Theater: John Logan’s 2010 Tony Award-winning play Red is going to be produced a great deal this season, and not just because it needs only two actors and one set. This brawny script about abstract expressionist painter Mark Rothko, wrestling with a commission to create a series of murals for New York’s famed power lunch Four Seasons Restaurant and also wrestling with his … [Read more...]
Director Montiel draws on his tough early life for film
Director-screenwriter Dito Montiel (A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Fighting) grew up in the low-income housing projects of Queens, N.Y. Many of the guys that he grew up with are now either in prison or dead, yet through sheer determination he avoided both and became a filmmaker. How did he beat the odds and avoid the violence that he recreates in his latest feature, The … [Read more...]
Sampling the Fort Lauderdale Film Fest: Capsule reviews
Here are capsule reviews of some movies scheduled for the Fort Lauderdale Film Festival, which opens today: ABOUT FIFTY (10/21, 7:30 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 10/24, 6:15 p.m., Sunrise Civic Theatre; 10/29, 7 p.m., Muvico Pompano) -- Most rites-of-passage films have been about the mysteries of puberty, but as filmmakers age they begin confronting the latter passage of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Oct. 21-23
Theater: West Boca’s Slow Burn Theatre Company, which is dedicated to edgy, offbeat musical theater, also knows how to have fun. And the 3-year-old troupe credits much of its popularity to last October’s tongue-in-cheek production of The Rocky Horror Show, the send-up of B-grade horror movies. So to open its season and help us ease into a Halloween mood, it is bringing Rocky, … [Read more...]
The View From Home 31: New releases and notable screenings, Oct. 11-Nov. 1
Here’s the long and short of it: Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’ documentary The Shock Doctrine (Zeitgeist, $26.99) attempts to explain, in 80 minutes, what journalist Naomi Klein proposed in her 600-page best-seller of the same name: that the neoliberal, free-market capitalistic ideas of Milton Friedman are the root cause of our economic perils yesterday, today and … [Read more...]
The View From Home special report: The cinema of Jean-Claude Brisseau
I’ve never been to France, but when I visit, I’d prefer to avoid the parts of the country that seem to fascinate Jean-Claude Brisseau. This underrated French director avoids the picturesque Paris of Woody Allen’s latest time-travel reverie, the tourist-chic France of living postcards, fashionable bistros and perpetually beautiful women. Nor is it the snooty enclave of the New … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in Miami-Broward art: A widely varied menu
The visual arts season in Broward and Miami-Dade counties offers its usual host of dichotomies, plus some surprises. There are trippy, hallucinatory drawings and religious icons; Baroque paintings and contemporary female-centric photographs; sculptures both austere and intricate and installations inspired by the American palate, vinyl records, Beethoven and the Beats. If we … [Read more...]
‘The Ides of March’: Political treachery, but without togas
During the Bush administration, people would sigh and say they wished Martin Sheen’s character on The West Wing were really the president. Expect a similar response to the new political intrigue drama, The Ides of March, with its iconic liberal candidate played with cunning charm by George Clooney. Clooney not only stars as Democratic Gov. Mike Morris, with perfectly polished … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in classical music: Big, busy, and edgy
Classical music continues to be a growth industry in Palm Beach County and South Florida generally, which is remarkable considering the depth of the current economic slump. Perhaps it’s the wealth of technology that makes it easier to get the word out about this music, and inspires small bands of enthusiastic players and singers to get out there and try to get their voices … [Read more...]
The 2011-12 season in pop: Classic rockers in short supply for energetic season ahead
The 2011-2012 concert season in South Florida could conceivably signal that classic rock is dead as we once knew it. Unlike the past two seasons, which collectively featured ’60s- and ’70s-launched brand names like the Allman Brothers Band, Bonnie Raitt, Crosby, Stills & Nash, the Eagles, Roger Waters, Rush, and Earth, Wind & Fire, the next eight months look comparatively … [Read more...]