has some genuine feeling. Linklater should not be begrudged his chance to “stretch.”…
When Seinfeld fans joke ad nauseum that the popular TV show is “about nothing,” they mean that the sitcom doesn’t have a traditional story hook. There’s no overarching premise along the lines of, say, “Widowed dad raises three kids with help from a Japanese housekeeper.” But even when a script…
Everything but the Kitchen Sink might make a better name for Art Frenzie, a new Wilton Manors gallery crammed with an amazing amount, not to mention variety, of art. Paintings and prints cover the walls, of course, but they’re also hung from the ceiling, placed on easels, and propped wherever…
Thursday March 19 What happens when a young Jewish musician falls in love with a Miami witch? In the musical-comedy Nightsong, both families disapprove of the match and try to break up the couple. Imagine Jerry Seinfeld’s meddling sitcom-parents battling Endora, the mother from Bewitched, and you get the idea…
Even though the simulated rock face is 25 feet tall, the beginner’s route is a simple scramble. In fact the hand- and footholds are so close together, it’s like climbing a ladder. But once I’m up top, my hands clutching a fake rock, my feet clinging to a narrow ledge,…
The rat-a-tat-tat footwork of flamenco dancing and belly dancing’s undulating tummies may seem worlds apart, but they actually have a lot in common. “The hand movements are very similar and the rhythms of the music,” says Damaris Ferrer, a professional flamenco dancer in Davie. The connection is Gypsy ancestry. A…
If ever there was a movie destined to be written about in an “elevated” realm beyond the movie pages, it’s Primary Colors. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky and Paula Jones, the Hollywood-Washington nexus has lifted director Mike Nichols’ picture, based on the 1996 bestseller by Joe Klein, into a higher stratosphere…
In his 1993 book Sarajevo: A War Journal, the Bosnian journalist Zlatko Dizdarevic reported on an eleven-year-old who was waiting in line for water when snipers killed his mother and father: “After the shooting, this boy started to fetch and pour water over the bodies of his dead parents. He…
Valentine’s Day is long gone, but the utterly charming revival of the 1963 musical She Loves Me at the Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables proves that romance is lasting. Certainly the story of feuding shop clerks who unwittingly fall for each other as pen pals has endured. First presented in…
Naked is not always sexy. Take the exhibitionist naked mole rats at the Palm Beach Zoo at Dreher Park — please. A queen and colony of the ugly, pink, wrinkly-skinned mole rats from Africa has now been established at the zoo. From the four fat fangs at one end of…
Thursday March 12 Since the ’50s, three-dimensional images have been popping off of movie and TV screens, but 3-D viewing has never measured up to the hype. The marketers at 3-D TV Viewing Inc. of Fort Lauderdale, however, feel that they have a winner with the Realeyes 3-D unit for…
One of photographer Lewis Baltz’s subjects, the Hotel Rothaus in Zurich, Switzerland, is flanked by two streets leading to very different worlds. The road to the left leads to an upscale shopping area and some Swiss banks. The road to the right cuts through a former industrial area now ruled…
A movie starring Paul Newman, Susan Sarandon, Gene Hackman, James Garner, and Stockard Channing ought to be a whole lot better than Robert Benton’s Twilight. It’s one of those “autumnal” movies about a private detective who is too old for the game but still goes through the motions. Benton, in…
Dangerous Beauty presents a sixteenth-century Venice filled with statesmen who hop from bed to bed without fear of “bimbo eruptions.” That’s because the courtesans aren’t bimbos, and they aren’t hidden: Everyone from the admiralty to the bishopric patronizes them. Having developed their minds along with their erotic skills, they’re boon…
“A man walks into a bar.” Standup comics have launched into routines with that line so often that it’s no surprise comedian-turned-movie-actor Steve Martin chooses the same set-up to fuel the many laughs in his first effort as a playwright. Only in the case of Picasso at the Lapin Agile,…
The work of sculptor Duane Hanson exerts a powerful pull on people. It’s not unusual to see a handful of museum visitors clustered around one of his life-size, detailed, uncannily realistic sculptures of the human figure, inspecting it with both amazement and wariness, as if vaguely worried that the piece…
Bonnie Canino is dancing around the canvas, looking for an opening. Suddenly she bends her knees, drops her left shoulder, and cocks her right fist. When she lets the uppercut fly, her black-and-white boxing glove looks like a checkered blur that — whap! — connects with its target, a boxing…
Thursday March 5 The documentary Crumb was one of the most critically acclaimed films of 1994, winning rave reviews across the board. But when it came time to promote the film, which recounts the life and career of popular underground comic-book artist Robert Crumb, in video stores, the marketing folks…
British actor Gary Oldman, who made his mark playing a punk in 1986’s Sid and Nancy and a playwright in 1987’s Prick Up Your Ears, wrote and directed Nil By Mouth, which has already drawn comparisons to the class-conscious dramas of Mike Leigh (1993’s Naked, 1996’s Secrets & Lies). The…
Jeff Bridges is so euphorically whacked as a social dropout in The Big Lebowski that you get a secondhand high just looking at him. Padding around Venice, California, in a T-shirt that barely covers his midriff bulge, he comes off like a beach bum who bowls instead of surfs. His…
“I want you to come up here right now and be saved in the name of Jesus,” the Rev. Edward Lord tells his flocks. People who smoke or do drugs, sick people, unrepentant sinners — the feisty revivalist preacher tells them all to step up front and let the Holy…
