On Tuesday night, the Cinematic Arts Commission showed a sneak preview of what is supposed to be ‘Ahnuld’s’ comeback film, Collateral Damage. The term “collateral damage” is used to describe innocent bystanders who are killed or wounded in military or terrorist action. It makes prefect sense then to make this the title of the film, since there are innocent bystanders that are wounded: members of the audience.
First off, the story. The former Mr. Universe plays Gordon Brewer, L.A. fire captain, loving father and devoted husband. His life gets ripped a new one when his family gets blown up in a building, courtesy of “The Wolf,” one of the world’s most dangerous terrorists. Frustrated with the lack of progress the authorities are making, Brewer decides to go after the man himself, a manhunt that leads him to South America where more stuff explodes.

Along the way he meets two Johns: Leguizamo and Turturro, both of them secretly asking each other: “Why are we in this movie again? Oh yeah, money.” There’s really nothing that stands out here; the actors do their job in trying not to laugh at Arnold when he tries to be serious. Director Andrew Davis (The Fugitive) does an even-handed job, and the script, well, it’s there. But you won’t see any of this, because there are tons of explosions to hide the fact that this movie isn’t a movie; it’s crap. Suffice it to say, from what was shown on the screen, it doesn’t look like Mr. Maria Shriver will be as big as he used to be back in the 1980s.
Ah, the 1980s. When Arnold why-can’t-I-have-a-decent-last-name made action movies that were stupid, yet entertaining to watch. Now he just makes action movies that are stupid. A big reason for that is that in all his good films, he played people that were larger than life: cyborgs, a CIA agent, a gov’t assassin, etc. Now he tries to play ordinary guys that find themselves in unbelievable circumstances, which he is not cut out to do. Why else did End of Days and The Sixth Day end up in the garbage? If people think that this movie will be anything close to those action flicks, forget it. One would rather go rent Hercules in New York than go out and watch this drivel.
No, unfortunately there are no dread-locked aliens chasing Arnold through the jungle, and he’s not hunting down Sarah Connor in this waste. He’s not even trying to avoid getting repeatedly kicked in the groin by Sharon Stone. Arnold, a word of advice: You can’t be what you once were, you can’t even make a decent film anymore. Stop trying. Light up a cigar, kick back and laugh at how Hollywood kept paying you millions of dollars to do nothing, and reminisce about the days when Robert Patrick chased you down the streets of L.A. with a mack truck. Just please, for the love of God and everything that’s holy, don’t make any more movies.
Collateral Damage: rated R. Featuring Arnold Schwarzenegger, John Leguizamo,John Turturro, Elias Koteas and Francesca Neri.

February 8
Polo Jeans’ men and women’s Spring/Summer 2002 Collection Preview with music by DJ JoJo Odyssey at Level. Show starts at 10 p.m. with an open bar until 11 p.m. For info visit www.levelnightclub.com.

Experimental rockers The Effect and Faller performing live, as well as listening parties for the new Hefner and Chemical Brothers’ albums at Revolver, 5922 S. Dixie Highway. For information call 305-661-9099.

February 8-10
Magician David Copperfield will be performing at the Jackie Gleason Theater. Show times vary. Tickets are $27.50-46.50. For information, call 305-358-5885.

February 9
Bob Marley Festival with Lauryn Hill, DMX, AZ, Erykah Badu, and the Marley Family at Virginia Key Beach. Tickets are $22.50. For information, call 305-358-5885.

The Dead Kennedys without Jello Biafra performing at Orbit. Tickets are $16.50. For information, call 305-358-5885.

February 11
Little Leroy’s Lyrical Lounge featuring performances by Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh. Also featuring disc jockeys Irie, Epps, Khaled and Sugar at Level. Show starts at 11 p.m.

February 12
Shallow Hal starring Jack Black and Gwyneth Paltrow playing at the Bill Cosford Cinema. Show starts at 8 p.m. For information, call 305-284-4606.

