The toys of summer
With boffo box-office receipts earned by “Gladiator” and “Mission: Impossible 2,” the movie industry is predicting that it’s headed for its best summer ever. As if. It’s on the toy-store shelves, not at the ticket counters, that the success of a blockbuster is determined. Anyone can come up with a semiplausible story, throw a few…
Curators of shock change their ‘toon
Movie: Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation
Losing the drag race
Movie: Big Momma’s House
Curators of shock change their ‘toon
Movie: Spike & Mike’s Sick & Twisted Festival of Animation
Losing the drag race
Movie: Big Momma’s House
DVD captures Young’s simple but golden rule
When a song is titled “Out of Control,” you expect to hear something as wild and wooly as Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti” or the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the U.K.” But when Young sings “Out of Control” on his brilliant new DVD “Silver & Gold,” the song loses discipline at the other end of the…
Electro-magnet school
Parents at Audubon Park Elementary School thought the deal sounded too good to be true. AT&T Wireless was willing to pay a premium to attach an antenna to a light pole at one of the school’s baseball fields. The telecommunications company would lease the space for $15,000 a year — a lot of money for…
Air today, gone tomorrow
The report card is in, and the news isn’t great. Orange County, according to the American Lung Association’s recently published study, received a “F” in air quality from 1996-98. And there’s more bad news: behind the industry-laden Escambia County and the congested-as-hell Hillsborough County, Orange’s air is the third worst in the state. In 14…
Let’s make a heal
It’s nice to know you can retain your virginity in a few areas of life. Myself, I can boast at least one “never,” and that is that I have never bought anything over the Internet. I know this automatically casts me in many of your minds as a Miss Jane Pittman figure, one of the…
Carrying a full load of corpses
A March Reuters news service story profiled the University of Tennessee’s “body farm,” a three-acre plot near Knoxville in which 20 corpses at a time are set up to rot under various circumstances so homicide investigators can study the stages of the decomposition process. (Yugoslav war-crimes researchers recently availed themselves of this opportunity.) The farm…
The fabulous kingdom
The Baptists are going to love this. Things Disney have had a special appeal for gays and lesbians going back long before “Ellen,” argues Sean Griffin in his new book “Tinker Belles and Evil Queens: The Walt Disney Company from the Inside Out.” In this survey documenting both the accidental and deliberate embrace of gay…
How Gay Day pushed Disney out of the closet
Walt Disney might have been horrified. Self-appointed guardians of the “family values” label definitely would have been horrified. But there was no fear — or even a hint of irony — on the part of the video crew stationed in the forecourt of Cinderella’s Castle at the Magic Kingdom, their camera trained on a well-toned…
Building to the height of folly
City Commissioner Bruce Gordy was livid at the May 8 City Council meeting. It seems the city gave the go-ahead to a modification to build the Lincoln Building four stories taller than original plans indicated. Trouble was, the police department hadn’t signed off on the change. So nobody caught the fact that the new design…
Protest with an outside chance
Apparently, no one ever told Doug Bottum that you can’t change the world by sitting around on your bottom. Since May 25, the Orlando resident has been staging semi-regular morning sit-ins outside the Starbucks on Park Avenue in Winter Park. At issue: Winter Park’s recent requirement that the shop remove its patio furniture from its…
Review – The Covers Record
Artist: Cat Power
Review – Infest
Artist: Papa Roach
Review – ‘Til We Outnumber ‘Em
Artist: Various artists
Harvest swoon
There appears to be some congenital defect preventing many local eateries from providing efficient service. When business is slow, employees act like customers are an imposition. How many times have you stood at a counter repeating your order because distracted staffers chat with each other instead of paying attention? When business booms, staffs scurry about…
Review – Pink Pearl
Artist: Jill Sobule
Review – The Covers Record
Artist: Cat Power
Review – Infest
Artist: Papa Roach
Review – ‘Til We Outnumber ‘Em
Artist: Various artists
Review – Pink Pearl
Artist: Jill Sobule
Review – The Covers Record
Artist: Cat Power
Review – Infest
Artist: Papa Roach
Review – ‘Til We Outnumber ‘Em
Artist: Various artists
Review – Pink Pearl
Artist: Jill Sobule
Grilling that holds up under fast fire
Indulge me as I rhapsodize about my favorite fast food, TropiGrill, advertised as “The taste you’ll crave,” and oh baby, they’ve got that right. I jones hard for TropiGrill’s mouthwatering flavors and have been known to dine there five times a week. Lately, I’ve jettisoned all pretense of balanced meals to focus exclusively on the…
Cider juiced about MTV exposure
When MTV called to say that Orlando band Cider had won an opportunity to perform on the network, nobody was more surprised than Ken Charton, who answered the call. The guitar player was shocked, not because he didn’t believe in his band’s music, but because he knew the group had not spent nearly enough time…
Star search
Memorial Day weekend is a time to get away from it all — from work, from household responsibilities and from Orlando’s city limits. But those of us who chose to visit the Kennedy Space Center over the holiday went where no man has gone before. From Saturday to Monday, the center hosted “Space Days 2000,”…
Out of the ordinary
Sandra Bernhard cuts a strange American figure. She’s published numerous niche market books, she’s cameoed in countless second-tier films (“Hudson Hawk,” anyone?), she’s recorded dance records and even made a spectacle on Broadway with her simple observations on society. But she’s never been truly famous in her own right. Rather, Sandra Bernhard seems more of…
