You know the saying: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” That’s not the case, however, at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, which is hosting its 21st Annual Faculty Exhibition in the school’s Mark K. Wheeler Gallery. At the very least, the show demonstrates that these instructors are…
Carl Rimi, a frisky young comic, is on stage pretending — or so it seems — to flub his routine. Turning his back to the audience, he pulls a piece of paper from his pocket, scans his notes, then spins around. He’s back on track. Rimi’s knack for toying with…
Thursday October 1 In 1949 he predicted the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1962 he predicted virtual reality. These days renowned science writer and futurist Ben Bova has some ideas about human technology. For instance, we’re going to start living for 200 years instead…
Benedict J. Fernandez credits his neighbors with encouraging him to get involved with the civil rights movement of the ’60s. In 1963, while he was an engineer at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, he shopped for a house in New Jersey and noticed the realtors were coming up with some pretty…
Have adultery, murder, and greed all moved to the sticks? Once firmly rooted in the big city, the seven deadly sins have taken on a distinct country-and-western twang in recent years, thanks to noirish, tough-minded scamfests such as John Dahl’s Red Rock West (1992) and The Last Seduction (1994), James…
The ants in Antz show a lot of personality. The film is the best example yet of how a fully animated computer-generated feature can delineate facial movement. Toy Story (1995), the first such feature to be released, was brasher and more child-friendly, but Antz is more of a — how…
Back in the early ’70s, when John Waters made his first splash with such low-budget gross-outs as Pink Flamingos and Multiple Maniacs, who would have guessed that someday he’d be making a Hollywood film as benevolent as Pecker? In retrospect maybe we shouldn’t be surprised. If any director has ever…
Twelve years ago Lily Tomlin opened her mouth and launched a thousand monologues. The 1986 Broadway success of The Search For Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe spawned a generation of self-styled storytellers, from the cutthroat visionary portraits of Eric Bogosian and the neurotic ramblings of Spalding Gray to…
For baby boomers who howled at early Saturday Night Live skits that parodied ungracefully aging rockers of the future, life today can be a minefield of painful reminders that, hey, those dreaded days are here. Venerable wild-guy pianist Leon Russell reportedly relied heavily on a cane during a show last…
During the day, Amy Watson rarely leaves her Las Olas Isles home. A self-employed public relations consultant, she spends half her time working for clients, the other half plugging away at her first novel. The canalside, ’40s-era brick house is decorated with abstract expressionist paintings, an eclectic mix of antiques…
Thursday September 24 It’s a foreign concept to youth-obsessed Americans, but in much of the rest of the world, older folks are revered for their wizened world views. This is especially true in the Orient, where, hundreds of years ago, the Chinese applied their older-is-better belief to trees. By 1400…
As a director of action thrillers, John Frankenheimer has been a peerless stylist for nearly four decades — without leaning on a pile of glitzy special effects. What’s more, his most memorable movies, from The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to Birdman of Alcatraz (also 1962) to 1986’s wickedly entertaining, unappreciated 52…
For better or worse, the confessional memoir has become the most popular literary form of our time, prompting ball players, Irish bartenders, prosecuting attorneys, and mothers of quadruplets everywhere to lay bare their deepest thoughts and secrets, all based on the presumption that their miserable lives are more interesting than…
Music, as a theater insider once put it, is the food of love. Opera, on the other hand, is a series of naughty sexual escapades, repeatedly slammed doors, and horny bellhops. At least, those are the elements that drive Lend Me a Tenor, Ken Ludwig’s 1989 Tony Award-winning farce about…
To get an in-a-nutshell sense of the differences and similarities between the “40th Annual Hortt Competition” and the “1998 Salon Des Refuses” exhibits, now on display at Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art and the Broward Art Guild, respectively, consider two works, coincidentally by the same artist — one accepted by…
A man swings a double-bladed axe at the stomach of a woman who has challenged his authority as a king’s guard. She sidesteps his blow, then brings down her long sword. He eludes her blade, and both come away unscathed. These fighters are members of the Royal Chessmen, a theatrical…
Jackie Chan’s American fans — and I include myself among them — have suffered through a nervous 1998 so far. The momentum the star earned with the 1996 release of Rumble in the Bronx has seemed to dissipate steadily: An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, the first American production…
One True Thing, directed by Carl Franklin, is trying to be the Terms of Endearment of the ’90s. Scripted by Karen Croner from the 1995 Anna Quindlen novel of the same name, One True Thing pushes the same high-gloss homilies about making peace with your family, and it caps everything…
Of all the things your mother specifically told you not to do — talk with your mouth full, go out with married men — chances are she didn’t mention the following: Running off into the snow in your wedding dress. But if you did happen to desert your fiance at…
Thursday September 17 With her 1995 album — and without the publicity of a live tour — she pretty much swept the country music awards in 1996: Billboard No. 1 Top Country Album Artist, Grammy for Best Country Album, Album of the Year from both the Academy of Country Music…
The director — the guy wearing the headphones over a turned-around baseball cap — is smiling. He’s pleased with the scene. It’s around midnight in Fort Lauderdale, and his actors are cruising around in a ’78 Checker cab with a 1000-watt light clamped to the hood. The taxi rumbles through…
Among the residents of the hillside village, Howard Goodwin looks like a giant. Popping through a cutout in the middle of the miniature-scale display at the South Florida Railway Museum, he’s Godzilla-like compared to the five-inch trees and toy trains that weave their way across the landscape. A sleek, silver…