February 16
Jimmy Buffet and the Coral Reefer Band will be performing at the National Car Rental Center. Tickets are $28.50-59.50. Show starts at 8 p.m. For information, call 954-523-3309.

February 24
Le Tigre featuring Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill and the Butchies performing at the Polish American Club, 1250 N.W. 22nd Ave. Tickets are $15 and doors open at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit www.epoplife.com.

Watch out, because the kindred teens of Dogtown have grown up and made a film that relentlessly marks their territory, and deservedly so, all over the trunk of skateboarding’s family tree.
Dogtown and Z-Boys appeared at the recently completed Miami Film Festival to a packed premiere at South Beach’s Colony Theatre and a rowdy sold-out showing at the Beach’s Regal Cinema, where it found considerable buzz and warm praise from students and locals.
Raging with nostalgia, colorful modern urgency and a sacred rock and punk soundtrack, the documentary traces the exploits of twelve misfits on the Zephyr skateboard team, a band of kids who changed the face of skateboarding forever by injecting the same fierce street mentality that they picked up in their home of Dogtown.
Dogtown was a former California wasteland in the 1970s located between Venice and Santa Monica. It was the type of place where gangs set their own dead end roads, the homeless took shelter under piers, and all types of food fought in the air for your appetite. What made the place unique, however, was a huge amusement park that had gone financially bust in 1967, leaving wealthy businessmen to quickly scatter elsewhere, while the park’s fate was left at the mercy of the ocean.
The beginning of the film features footage of surfers, many of whom would later become Z-boys, riding on a death wish as they dodge rusted, giant roller coaster rails both above and beneath the water’s surface. Witnessing this in the theater is truly observing the uncut, triple X version of “X-treme” sports’ ancestor in its purest form. The absence of sponsors hanging from every imaginable place, there is gratefully no capitalism to be seen. To the lower class kids pulling off this stuff, all they had was the elite fix and satisfaction from doing it, a sense of belonging and gutsy pride that was kept forever. During these scenes, even actor Sean Penn, who narrates the film, lies low and lets the stunning footage speak for its self.
According to Z-boy testimonials, surfers from outside of the area were not allowed to surf in Dogtown and often faced being hit with rocks, buckets of sand or anything else that was at the disposal of the territorial locals.
“The funniest thing I saw was someone paddle out in the water with the guy’s carburetor on top of his surfboard and go: ‘Hey does this belong to you?’ and drop it in the water,” said Z-Boy Jim Muir.
Skateboarding took its first hold on the youth of the nation in the 1950s. But it was more like a corny Frisbee revolution than something that actually took balls and skill to pursue. When skateboarding faced a bleak extinction in the 1960s, the Z-boys stuck with it and ended up salvaging a debatable sport/art form/lifestyle for the 20 million kids who currently skate around the globe.
“If you wanted a skateboard back then, you had to go to a thrift store, buy a pair of roller skates with clay wheels, cut ’em in half, then go out in your garage and find an old drawer out of a dresser…carve it into a surfboard shape, screw on the wheels and go,” said director and former Z-boy Stacy Peralta.
The invention of the polyurethane wheel in 1972 sets the flick off in full gear, as the Zephyr team uses the new wheel’s speed and versatility to imitate the moves of their favorite aggressive surfer, Larry Bertelman, on the black top playgrounds of Southern California.
Footage of the Z-boys and lone girl, Peggy Oki, riding smooth concrete waves in unison, wearing torn jeans with the wind possessing their soft blonde locks is both visually powerful and relaxing in its assaulting innocence. The film contains faux guerilla editing techniques as it switches back and forth from original 16mm footage to the colorfully stark photos of Glen E. Friedman, and then throws in candid humorous present day interviews with people from the era.
The climax of the film is the segment on Jay Adams. One of the youngest members of the Z-boys, Adams was also the most talented and craziest. When skateboarding blew up again in the 1970s, the Del Mar Nationals was organized in 1975 to showcase competition. While other skaters were still perfecting the kooky headstands and simplistic maneuvers of the 1950s, the Zephyr team came to the contest as a self- described “hockey team at a figure skating contest.” Decked out in navy blue T-shirts screen printed with a DIY Zephyr logo and matching navy blue Vans, the team made total jackasses out of every other crew that day. Mocking the uncreative flat surface that was reserved for competition, Adams pulls sharp curves in every direction with such intense force that it purposely takes his board off of the court’s edges. The scene is magnified with a blaring rendition of Jimi Hendrix’s Foxy Lady as he flies totally off of the court and lands, leaving the audience to ponder what the hell it has just seen. With Adam’s performance, the team took first in the competition, and made every conservative judge and lame skate crew in attendance feel like their time had expired like spoiled milk.
Adams’ segment features commentary by the man himself. Now serving time in a Hawaii penitentiary for drug possession, Adam’s speaks on camera with a calm demeanor. Ye,t his dark focused eyes, tattooed neck, and husky voice tell you that the guy has lived through more than just hangovers- he is the member who never wanted to face the business end of skating and instead rebelled in every means for an escape. Neil Young’s Old Man strums in the background as a black and white snapshot of a young goofy faced Adams is blown up on the screen. The words Old man take a look at my life, I’m a lot like you, are incredibly symbolic coming from the speakers. They seem to ask people who have never been willing to respect or understand skating to find a point of realization. This an art form that has rebellious roots, but also a genuine heart and purpose.
As they trespass and skate empty upper class swimming pools, with some inevitably becoming egotistical rock stars, the film poignantly sounds out that these are just kids finding out who they are, having fun and testing the levels of danger.

