Chalk up another one for George Dubya. Recently the U.S. Immigration Department refused to allow acclaimed Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, director of both the Oscar-nominated The White Balloon and the Venice Film Festival Golden Lion winner The Circle, to change planes in New York on his way from Hong Kong…
When Fort Lauderdale’s Museum of Art (MoA) pulled the plug on the Hortt Competition last year, an era appeared to have ended. At 41 years old, the Hortt — named for former Fort Lauderdale mayor, art collector, and MoA benefactor M. Allen Hortt — was one of the region’s longest-running…
The publicist asks if I’d like to speak to D.A. Pennebaker to commemorate the 60th birthday of Bob Dylan, which falls on May 24. She asks this because, during the spring of 1965, Pennebaker made a documentary about Dylan’s tour of England, Dont Look Back, which captured a drained, cagey…
While the leaders of the free and not-so-free worlds (read: United States and China) continue to argue over a high-priced spy toy, Chinese men and women several rungs down the political ladder from these world leaders demonstrate that we all really can just get along. The Yunnan Provincial Song and…
Last year saw funk-jam band Deep Banana Blackout at what was probably its biggest crossroads since it was founded in 1995. With eight members to pay, money was very tight. Putting out albums on its own label, while doing a lot to maintain creative freedom, was doing absolutely nothing to…
Welcome to the movies of summer 2001! Of course, whether you’ll actually feel welcome is another issue: Hollywood is doing its usual stuff to attract the most dollars, which may not always mean your dollars… unless you belong to that centrally crucial demographic — males ages 13 to 25. You…
A TV turns to static. A young girl lies motionless on a bed. A man in a suit enters a dark kitchen, loosens his tie, and opens a refrigerator. These scenes could be indiscriminate snapshots of anyone’s daily life, but placed in one of Michael John Garces’s plays, they become…
Step into the first gallery to your left at the entrance to “Sophia Vari: Volumes of Poetry,” now at the Boca Raton Museum of Art. You’ll see pedestal after pedestal, display case after display case featuring the gleaming, curvaceous sculptures of the Greek-born Vari, who typically works in bronze, often…
The name Children of Lesbians and Gays Everywhere (COLAGE) makes for a nice acronym, but member Daniel Wayne Lessem is also fond of another, slightly more irreverent label for himself and his compatriots: queerspawn. Whatever its constituency is called, COLAGE is a safe place for the children of lesbian, gay,…
Kids might well be amused by the frenetic pacing of Shrek, the latest computer-animated film from DreamWorks, which moves so quickly it’s nearly a blur, though they need not get the jokes to enjoy frolicking in the muck (and the maggots) with a green, snaggletoothed ogre who wants only to…
Like nearly all book-to-film adaptations from Merchant Ivory Productions, The Golden Bowl is a feast for the eyes, with choice real estate, exquisite interior design, and dazzling costumes all bathed in a golden light that not only enriches the colors but also helps to give the settings a sense of…
There are not many stories left buried in James Ellroy’s past. In 1996, at the age of 48, he penned his memoirs, in which he paired his life story with that of his dead mother, Jean Ellroy, a nurse found strangled and beaten in the bushes of suburban Los Angeles…
This weekend Audrey Mestre-Ferreras and Pipin Ferreras hope to beat two of their own free-diving records — tandem and female — as part of Lauderdale-by-the-Sea’s Ocean Fest. Competitive free-diving involves going underwater without a mask or tank, staying under for longer than three minutes at a time, and going as…
Perhaps it’s sheer coincidence, but it seems largely appropriate that the first International Monologue Festival began with a voyage and ended with an enigmatic door. The festival, which took place from April 27 to May 6, began with Teatro Mio’s Waiting for Odysseus and closed with Teatro Buendia’s The Eighth…
Heath Ledger, wearing the scowl of the anxious and uneasy, is having trouble standing still. He most certainly would rather be anywhere but here: killing time in a TV studio, waiting to be interviewed during a live afternoon newscast. Waiting to promote his new movie. Waiting to assume the guise…
It’s a bright, windy day, and the Atlantic Ocean is choppy with four- to six-foot swells. On the beach are gathered about a dozen members of the Las Olas Outrigger Canoe Club, and five of them are going to brave high tide to get a Hawaiian outrigger on the water…
After polka’s heyday came and went, most folks thought the accordion was history. It had its 15 minutes, a few people with strange taste in dance got down to it, and the instrument forever disappeared from fashion. But the squeezebox lives on. An entire region of the United States owes…
Irish. Sex. Farce. These are not three words you see snuggled up together very often. Given the ironclad no-noes of the Catholic Church, the preoccupations imposed by their political troubles for the last eight centuries or so, and frequent commutes to the local pub, the Irish probably haven’t had much…
Let us first in olden verse this critic’s cynical curse disperse: The greet unwashede consummeth crappe, Fro Jerrye Springgere to ganggsta rappe; Bothe yonge and olde, ’tis sore pitee, Doth foule thir hertes with drede teevee, So slye produceres, with bisynesse cunning, Devysde a shew to pyne come running Consummeres…
If playwright Stan Lachow could have seen the set that the Hollywood Playhouse was going to construct for the world premiere of Harry and Thelma in the Woods, he would have edited out the “in the woods.” Walking into the small, residentially located theater, you are so assaulted by the…
Last thing first. At this very moment, Chris Carter sits behind his desk in the Ten Thirteen Production offices, on the 20th Century Fox lot in Studio City, California, finishing the final X-Files episode of this season. The show’s creator has just one scene left to write–the very last–and that…
Kiddie crazes have a way of becoming preteen cultural cartels. Witness Pokémon — it’s a card game, no it’s a TV show, no it’s a movie! Or what about Rugrats? It’s a TV show, no it’s a comic strip, no it’s a movie! The list goes on and on, from…
