Say what you will about the sorry state of theatrical film exhibition in South Florida; some of our local movie houses are at least trying to remedy the situation. One of the most popular offerings from the 1993 Miami Film Festival, Bigas Luna’s Jam centsn Jam centsn, did not begin…
The mix-up-at-the-sperm-bank premise, the basis for 1993’s vacuous Made in America, takes a turn for the kosher in Vadim Jean’s and Gary Sinyor’s Leon the Pig Farmer. The quirky, oddly engaging little film has its Miami premiere this Saturday at the Colony Theater as part of the Jewish Film Festival…
“One hundred rinses cannot wash away these kinds of stains,” warns Duilio, eighteenth-century patriarch of the Benedetti (“the blessed”) clan in the rolling hills of Tuscany. He’s a poor farmer speaking to his fellow villagers in the town square, where a French lieutenant named Jean will be executed at dawn…
I can’t help it. It’s a reflex action. I hear the word “documentary” and some uncontrollable voice from deep within me screams, “Boring!” I realize it’s an irrational response; after all, I’ve seen plenty of entertaining documentaries. Then again, most of them have had something to do with rock music,…
Am I the only viewer in America who has a problem with the recent spate of slacker movies? From Slacker to Singles to Dazed and Confused, a trend seems to be emerging, the salient characteristic of which is the romanticization of sloth and navel contemplation. Not that I have anything…
The drug dealer with a guilty conscience — has there ever been a phonier Hollywood invention? That’s what Sugar Hill, which debuted locally at the Miami Film Festival, is all about. Wesley Snipes stars as Roemello “Ro” Skuggs, a heroin dealer who wants out. Of course, he doesn’t want out…
Truly satisfying basketball movies are rarer than celibate NBA players. From Drive, He Said to White Men Can’t Jump, Chu Chu and the Philly Flash to Hoosiers, the essence of the game has eluded Hollywood’s grasp. It’s not just the fact that removing the elements of competition and unpredictability takes…
Johnny is a bitter but brilliant guy with a taste for rough sex, the quintessential angry young man drifting through a London netherworld of emotional cripples. He’s got no shortage of places to go, but he’s searching for a warm place to stay. When he finally finds it, he leaves…
Kim Basinger has amazing nipples. It’s a bad sign when you walk out of a movie theater and the thing that most sticks in your mind is some physical quirk of one of the lead actors. I exited The Bodyguard, for example, unable to get over Kevin Costner’s haircut. It…
“Let’s stop playing the dying fag!” exhorts Lawrence Helman, producer of the controversial movie Sex Is…, which opens at the Alliance Theater on Miami Beach this Friday. “Marc [Huestis, the film’s director] and I were tired of always seeing gays portrayed in the media as monogamous or abstaining — but…
In their infinite wisdom, Sony Pictures Classics, whose offices are in New York, decided to independently release the intricate French drama The Accompanist here in Miami on the eve of the Miami Film Festival. The Festival is an extremely popular and eagerly anticipated orgy of foreign movies that would sate…
Nick Nolte playing the lead in a musical — now there’s something you don’t see every day. Nor, for that matter, will you see it any day, thanks to the early test-screening audience that gave the musical sequences in I’ll Do Anything a thumbs-down — way down. Writer-director James L…
Hotshot architect Vincent Eastman barrels down a slick mountain road in his classic 1968 Mercedes 280SL. He rounds a tight curve to discover a dilapidated VW van that has stalled while attempting to enter the thoroughfare ahead of him. Eastman swerves into the left lane to avoid the van –…
Let’s hope the L.A. earthquake didn’t claim any acting coaches. After viewing the latest outings by Madonna and Sharon Stone, Hollywood is going to need every last one. Madonna’s new film is director Abel Ferrara’s Dangerous Game, one of those self-indulgent film-within-a-film exercises. It’s hard to tell exactly where art…
We live in a litigious world. Lawyers proliferate like locusts, except that the six-legged insects have a seventeen-year gestation period while the two-legged pests require only three. Yet no matter how many thousands of litigators law schools pump into the pipeline annually, the crime rate rises and the legal system…
From its opening scene of Richard Harris doing pushups in the nude, Wrestling Ernest Hemingway practically dares you to write it off as one of those feisty-but-lovable-old-folks-raging-at-the-dying-of-the-light movies. The Florida setting (in a fictional beach town called Sweetwater which bears as much resemblance to the municipality in West Dade as…
Warning lights ought to flash in every filmgoer’s head any time the words “based on a true story” or “adapted from a play” are used to promote a motion picture. A true story is one thing, but based on a true story — that’s like the difference between 100 percent…
One of my New Year’s resolutions was to avoid giving away the endings of films in my reviews. But sometimes a movie is so predictable I can’t help myself. I feel that old temptation and I end up writing something to the effect of: “You know from the moment you…
I can’t really say I knew Bill Cosford. I met him a few times at previews. He liked popcorn. He was usually the first one out of the theater when a screening was over, no doubt a pre-emptive maneuver designed to avoid becoming entangled in endless “So, whadjathink?” queries from…
Everyone has heard that shopworn saying, “The third time’s a charm.” But what if you’re successful the first two times you try something? Does that mean you’ll blow it the third time around? If your name is Oliver Stone and you’ve carted away Best Director Oscars for Platoon and Born…
Manifest Destiny. What a clever two-word rationalization for the indiscriminate slaughter of tens of thousands of indigenous peoples and the bald-faced theft of their land. On September 5, 1886, Chiricahua Apache warlord Goyahkla, better known as Geronimo (a moniker bestowed upon him by the 3000 or so Mexican soldiers whose…
Have you ever been to a party where someone you don’t like tells a long-winded story about some fabulous adventure they had and you know it’s a good yarn but you don’t enjoy it because you can’t get around the fact that the storyteller is a jerk? Welcome to Six…
