Night & Day

Thursday January 8 With Behind the Broken Words: A Tale of Two Voices, Emmy Award-winning actors Roscoe Lee Browne (Falcon Crest) and Anthony Zerbe (Harry-O) have created a moving mix of satiric, comic, and lyric poetry by culling the works of modern masters such as e. e. cummings, Dylan Thomas,…

Greetings From Anywhere

“I started collecting when I was about six years old,” says JoAnn Van Scotter. “That was 60 years ago. Let’s just bring it right out in the open.” The Tropical Post Card Club of South Florida member isn’t shy about revealing her age or talking about her hobby-turned-avocation. Relatives gave…

Is There a Spin-Doctor in the House?

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…

Split Decision

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…

Brothers in Alms

The convoluted political negotiations surrounding Pope John Paul II’s trip to Cuba next week seem facile compared to the grave-robbing, relic-switching, and sundry ecumenical dirty tricks attendant to a papal visit in playwright Michael Hollinger’s farce Incorruptible. Even though the play’s setting in France sometime around 1250 A.D. is inarguably…

Night & Day

Thursday January 1 The nightclub neighbor of the Kings Park Condominium complex in Oakland Park is wasting no time in helping more than 100 tenants displaced by the raging fire that destroyed 51 units there December 18. A portion of the proceeds from tonight’s Kings Park Benefit at Roxy Nightclub…

In Joyce’s Wake

About 70 years ago in an American bookshop in Paris, the great Irish novelist James Joyce was introduced to a young aspiring writer named Ernest Hemingway. If any performer is qualified to portray both men in a reenactment of that moment (okay, if would be difficult to play both), it…

Horse Latitudes

Almost three years ago — January 22, 1995, to be exact — the four-year-old gray colt Holy Bull cantered out onto the racing strip at Gulfstream Park to run in the Olympic Handicap. Head bowed, he looked extraordinary. Muscular. Intense. Intelligent. Imposing. He fairly glowed, the embodiment of an altogether…

As Merely OK as It Gets

While not a movie year to go down in infamy, 1997 was still mostly full of hype and holler. If the annual yield is judged by how many great films came out, 1997 was a loser. If you factor in the number of films that brought fresh talents and fresh…

The Sleep of the Just

I try not to use the word I. I try not to be too “self-referential” or self-consciously “literary.” But 1997 wasn’t exactly the kind of movie year that made me feel “cinematic.” As I looked over my writing for the past year, I was struck by how often I used…

Small Wonder

Some people call it the Black Box of Hollywood, a theater so tiny that its lobby consists of a table and two chairs located outside on the sidewalk. So tiny that the actors, working on a stage 27 feet wide by 15 feet deep, virtually perform in the laps of…

Man of Letters

Don’t take the term “historical novel” at face value as it refers to The Legend of the Barefoot Mailman, warns the book’s author John Henry Fleming. “I call the book a historical novel only in that it tries to re-create the character and the themes of those times [1880s], rather…

Night & Day

Thursday December 25 Families in search of a new holiday tradition could do worse than the Christmas Day Picnic and Cruise to Deerfield Island Park. The day of Intracoastal cruising begins at 9 a.m. with hourly pickups by boat from Sullivan Park, which is located on Riverview Road at the…

Bird Is the Word

“Some of us leave at five, some of us at six, and so on,” says birding enthusiast Howard Langridge — and he’s talking a.m. “We try to encourage them to get out as early as they can, so they can catch some of the owls.” After all, Langridge adds, nocturnal…

Paying the Piper

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…

Extreme Unctuousness

The new Gus Van Sant film Good Will Hunting is like an adolescent’s fantasy of being tougher and smarter and more misunderstood than anybody else. It’s also touchy-feely with a vengeance. Is this the same director who made Mala Noche (1987) and Drugstore Cowboy (1989)? Those films had a fresh…

The Abominable Woodman

Woody Allen’s Deconstructing Harry is a film made by a free man — free certainly in a good way and perhaps also in a not-so-good way. Liberated, for whatever reason, from the need to play a nice guy, playing the bad man he does here frees Allen of the optimistic…

Black Like Him

If Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown didn’t arrive weighted with post-Pulp Fiction (1994) expectations, it might be easier to see it for what it is: an overlong, occasionally funky caper movie directed with some feeling. It’s derived from Elmore Leonard’s 1992 bestseller Rum Punch, with the location shifted from Palm Beach…

Photosensitive

By anyone’s measure, Margaret Bourke-White was extraordinary, both as a photographer and as a person, although the two wrapped inextricably around each other like a DNA double helix. As a staff photographer — a photojournalist, really — for Life magazine (her image of Montana’s Fort Peck Dam graced the publication’s…

Model Trains on the Brain

A full-limbed evergreen flush with lights and trinkets. An electric model train chugging around its base on a circular track, disappearing momentarily behind brightly wrapped boxes before coming back around the bend with its whistle cheerily declaring its return. The nostalgic tableau could be right off of a holiday greeting…

Night & Day

thursday december 18 You just can’t help but get the warm fuzzies when you hear Judy Collins sing “Both Sides Now” and “Send in the Clowns.” So imagine the overwhelming heart-warming you’re in for during tonight’s Judy Collins Christmas Special. For this show of religious and holiday music — including…

The Big Wet One

If one is in a Biblical frame of mind, the sinking of the White Star Line’s R.M.S. Titanic about 400 miles off the southern coast of Newfoundland in 1912 could well be characterized as an act of divine one-upmanship. The 46,328-ton “ship of dreams” was struck down on its maiden…