As expected, Stephen Hopkins’ biopic of Jesse Owens is full of suspenseful action on tracks and fields, Olympic and otherwise. The refreshing surprise of Race is that it’s a more important film than it needed to be regarding ethics, morality, identity, politics, history and, yes, race. Even while somewhat conforming to a crowd-pleasing triumphalist formula, Race lives up to … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: Sept. 12-13
Film: Within every great comic is a dramatic actor yearning to break through. Or that’s how the show business cliché goes. But it is true about Lily Tomlin, who gives a remarkable, tough, smart-mouthed performance in a brief – only 78 minutes – low-budget film called simply Grandma. She is Elle, a lesbian poet whose granddaughter, Sage (Julia Garner), arrives on her Van Nuys … [Read more...]
‘Watchman’ a letdown, not least for Scout
Go Set a Watchman recently became an overnight blockbuster, selling more than 1 million copies in the first week. Book critics understandably sought to compare the storyline in Watchman with the theme in Harper Lee’s first book, To Kill a Mockingbird, which was published in 1960 and won a Pulitzer Prize. Some expressed surprise that Atticus Finch, the lovable hero in … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 26-28
Music: Dean Peterson, a fine operatic bass with world-class credits (Metropolitan Opera, Lyric Opera of Chicago, San Francisco Opera, Santa Fe Opera, etc.) whose work is familiar to South Florida audiences — most recently as Bluebeard in Bartok’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle for his new Opera Fusion company — is the subject of a fundraiser this Sunday at First Presbyterian Church in … [Read more...]
‘Gett’: A bill of divorcement, Israeli-style
Gett: The Trial of Viviane Amsalem begins in a courtroom, and, like 12 Angry Men, never leaves it. But unlike Reginald Rose’s morality play, there are no heroic shifts in conscience or unequivocal denunciations of prejudice in this legal drama. Instead, we become the voyeurs of a wrenching case study of religious chauvinism masquerading as proper litigation, a tunnel of … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 20-22
Art: Community centers are not usually associated with striking art, but a chance encounter with vibrant colors at the Sugar Sand Park Community Center challenges that notion. Currently adorning the center’s walls are imaginative works featuring organic shapes and intriguing textures that bring to life what Farida Morris calls her happiest moments. Every color and composition … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: July 19-21
Music: Dave Matthews is one of those fortunate pop stars with a fan base that is essentially an extended family. Tonight he returns with his band to the Cruzan Amphitheatre for two nights of concerts in which the Dave Matthews Nation will surely be in force. At the end of this year he returns to his native South Africa for a series of concerts that are selling out, and which … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: June 7-9
South Florida Jazz wraps its 2012-13 season this Saturday night with an appearance by the jazz singer Kurt Elling, who made his mark at Chicago’s legendary Green Mill while studying the philosophy of religion as a grad student during the day. A Grammy winner and a regular audience favorite, Elling has a flexible voice and style more akin to Al Jarreau than to Johnny Hartman, … [Read more...]
Weekend arts picks: May 24-26
Theater: Palm Beach Dramaworks ends its season with Brian Friel’s Dancing at Lughnasa, a fictionalized tale of his mother and her four spinster sisters, who lead a repressed, impoverished life in the Irish village of Ballybeg. But when they are at their lowest, they manage to kick up their heels and give in to the spirit of the pagan harvest festival of Lughnasa, capturing a … [Read more...]
Sundays: My naughty madeleine, on the auction block
By Myles Ludwig Yesterday’s auction of ephemera from Studio 54 at Palm Beach Modern Auctions on Bunker Road was a Proustian picture of my past refracted through a disco mirror ball. I walked into the auction house and was immediately confronted with a rogue’s gallery of black-and-white happy-snaps of ghosts fixed to the wall. There was a laughing ex-girlfriend who had … [Read more...]