Stacy Peralta and other contributors of the film, now “old” themselves, are a reflection of skateboarding’s longevity. They are the first men to look back on what they were a part of, the first members of an elite counter culture that will hopefully always remain two steps outside of the mainstream, even when and if the mass population ever comes to accept it.

The current exhibition at the New Gallery on campus, appropriately named “Earth 2002,” is displaying an eclectic collection of works responding to significant ecological issues by various artists from around the nation. The exposition, under the curatorial direction of Sherry Gache, is one of several that will be featured at the gallery.
“Earth 2002” opened on Jan. 18 and will end its run on Feb. 15, when the art pieces will be moved to another exhibition and replaced by new works. Furthermore, in accordance with the theme of “Earth 2002,” a special lecture presented by the gallery will feature two University of Miami environmental experts, Ellen Prager, of the marine biology department, and Hal Wanless, of the geological sciences department. The presentation highlighted substantial ecological issues ranging from sea level rise to changes in ocean life.
Walking through the gallery is an enlightening journey inside the fretful minds of artists who have created a unique, aesthetic perspective on the existing effluences that permeate a green world of nature contaminated by the dark fumes of pollution. The artists in this exhibition respond in disparate ways to the problems brought about by today’s environmental changes, each expressing their concern in visually stunning works.
The first piece at the entrance, which encompasses the words introducing the exhibition (“Earth 2002”), is an unconventional work entitled “Exchange of Echoes” by Paul Hitopoulos of South Carolina. It consists of many rows of grass attached to a wall. To compose the piece, he used 150-year-old crown molding, soil and vegetation; in this way, the molding becomes part of the gallery’s architecture. In a statement about the work, Hitopoulos comments that the work bridges the gap between what is and what is not art. The grass, in a certain metaphysical way, fills the literal and metaphorical gap between these two logics. “To my sensibilities,” writes Hitopoulos, “preservation of what exists is good, suburban sprawl and contemporary single family architecture (construction) are evil.”
A three-print work by Aimee Joyaux from Indiana titled “The Earth is one day thinner” has a haunting feel that will make you strongly contemplate certain environmental problems. Three silver toned prints surrounded by steel frames show a close-up of hands maneuvering hay and soil as the ghostly words in the middle print exclaim, “the Rock is one day thinner.” Joyaux is interested in creating works that deal with contemporary issues and exploring the ways photography and language can represent and shape personal identity, sexuality and gender. He notes that his work in mixed-media “combines the devices of narrative sequence, installation and construction to explore a scrambled auto-biography.” Here, the idea is a sequential work portraying a man-made rape of nature.
New Jersey-native Maria Lupo presents a bizarre, enigmatic series of object sculptures that may symbolize the indigenous relationship between different animals and animals with humans. “Pig Baby” is a baby doll lying on a soft cushion with a pig nose and a pig tail attached to it. “Piscis Ostensus Series, #1A” has a pig nose attached to something resembling the body of a fish with plants which make up the scales; it hangs floating from the gallery’s ceiling. “Genius Series, Elephantus locklen” is a strange object with a body of black feathers and a gold elephant nose. On a lighter note, next to these works, Augusto Arbizo showcases “Reef” a dazzling, abstract acrylic painting of greens, blues and yellows that embody the forms of the ocean’s reef and coral.
