Last year's faculty exhibition at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale got mixed but generally promising grades. Although some of the instructors represented in the show seemed to be working at less than their full potentials, several were producing above-average work, the kind we might reasonably expect from people in...
Seven teenage boys fall on their bellies and press M16 semiautomatic rifles tightly against their shoulders. Wearing black boots, fatigues, and caps, they squeeze the triggers five times, the air erupting with eardrum-splitting explosions. Hot brass bullet casings scatter in all directions. The smell of smoke and gun lubricant mixes...
On stage at the Wallflower Gallery in downtown Miami, Karen Feldner strums a burgundy, hollow-body Gibson guitar while singing with the latest incarnation of her local altrock band, Trophy Wife. Behind the foursome Night of the Living Dead is being projected onto a movie screen. In a surreal, reaching way,...
David Heilman is making the most of happy hour. A slow but steady stream of Bacardi rum and Cokes, interspersed with glasses of Budweiser, appear and disappear in front of him on the bar at Gatsby's in West Palm Beach. The small Tuesday-evening crowd consists mainly of middle-aged men dressed...
Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it. Jasper Johns' famous exhortation is one of the most succinct statements of aesthetics in 20th-century art, and the artists included in "Amalgam: Multi-Media Fusions by Four Florida Artists" seem to have taken his advice to heart and then...
A year ago there wasn't a gallery at Steven F. Greenwald Design, just a suite of interlocking offices, work areas, and cavernous storerooms. Greenwald was primarily in the business of custom framing, not running an art gallery. All that changed in December. Now a gallery -- divided into two sections:...
There's a pile of 34 shoes just inside the front door of Stephen Bonnell's comfortable South Miami home. They came off the feet of the 17 people kneeling or sitting in Bonnell's living room, chanting in unison while facing a small cabinet, the butsudan, hung chest-high on the opposite wall...
In the highly competitive, dog-eat-dog world of the modern-day superhero in Mystery Men, the members of the group that eventually becomes known by that name start out with a couple of strikes against them. First off, there's the little matter of superpowers: They don't have 'em. Or let's say that...
"Why is this a story?" grumbles the weary drug-enforcement agent, clad in black boots, black pants, black sidearm holster, and a black T-shirt with the words Six to ten seconds to make a first impression on the back. He stands guard near the rear entrance of a dingy, five-story office...
The improvised locker room off the Broward Community College gymnasium in Pembroke Pines reeks pleasantly from the wintergreen smell of liniment. Yard-long submarine sandwiches line tables along the wall. As cheers and jeers drift in from the gym, hulking men with long hair or no hair, many wearing brief black...
I don't like surprises. In fact, I despise them. I can't stand not knowing something that other people know; whatever the secret is, I have a pathological need to be informed. I read the ends of mysteries before the beginnings. I got an ultrasound to determine the sex of my...
Every once in a great while, I get a sensation that begins at the base of my brain, one that starts out as a mild warmth but intensifies to a searing heat. The increase in temperature is accompanied by an increase in vibration, a distinct buzzing noise that is at...
In November 1994 the United States had not yet gone loco for Latin pop music. Even so, old-school Spanish crooner Julio Iglesias had just finished the first of four sold-out shows at the Broward Center For the Performing Arts, and he was pumped. In the dressing room, he recalled the...
Elise Leonard seems like the kind of doctor everyone wishes they had. The attractive, mid-fortyish Plantation ophthalmologist is friendly, listens well, and likes to spend time with patients, evaluating their health. But behind her courteous professional demeanor is a growing frustration that her income, like that of many doctors, is...
-as told to Tom Walsh Here's a new theme song for downtown Fort Lauderdale: "Where have all the homeless gone? Gone to the bushes, every one. When will the cops everlearn?" We hear that harassment, in the form of rousting, is continuing, and the police are confronting the homeless with...
Eyes Wide Shut. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, from a screenplay by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by a novella by Arthur Schnitzler. Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
Eyes Wide Shut. Directed by Stanley Kubrick, from a screenplay by Kubrick and Frederic Raphael, inspired by a novella by Arthur Schnitzler. Starring Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.
The Blair Witch Project, the bone-chilling indie by Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, is easily the scariest horror picture of the '90s, a movie that can take a place among the most potent and inexorable of modern shockers, like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre...
Like the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, which is currently showcasing pieces from its permanent collections in an exhibition called "Scale Matters," the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami is putting the summer lull to good use with a show called "Heads Up!: Highlights From the...
Anthology films are an odd-duck genre: Although there once was a time -- now long gone -- when books of short stories were published with nearly the frequency of novels, their cinematic equivalent has never amounted to even 1 percent of the fictional films released. You could argue that Pulp...
It's sweltering inside the rundown trailer home in Davie. The electricity and air conditioning are down, and Roxann Dagenais is stuck with a half-cooked stew in her frying pan, the onions pungent in the stagnant air. Danny and Michael, two of her teenage sons, lounge on a nearby bed, waiting...
American Pie. Directed by Paul Weitz. Screenplay by Adam Herz. Starring Jason Biggs, Jennifer Coolidge, Shannon Elizabeth, Alyson Hannigan, Chris Klein, Eugene Levy, Natasha Lyonne, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Chris Owen, Tara Reid, SeannW. Scott, Mena Suvari, and Eddie Kaye Thomas.
