speedlimit-13430
I wish the current owners of the Fontainebleau (The Soffer's aka Turnberry Realty) would have let this show state the real name of this hotel, not this Miramar Playa hooey. Everything about the lobby, golden staircase to nowhere and the exterior curved shape, and swiss cheese holes in the walls, scream Morris Lapidus MiMo design right from the 'bleau. Ike Evans character even mentions walking guests to the Eden Roc hotel, which is next door to the FB. This show really hit's home to the reality of what it's like to work at this type of hotel. I especially liked the episodes with James Caan. I met him at the Fontainebleau hotel at Don Soffer's wedding, and he brings such an authenticity to the role on the show.
Dan1863Sickles
MAGIC CITY is the world's longest cigarette commercial, written by people on cough syrup and acted by people on horse tranquilizers.All the ingredients are here, yet nothing . . . ever . . . happens. The sex isn't sexy. The violence isn't menacing. The humor isn't funny. These are characters whose every emotion, action, and motivation are spelled out in blatant, obvious detail before they even open their mouths. You can figure out in every single episode within five minutes what will happen at the end. One thing that could have saved this series would have been a shark attack. A real, live great white shark could have come ashore at the Miramar and started eating all of Isaac Evan's loved ones. I don't mean like in JAWS, I mean like the shark grows legs and just walks up onto the beach and starts chomping the cast members. First he chomps down on the bratty little girl having her Bas Mitzvah. CHOMP! Then he chomps the long-legged Russian trophy wife. CHOMP! Then he chomps the sleazy son and the goody two shoes son, CHOMP CHOMP! Then he pats Isaac Evans on the back and walks back into the gulf. Another way they could have saved MAGIC CITY is to have used the plot from H.P. Lovecraft's SHADOW OVER INNSMOUTH. What if Isaac Evan's partner was not boring cliché gangster Ben Diamond but a race of "old ones" or "deep ones" who live far beneath the gulf waters? What if Ike finds out that they demand sacrifice, and that only his impossibly luscious young wife with the long dancer's legs is suitable? What if Ike just panics and starts babbling to his sons, "can't be like that Kanaky isle! Yog sothoth! Ia!" What if the Miramar Play is putting on a big Gary Moore or Frank Sinatra spectacular when suddenly a grotesque impossible pageant of fish like things from below the deep forces its way into the lobby?This did get ugly,
Turtle Heart
A show about people with empty lives, incredibly empty and meaningless lives. usually a crime oriented show might produce a few sympathetic characters, but not this show. The people in the show, for the most part, are rich and beautiful yet with daily lives so empty that the overall effect is depressing. The actors are good. The production is good. If this is what the life of the so- called one percent accomplishes, I am deeply relieved not be among their number. The underlying story is interesting, rich people getting in over their heads with love and criminals. It is stylish and sexy. It is very Cuban and Jewish, which is a novel and interesting combination in a story line. there is lots of cigarette smoking and Zippo lighters and some amazing vintage automobiles. Yet the historical evidence of how so many people live their lives oblivious to social justice, to history, to anyone below their station is something of a condemnation of American values; and this may be its main redeeming value.
marcosgoodman
That era of Miami Beach is a fantastic treasure trove of visuals and stories of all kinds of incredible characters. I grew up in it a few years closer to those years than Mitch Glazer, so maybe I just remember it better. Hey, he got the series made, whereas I've just had this stuff in my head for 50 years, so I'll definitely give him some credit for portraying the atmosphere. Unfortunately though, he's just objectively inaccurate on a number of points where he really didn't need to be. Those are probably things that only a nitpicker like me would care about, but, to me and other Miami Beach people of the era, those things might matter. The worst part, though, is just that the characters and the story are boring, just the opposite of the reality.So, I watched episodes 1 & 2 and then chucked it after the beginning of episode 3 which showed the girls at the 1959 beauty pageant dancing The Twist. Unfortunately, no one danced The Twist until mid-1960 when Hank Ballard's original version came out, and then it really became big with the Chubby Checker #1 version later in 1960. I spent a whole lot of time working on picking up tourist girls in teen dances in those hotels, and I screwed up my back twisting too much at one hotel bar mitzvah and had to miss a day of school. Also, my father had the first rock and roll club on The Beach, so maybe I'm a bit sensitive about the music stuff. That's another thing- they talk about "Miami" in Magic City. Sorry, but people said "Miami Beach", not Miami. I'm serious, because Miami was this place across the water somewhere in the South of the US. It was another universe that people only visited for sports events. Miami Beach was its own world, and New York was really the next stop in those years before freeway exits. No big thing, but it just irked me, as did a bunch of things in the earlier episodes. In episode 1, the restaurant in the hotel can't function pre-New Years 1958-59 because all of the Cuban kitchen staff are preoccupied with the events in Havana. Sorry, but the staff would definitely have been black, not Cuban, as hardly any Cubans had come across yet. I remember in 1958 when the first Cuban came into our school wearing a white suit, and I became his first friend. I used to go over to his house, one of the last houses still on the beach, and they had all kinds of weapons and adults arguing in Spanish. Although no one will ever know, his father, Eladio del Valle, was most likely key in the Kennedy assassination. He was found in his car with a bullet in his head on the same day as David Ferrie was found dead in New Orleans.The owner's son, Stevie, has a build that only comes from weight-room workouts, and weight rooms didn't exist then. The only gyms then were places that boxers worked out, like the 5th Street Gym where I'd go to watch Cassius Clay. When my father took me to the spa at the Fontainebleau, there was no place to work out. The guys got a rubdown while getting their nails done with clear polish. The closest thing to exercise was walking into the steam room. No one in those pre-steroid, pre-workout days, except for a few very odd muscle guys, had developed lats or triceps. Even pro football players didn't use weights, as they thought that it would make you "musclebound". The owner's wife talks about "stress". Not a concept yet. The Eames Management chairs in his office weren't commercially available yet. More importantly, Frank Sinatra opened cold, no warm-up act or big build-up! I remember sneaking into the Boom Boom Room to see Sinatra, and it just wasn't like that. Actually, when someone asks me where I grew up, I still often say, "The Boom Boom Room".In episode 2, the guy orders "extra-lean corned beef"!! Heresy! Now, maybe Glazer was just intending that to be some kind of joke, as the guy ordering wasn't Jewish? However, I don't think that anyone ordered extra-lean anything in those days, and especially not corned beef. Then they make a big thing about the daughter's bas mitzvah, and she says, "Everybody I know has her bas mitzvah!" Absolutely wrong. Not in 1959. I doubt if one Jewish girl in a hundred had a bas mitzvah. Then, grandpa tells the daughter that he'll take her on the rides at Fun Fair. Sorry, no rides at Fun Fair other than the mechanical horsie for 3-year-olds. A somewhat less nitpicky thing is that the big mob guys didn't live in big mansions! Meyer Lansky and "Trigger Mike" Copolla, the Italian boss at the time, both lived in modest homes without gates. As I remember, Copolla's did have bullet-proof glass in the living room that faced the street right across from our junior high school, but it was just a normal 50's house. Miami Beach definitely had big fancy houses and cars, but the mob guys kept a low profile, although everyone knew who they were. My "fraternity", Knights, had the sons of the of some of those mob guys. The dads were nice enough to me, though they did things worse than anything shown in Magic City. My friends died early.Well, enough of my kvetching for now. Maybe I will watch the rest of the season, just because it's playing in my head whether I watch it or not.
