Mad City, a descendant of Billy Wilder's 1951 Ace in the Hole, may irritate orthodox movie buffs. In the coruscating Wilder classic, Kirk Douglas' supremely cynical newspaper reporter turns the rescue of a cave-in victim into "the big carnival" (the film's alternate title). The protagonist of Mad City, a TV...
Over the course of this weekend, South Floridians will spend three warm evenings with Barry Manilow -- the man, the legend. But not the myth. There really isn't one surrounding Manilow. In fact, though his fans seem to enjoy an intensely personal relationship with him, Manilow appears almost totally devoid...
The juxtaposition, faintly surreal, reminds me of a shop I once saw in the rural Deep South, housing both a beauty salon and a hardware store. But Needlepoint Originals and Paradise Gallery (the italics appear right there on the business card), an unassuming little establishment next to the Riverside Hotel...
"Hold on a minute, hold on a minute," Leola McCoy says. The high-school auditorium falls silent. Something's wrong. The people in the room, approximately 40 of them, can detect annoyance in McCoy's soft but shrill voice. They watch as she marches to the front of the room, arms swinging, and...
Robbin Haas was a little nervous about opening his latest project, Bex, in Boca Raton. And who could blame him? The award-winning New American chef, who was named one of the top ten chefs in the nation by Food & Wine magazine in 1991, has also received critical acclaim from...
Craig Yarnold sounds thrashed. His voice is croaky, nose congested, and he's sending some gnarly, hacking cough concussions over international phone lines. Sick? Not really. More like a hefty hangover. And who can blame him? It's not often a band plays a gig like Yarnold's Buck-O-Nine did in Tokyo two...
Jen Trynin Gun Shy Trigger Happy (Warner Bros.) Jen Trynin may ponder love's great existential questions to death, but Gun Shy Trigger Happy is a brilliant bit of navel gazing. This is a confident and cagey second outing, with more of the coy balladry and tough guitar-wrangling that made 1994's...
Outside on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach all is bustle and conviviality, but inside the Alliance Cinema it's silent and anticipatory. Three people and a turtle have gathered here for the first private screening of a movie. The rough-cut video is longer than feature length, and the tiny audience knows...
It's been more than six years, yet Ronnie Greenspan still can't talk about the staff party without feeling a rise of queasiness in the pit of her stomach. The shame she felt that night, though diminished by time, has never quite disappeared. Rather, it has spiraled down through the years...
It was like Edgar Renteria singling in the eleventh-inning run to win the seventh game of the World Series but not being able to tell anyone for a whole year. Oh, Phil Mundy had wanted to talk about it and had hinted around about it, but secrecy had to be...
Sitting in Ross Perot's favorite booth at a fancy Dallas restaurant, Leigh Valentine eats half her low-fat redfish and then explains about her husband's "disguise kit." The kit contained several fake mustaches and a $1200 custom-made wig. Robert Tilton, the Texas televangelist, carried it everywhere, and during their first year...
