Instant “Kramer”‘s gonna get you
Movie: I Am Sam
A game of telephone
Movie: The Mothman Prophecies
Other fish to fry
You can’t really call Julie’s Waterfront a fish camp. It’s on Lake Jennie Jewel, not some swampy, gator-ridden river. In fact, there’s no gator at all, particularly on the menu. You can get pitchers of beer, but most folks seem to be drinking Heineken or New Castle Brown Ale. The deep-fried battered fish and clam…
Pirate treasure
Movie: The Count of Monte Cristo
Movie: Brotherhood of the Wolf
Brotherhood of the Wolf Length: 2 hours, 22 minutes Studio: Universal Focus Website: http://www.lepactedesloups.com/new/default.asp Release Date: 2002-01-25 Cast: Samuel Le Bihan, Mark Dacascos, Vincent Cassel, Monica Bellucci, Emilie Dequenne Director: Christophe Gans Screenwriter: Stephane Cabel, Christophe Gans WorkNameSort: Brotherhood of the Wolf Our Rating: 3.00 French cinema seems to be getting more and more American…
Movie: Charlotte Gray
Charlotte Gray Length: 2 hours, 1 minute Studio: Warner Bros. Website: http://charlottegraymovie.warnerbros.com/ Release Date: 2002-01-25 Cast: Cate Blanchett, John Benfield, Ron Cook, Robert Shannon, Jack Shepherd Director: Gillian Armstrong Screenwriter: Jeremy Brock WorkNameSort: Charlotte Gray Our Rating: 4.00 At last, a World War II heroine! In the recent deluge of films about “the Good War,”…
Instant “Kramer”‘s gonna get you
Movie: I Am Sam
A game of telephone
Movie: The Mothman Prophecies
Pirate treasure
Movie: The Count of Monte Cristo
Movie: Brotherhood of the Wolf
Our Rating: 3.00 French cinema seems to be getting more and more American of late — more violent, crass and prone to the sensational. In “Brotherhood of the Wolf,” director Christophe Gans brings the trend to fruition with the first French period-costume, CGI-assisted, martial-arts, creature-feature epic. It’s 1764, and a mysterious beast is turning the…
Movie: Charlotte Gray
Our Rating: 4.00 At last, a World War II heroine! In the recent deluge of films about “the Good War,” women have been relegated to playing weepy mums, pinup love interests or (at best) nurses. Now we have Scottish Charlotte Gray (Cate Blanchett, appealing as always), an agent with the British Special Operation Executive –…
McDonald’s: the next generation
Just across I-4 from the self-proclaimed “World’s Largest McDonald’s” (and owned by the same folks), we now have the one with the oldest demographic — an “adult-themed” McDonald’s, if your mind can grasp that concept. With chandeliers, cappuccino, Breyer’s ice cream and a pool table upstairs, the two-story, tin-roofed über-D at 7344 W. Sand Lake…
How to be good at being bad
Leafing through the local daily last week, ever mindful of finding material for this column under any rock, the toss-up for intrigue was between the Scottish Highland Games and a tattoo convention. Ten years ago it would have been no contest. Tattoos were just beginning to appear — shyly — on women. Today, the sight…
Speech lessons
There was a time when the word “slam” meant little to Orlando beyond breakfast at Denny’s. But our plates got closer to full in June 1998, when the documentary “SlamNation” was screened at Maitland’s Enzian Theater as part of that year’s Florida Film Festival. Audiences were unexpectedly thrilled by the film’s representation of the high-minded…
An elephantine tussle
Charges continue to be hurled like, well, elephant dung between animal-rights activists and the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. With the circus in town last week, Orlando was ground zero in the fight, as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) campaigned to counterattack Ringling’s own media barrage, which was unleashed when…
Faherty admits he did it
For months he claimed he was only an innocent victim, just doing a favor for an old family friend by cashing in a fraudulently obtained $1-million McDonald’s game piece. But on Jan. 17 Jim Faherty, a former owner of the downtown music club Sapphire (since renamed The Social by new management), pleaded guilty to one…
Money talking
Mayor Glenda Hood proclaimed 2002 the year of the arts, but this municipal election season more accurately pays homage to the almighty dollar, judging from the eight candidates who met the Jan. 18 deadline officially to declare their campaigns for the Orlando City Council. Five candidates in three city commission races each have collected more…
That old black magic
For a disgruntled toehead whose only interest in magic lies in wondering how Olivia Newton-John kept her perm while rollerskating off the wall in “Xanadu,” an audience with the people’s magician, David Copperfield, elicits only furrowed-brow curiosity. Magic, you see, is this year’s lipgloss, thanks to J.K. Rowling and J.R.R. Tolkien. What I’d really like…
Cartoonish behavior
Why have so many talented animators been bailing out of the Mouse Factory? Fact is, they’ve grown tired of dealing with their absentee landlords at Walt Disney Feature Animation (WDFA) — executives who seem much more interested in searching for Disney’s next big Broadway theatrical production (to follow up such hits as “Beauty and the…
Voodoo home economics
Prosecutors in Greenbelt, Md., finally have indicted Josephine Gray, 55, for her role in the serial murders of her two husbands (in 1974 and 1990) and a boyfriend-cousin (1996), cases that have long been stymied by the resolute refusal of her kinfolk to testify against her. Gray’s relatives feared that she would use voodoo on…
Playing in the street
It’s a bright afternoon in late winter, and inside the intimate Bailey’s nightclub at the Sheraton Biscayne Bay in Miami, the joint is jumping. Bebo Valdes and Israel “Cachao” Lopez, two Cuban-born octogenarian musicians who star in “Calle 54,” filmmaker Fernando Trueba’s loving tribute to the joys of Latin jazz, are in the heat of…
Nourishing both mind and body
Once you drag yourself away from hours of scanning covers, looking for those obscure German Impressionist videos, stumble over to the food side of Stardust Video & Coffee (1842 E. Winter Park Road, Orlando; 407-623-3393) to fulfill other, less cerebral appetites. Extra points to anyone who gets all the film/music/literary references on the clever menu.…
