You will give yourself a migraine if you attempt to divine a theme running through the 26 films that make up the fifteenth Miami Film Festival. Don't bother trying. A readily apparent theme does not exist -- not that one needs to. International in everything but name, this year's renewal...
Rock 'n' roll belongs to the young, but in the jazz world, it's the elders who are revered. With 55 years of recording experience and a reputation as one of the highest authorities on jazz music, the 76-year-old pianist Dr. Billy Taylor certainly deserves his props. Taylor has been an...
In your book The Straight Dope, you wrote about a possible link between aluminum and Alzheimer's disease. You waffled on the question of whether aluminum actually causes Alzheimer's and gave your stock response that research was continuing (equivalent to Ann Landers kissing off a question by telling the writer to...
In the twisted game plan of Barry Levinson's scintillating political satire Wag the Dog, presidential aides concoct an election-eve war with Albania in the hopes of torpedoing charges that their boss improperly touched a teenage girl. Hollywood and Washington work together to create that greatest of diversions: an international crisis...
The fifteenth Miami Film Festival continues apace Thursday through Sunday with two works by Japanese director-actor Takeshi Kitano, a star-studded entry from venerable new-wave filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, and the most recent movie made by playwright David Mamet. Not forgetting a closing-night screening of Italy's Il Ciclone, which has become that...
The Gray Man does architecture, not carpentry. He does not drive through blue-collar neighborhoods to make sure campaign lawn signs are still standing after a windy night. He does not spot-check the jumbo shrimp before fund-raising cocktail parties or call up candidates' friends in other states to wring contributions out...
If you want to check out how well a restaurant is doing, visit on a Monday or Tuesday evening. Stop by an ethnic establishment, a place to which people go for particular flavors. Schedule your meal during prime-time TV hours, when the kids have gone to bed and most folks...
Various Artists In Tha Beginning...There Was Rap (Priority Records) Say what you will about rap -- it's sexist, it promotes violence, it gave Vanilla Ice his fifteen minutes of fame -- but it changed popular music as we know it. First heard in the late Seventies and early Eighties, rap...
It was after dinner, while waiting for the valet to retrieve our car, that we got confirmation on what we already knew about Aquaterra, the much anticipated Palm Beach restaurant located on Sunrise Avenue across from the Palm Beach Hotel. As other patrons milled about, waiting for their cars, the...
It was just eleven days after Princess Diana tragically died while fleeing the paparazzi in Paris that news photographer Brent Strange found himself alone in a jail cell at the Coral Springs Police Department. He believes the two events, occurring on separate continents, are connected. The 41-year-old veteran TV news...
After I read the latest article to extol Miami's New World restaurants -- the spread in the November issue of Gourmet magazine -- I thought (and not for the last time, I suspect): Nice piece. But what about Fort Lauderdale? Long before local voters resolved to change Dade's name to...
There comes a point in every rock fan's listening career when he or she feels obligated to "try" jazz. It's tricky musical territory for the novitiate, full of snobs and geniuses and difficult theories. There's much talk about "tone" and "phrasing" and other things that don't necessarily matter much in...
James Joyce's work is an acquired taste. Whereas the late Irishman's short-story collection Dubliners (1914) is an easy read, the experiments in style in his later novels have always banned them from my beach bag. Not willing to thread my way through the stream-of-consciousness narrative of A Portrait of the...
The recent referendum creating Miami-Dade County is just the latest sign the area is suffering from an identity crisis worse than Sally Field's in Sybil. While the county government proffers the Miami moniker as an all-purpose consumer label, many residents would be hard-pressed to describe themselves as typical Miamians. It's...
With 1994's Exotica, Atom Egoyan secured his reputation as Canada's leading director; his new film, The Sweet Hereafter, based on a celebrated novel by Russell Banks, should solidify Egoyan's hold on that title. Egoyan's work, in general, is small-scale enough to seem arty and plain enough to be accessible. The...
Where would Irish filmmakers be these days without "the Troubles"? In just the past couple of years we've seen The Crying Game (1992), In the Name of the Father (1993), Michael Collins (1996), Some Mother's Son (1996), and now The Boxer, the latest collaboration between director Jim Sheridan, screenwriter Terry...
A glance at the cast list for the new Sidney Lumet hospital drama Critical Care might lead you to expect an embarrassment of riches. Instead, the results are often just plain embarrassing. How could a film starring James Spader, Helen Mirren, Albert Brooks, Kyra Sedgwick, Anne Bancroft, Jeffrey Wright, Wallace...
Toward the end of this week, more than a dozen singers-songwriters will begin making their way to Broward County to compete in the South Florida Folk Festival. Al Scortino will drive two hours from Sebastian, just north of Vero Beach, in his Mazda pickup truck. Bernice Lewis, from Williamstown, Massachusetts,...
A grouper zinc is a lump of metal shaped like a fish. Boaters attach them to propeller shafts and other underwater fittings so that corrosion will eat the zinc instead of the boat components. A grouper zinc can also be used to fracture someone's skull. That may or may not...
By the time Nina Chamberlain tried to restrain the student at Boca Raton Middle School, he'd already punched a teacher so hard that he caused permanent hearing loss. The brawl started after two teachers -- one male, the other female -- invited the emotionally disturbed fifteen-year-old and his mother to...
Supersonic Wall to Wall Moustache (Sire) "Welcome to the fucked-up chemical beats of Supersonic," announces this band's press kit, which means there's now more weight on the electronica bandwagon that was initially steered by the Chemical Brothers. Unlike that pioneering duo, however, Darren Pickles and Slapper Dave of Supersonic are...
Her boyfriend recalled seeing her drenched in blood and coated with gold dust. The boyfriend, Alejandro Gomez Arias, and his eighteen-year-old companion Frida Kahlo were returning to their homes in suburban Mexico City that September day in 1925 when the city bus on which they were riding collided with a...