An oil painting by Mia Brownell, a Connecticut native, has a sharp, pink-and-purple background with black polka dots. The right center is “decorated” with a headless, wingless, skinned chicken’s body. This work is part of the artist’s ongoing series called the “Stomach Acid Dream.”
“I am expanding classical still life painting to include symbolic imagery and pop abstraction in order to express a reaction to the overwhelming expansion of genetically modified foods and other manipulations of what we eat by biotechnology,” explains Brownell about her work in progress.
She finds that biological manipulations of the natural foods we eat bring a new hazard to the consumer. She wants to combine traditional painting along with various industry symbols (here, the polka dots are connected by lines, resembling a molecular chain) such as chemical and advertising logos.
The two works by visual artist Kyle are also interesting. His “Not harmful to humans” is an acrylic painting on plywood with cubic forms-reminiscent of Piet Mondrian- in dark shades of blue that fade out into cut-outs of images showing various pictures of homes, people lying down (asleep, dead or strapped up on a bed) and, in the middle, a dominating image of a mosquito. His “Trace Elements” using spray enamel, acrylics, plastic buildings and organic miniature trees on a table of plywood, recreates a suburban ground that looks like a board game, surreal and fantastic in its own nature. Kyle describes his work as a combination of made and found objects with painting which become constructions that are “frozen moments of dimensional human drama.”
The only installation piece at the gallery is by Alexandria Searls from Virginia. Her “Meadowcreek Tire Installation Project” compiled with maps and plans, an “e-mail battle” with the governing authorities and real rubber tires. There are e-mails taped all across the walls of the installation with words written in red chalk across some of them : “Save the park, don’t pave it!” and “Keep going going going”.
High school students from the Living Education Center for Ecology and the Arts in Charlottesville have made a video of an art installation they completed in protest of a road. Tires aligned along the proposed path of the road, accentuate the damage that would take place in the environment. Searls comments about her installation at the gallery: “It shows, in tires, what will be lost from a community when yet another road is built to aid our hurried car culture, more interested in getting somewhere without hindrance rather than in having somewhere beautiful to go.”
These are only a few of the remarkable pieces presently being shown. Unfortunately, many students do not hear about the events at the New Gallery due to scant publicity on campus, which may be due to the inconspicuous location of the gallery. A frequent gallery visitor commented that most of the people who have visited the exhibition were affiliated with the art department or the local art scene.
This establishment, often under-exposed to Miami’s college students, is a vital institution that can help nurture the development of art on campus and serve students as a intrinsic link to the art community outside the university. Moreover and more importantly even, the New Gallery is an interactive forum itself that can encourage a greater awareness of the contemporary scene in visual arts through a number of lectures and diverse programming. Students need to become attentive to its importance.
Gache mentioned that the gallery might be undergoing some renovations in the future, but could not discuss specifics at this time. In the meantime, the gallery will be featuring three more exhibitions before the end of the semester. The next one will expose works by Anthony Barboza with a series of provocative and controversial photographs by the well-known New York photographer. After that, some fine arts students will exhibit their work. Plans for the last exhibition are still being discussed. The gallery is open from 12 to 7 p.m. on Thursday and 12 to 5 p.m. on Monday through Friday.

It’s no wonder the biggest fans of the French film Am