​The most vaunted NBA free-agency class in history ran screaming out of the school building at midnight, and the Miami Heat has some pretty crazy rumors swirling around it. Word on the street is that the team has a strong chance of re-signing Dwyane Wade and signing noted man/lion/gazelle hybrid LeBron James. We have no idea whose mouth those words are coming from, but word on the street is those words are on the street.

So now, a look at a few other duos who have reshaped Miami history. And yes, we realize superstar Chris Bosh might be in the mix too, but he's really Alfred to LeBron and Wade's Batman and Robin. Plus the list worked better with two, so lay off.

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Film School Rule #1: What your movie lacks in quality can always be made up for with a hot lesbian kiss.

​Are you familiar with Tommy Wiseau's legendary 2003 movie The Room? A film so bad it has gained cult status for being just godawful. A piece of cinema with no regard for things such as a concise plot, acting ability, or general sense that midnight screenings are still held in major cities across the globe so that audiences can always appreciate just how horrendous it truly is.

Well, a teaser trailer for a new flick called South Beach: The Movie (not to be confused, we suppose, with South Beach: The Musical or South Beach: An Epistolary Novel) somehow actually looks worse than that.
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Magnolia Pictures

​Of all of Miami's '80s-era cocaine cowboys, Mickey Munday is our favorite. Jon Roberts is a little too batshit-insane for our taste. Max Mermelstein adopted a false identity and died broke. Griselda Blanco scares the shit out of us and has absconded back to Colombia. And Manny Noriega, well, he's in France getting reamed by the baguette of justice. Nothing cool about that.
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​Asked the difference between his characters and Hollywood's, director Spike Lee answered, "Mine are real." Lee has made it his cinematic mission to accurately portray being black in America. In one of his first films, Do the Right Thing, he sketched a rich portrait of racial tension in a Brooklyn neighborhood. And he recently dramatized the overlooked sacrifices of black soldiers during World War II in Miracle at St. Anna, which was a big "F U" to Clint Eastwood's white-centric Letters From Iwo Jima.

You'll have two chances to hear from Spike Lee at this weekend's American Black Film Festival. Tomorrow at 9 a.m., he'll host an art-of-filmmaking master class at the Ritz-Carlton South Beach. It'll cost you $200 to learn from the auteur's 25 years in the biz. But hey, that's a bargain when you consider it breaks down to only $8 for each year of experience.

Beyond his filmmaking skills, though, Lee is revered for not putting up with any bullshit. He has repeatedly refused to do any interviews with Fox News, although he once ran into Bill O'Reilly in a bathroom. As the story goes, Lee chose a nearby urinal and quipped, "Did you find any weapons of mass destruction in here?"
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​What exactly was Charlie Murphy doing before he got famous for slapping the shit out of Rick James on Chappelle's Show? "Well, I was in movies. The last 20 years, I've been writing movies, being in movies. Between that and just hustling... I was a martial arts instructor for a couple years. I did a lot of stuff, man," Murphy says. "Prior to that I was in the military, prior to that I was in jail, prior to that I was in high school not sure what I wanted to do with my life."

These days, though, Charlie Murphy is a star. He's writing books, shooting Comedy Central specials, and sipping liquid crack (AKA Cuban coffee). And this weekend, Charlie will come to the Miami Improv for a three-night stand. New Times talked to him about baby bro Eddie, eating in the Magic City, and the day Dave Chappelle went AWOL.
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Maluca plays Grand Central on Saturday.

​Friday

• Tattoo artists from all over country will descend on Miami's downtown Hyatt this weekend for the three-day Tattoolapalooza. There'll be tattoo contests, marauding evil clowns, inking seminars, gnarly bikers, and goth punk bands. If you're going to get inked, this is the place to do it.
  
• Yes, it is genetically possible for there to be two funny guys born into the same family. Charlie Murphy doesn't play second fiddle to brother Eddie. He gets his own laughs on his Comedy Central special, I Will Not Apologize, on The Chapelle Show, and in his book The Making of a Stand-Up Guy. He performs at the Miami Improv all weekend long.

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​We thought 80's teen-pop stars were nearly extinct, but apparently they're actually alive and thriving in the Everglades. Or will be anyway. Former pop-stars Debbie Gibson ("Foolish Beat") and Tiffany ("I Think We're Alone Now") will star as rivals in the upcoming SyFy TV movie Mega Python vs Gatoroid. More >>

The cool kids' table in the cafeteria is inviting you to sit with them. Or at least that's what it feels like when the Borscht Film Festival announces it's accepting submissions for next year's festival. Above is a trailer for their CCCV short series (CCCV is the Roman numeral for area code 305). Some of last year's CCCV stories went on to screen at Tribeca and Cannes, and one resulted in an MTV production deal. (Daniel Cardenas, who made "Xemoland" about Key Biscayne last year, is working on a pilot for an animated series with MTV.)

If you'd like to get in on that Borscht action (ahem, we voted it Miami's Best Film Festival), there are four ways to get involved:
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Miami-Dade Corrections

Raul Quintana

​Raul Quintana might have a hard time blaming this stuff on a clandestine porn crew.

The Fisher Island condo owner who sued Miami-based porn production giant Bang Bros for filming a golf-themed hard-core skin flick in his pricey apartment, as New Times reported last December, is accused of brutally beating his live-in girlfriend, well-known Telemundo TV host Maria Celeste Arraras, known to her fans as simply Maria Celeste.

Around 1 a.m. on May 28, according to a police report, Quintana and Arraras returned to her $2.8 million manse on North Kendall Drive. They "got involved in an argument," and as Arraras went to call police, Quintana "grabbed [her] by the hair," "slammed her head... to the ground, striking her several times."
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Starting today, the American Black Film Festival takes over the Ritz-Carlton as its headquarters and will screen films at Lincoln Road's Colony Theatre and the Española Way's Miami Beach Cinematheque through Saturday. But with 17 films, a shorts competition, workshops, and symposiums, you can't make it to everything. Here's where we think you should spend your dough:

Our advice is to skip tonight's opening night film, Takers, a heist movie starring T.I., Chris Brown, and Matt Dillon. It'll be released nationwide at the end of August in a multiplex near you. Plus, Chris Brown hits women.

Take advantage of the film festival by seeing films so indie they don't have distributors yet. There's Legacy (see above trailer), where a conspiracy web catches a black ops solider, played by The Wire's Idris Elba. The film was written and directed by Thomas Ikimi, a Columbia-trained screenwriter whose low-budget, student film Limbo made it into Cannes in 2004. Legacy, which just made the rounds at this year's Tribeca and Cannes, screens tomorrow at the Colony and Saturday at the Cinematheque.
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