Fat Mike leads something of a double life. While he thumps bass and wails vocals for famed punk group NOFX, he also heads his own record company, Fat Wreck Chords. Record companies, as any punker worth his blue Mohawk knows, are the target of some of the most heated vitriol…
To keep it simple, Enemy at the Gates plays like a mix of the PlayStation game Medal of Honor, a World War II Nazi shoot-’em-up viewed through a sniper’s scope, and a Harlequin Romance novel. It’s history lesson as video game, video game as soap opera, soap opera as highbrow…
There’s a myth that the right person saw the right starlet slinging hash at the local diner, and poof! Metro Goldwyn Mayer and 20th Century Fox popped up out of nowhere. Derek Elley’s 1998 documentary, Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies, and the American Dream, debunks this myth by revealing a more fascinating…
One can only imagine the pitch meeting at which comedian-turned-film actor Denis Leary told ABC programming execs he wanted to write and star in a show about a pill-popping, Scotch-swilling, chain-smoking, adulterous New York City cop who utters obscenities as casually as he exhales. It’ll be a 30-minute show, Leary…
Despite a novel-length list of writing credits and a 30-year career in the music business, perennial singer-songwriter John Hiatt has spent most of his career below the pop-culture radar. Though he continues to perform and record his own songs, those tunes are far more likely to become hits when reinterpreted…
Most charity events raise money to help alleviate some form of suffering. This Saturday’s Black Heart Ball is no different, except that it also is a celebration of suffering — the fun kind, that is. Sponsored by LeatherWerks, the ball is the annual gala for the National Leather Association’s Florida…
Director John Herzfeld’s 1996 feature, the droll and underrated 2 Days in the Valley, was a more than adequate counterbalance to the catastrophe of his first feature, Two of a Kind, a 1983 John Travolta vehicle (which, together with Moment by Moment, put its star on the fast track from…
The strife between the lead characters inCaldwell Theatre’s production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane goes way beyond the typical mother-daughter friction. Early in the play, while Maureen Folan (Cary Anne Spear) slams cabinet doors and slings pans around the kitchen of their little cottage, her aged mother, Mag (Virginia…
About three months ago, the Fine Arts Gallery at Broward Community College’s Central Campus in Davie showcased an eclectic retrospective of works by five full-time faculty members. Now the gallery weighs in with the fourth annual “Adjunct Faculty Exhibit,” an even quirkier and more ambitious show featuring the works of…
Sam Hamm is, relatively speaking, a successful Hollywood screenwriter, meaning he earns his keep penning screenplays without having to subsidize his income by tending bar or waiting tables. He has to his credit a handful of films, some little known (1983’s Never Cry Wolf, his debut), some enormously profitable (1989’s…
Little more than a decade ago, Bob Ritchie was a Vanilla Ice clone who stole away from his whitewashed suburb to break-dance with the black kids in Mount Clemens, Michigan. He had a hairsbreadth more street cred than the high-school chess club before he started spinning at parties. And then…
The director of TV’s Boy Meets World and Pacific Blue is excited about his new film. He’s just finished Contempt starring Stephanie Zimbalist of Remington Steele and Gabrielle Carteris of Beverly Hills 90210. Another movie is already in the works, but the 30-year directing career has been put on hold…
With In the Mood for Love, Wong Kar-wai solidifies his stature as the subtlest and most idiosyncratic of Hong Kong directors. In an industry best known for its accessible, crowd-pleasing comedies and action films, Wong has turned out a series of increasingly risky dramas that make little or no concession…
Legend has it Robert Johnson became a blues guitar master in an amazingly short time, hence the myth that he made a deal with the devil. Johnson didn’t achieve fame during his lifetime, but his signature sound and lexicon of powerful tunes have lived on through the work of rock…
It was to have been a routine stop on a routine press tour, yet another town in which the actress was to show up, chit and chat with the local media about her movie, then move on–the traveling salesman getting the word out, moving The Product. Denver, Dallas, San Francisco,…
The City of Hollywood does its best every year to accommodate those poor souls who can’t make it to the Big Easy for Fat Tuesday. So if you hunger for jambalaya, zydeco, or shouldering your way through a crowd to grab some flying beads, Mardi Gras Fiesta Tropicale is your…
Ever wonder what the rest of the world is doing while French-influenced cultures are ringing in Mardi Gras? It turns out a lot of them are pulling similar stunts. Even though the Germans don’t actually call it Fat Tuesday, which would be Dienstag Fett, they nonetheless have their own unique…
It’s almost impossible to know what to make of Monkeybone after one viewing; there’s so much going on in this dreamland of stop-motion and computer-generated animation and celebrity cameos that you have trouble keeping up with it. Indeed like a half-remembered dream, the movie’s often so overwhelming that even its…
If translation is treason, as Argentine author Jorge Borges said, then adaptation might be considered assassination — especially when it comes to reviving a Tennessee Williams work, which more often than not results in catastrophe. Not in the case of the attempt by Cuban-born director Rolando Moreno, whose sensitivity to…
After three visits to Harmony Isle Gallery in Fort Lauderdale, I still found myself circling through the gallery again and again, picking up on items that seemed to have appeared out of nowhere when my back was turned. Was that piece really there a moment ago? Surely I would have…
