The 16th Annual Fort Lauderdale International Film Festival swings into full gear this weekend, beginning with the official opening-night film Friday at the Parker Playhouse and continuing with an average of more than a dozen screenings a day. Without further ado here's a selection of what you can expect from...
Some of his best friends are...: I thought Adam Pitluk's September 6 article ("The Heart of Whiteness") was interesting and good, not the usual smear of white people and their interests that seems to be the rule nowadays. I'm not a member of any of the groups associated with white...
Imam Ibrahim Dremali finished evening prayers on September 26 at Boca Raton's Islamic Center in front of a sparse congregation. The mosque, which he had helped establish three years ago, would normally have been packed with worshipers, but the events of September 11 and the subsequent backlash against Muslims in...
On November 4, some 1,800 television personalities--actors, writers, producers, show-runners, network executives--will, finally, parade into a Los Angeles theater to award their peers and themselves for a job well done. They will, at long last, hand out the golden statues known as Emmy, just as it has been done every...
Back in February, Marcileen Bernard was near the end of her rope. "I work for $8 an hour. There's no way I can support two kids and my mom and maintain a decent standard of living," the 33-year-old Miramar resident says. For three months she had been trying to squeeze...
Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to use the name of the man interviewed below; indeed, it would have been expected, as he is no mere "spokesman," the only identifier by which he is to be referred. Two weeks ago, it would have been possible to point out...
Often the best pop music requires a compromise from the listener. Bob Dylan's coyote howl may grate like sandpaper, but tremendous rewards await any who approaches his early recordings with an open mind. And so it is with singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. I balked upon first hearing Wainwright's 1998 debut album...
Before relocating to South Florida, I witnessed an endless procession of Cuban groups visit my then-hometown in the wake of Ry Cooder's Buena Vista Social Club project. For a time it seemed every musician from the island who could claim an affiliation with this or any other famous Cuban act...
History has a funny way of tampering with the legacy of Echo and the Bunnymen. The band itself often clouded the issue of its importance with half-hearted and half-headed albums. But just as history can obscure, it can sometimes sharpen focus, and the four-disc collection Crystal Days 1979-1999 does just...
Richard Scheff has long been known in courthouse circles as an excellent trial witness -- smooth, confident, authoritative, and credible. As a result of his eloquence, a stack of laudatory letters from prosecutors in the Broward Sheriff's Office fills the captain's personnel file. Scheff, a homicide detective during the '80s...
The American Indian Movement, an organization of Native Americans, began more than 30 years ago in Minnesota and quickly became a militant thorn in the side of the United States government. The group took over Alcatraz in 1969 and a dam and an abandoned naval air station in 1970, marched...
All Jeff Snow, drummer for West Palm Beach's Legends of Rodeo, will say is, "We'd rather not say." "We don't want to make a wrong move," cautions singer-guitarist John Ralston. "We're keeping our cards close to our chests right now," adds Snow, his voice indicating the discussion is over. A...
As spinoffs go, Tom Tom Club came with a remarkable schematic for success. Jettisoning the intellectual elitism that had a grip on their full-time group, Talking Heads, drummer Chris Frantz and his wife, bassist Tina Weymouth, founded their side project on the premise of funky, beachcombing fun. It worked, too:...
The members of The Faint are in limbo, between two stops on their five-week tour in support of their newly released album, Danse Macabre. The industrial-strength, new-wave quintet is on its way from Urbana, Illinois, to Bloomington, Indiana, as one of the headliners at Bloomingtonfest, a three-day weekend festival of...
In what surely ranks as the year's most laughable use of subliminal art, Nikka Costa's flawed debut album is festooned with photos of a neon star. She's a star all right: an ambitious singer-songwriter with impressive retrofunk chops, swarthy good looks, and a gospel-influenced vocal style. On Everybody Got Their...
Ten years ago, Robert Harris picked up the phone to find on the other end a relative stranger bearing extraordinary news. This man was at a film exchange in Toronto, where movies are housed and rented out to exhibitors, and he was holding in his hands canisters of film containing...
On September 24, 1998, 28-year-old Louis Gallart was crushed to death while on the job at the Publix warehouse in Deerfield Beach. Gallart was employed as an unloader, meaning he used an electric tugger to remove empty pallets and crates from trucks. According to a Broward Sheriff's Office report, Gallart's...
When I met the man who would become my husband, I gave him the lowdown right off the bat. "I'm always right," I told him. "If I'm not right, my sister is. And if my sister's not right, my mother is." He got the picture: I don't like to be...
They met at Western High. Richard Clark was the big man on campus -- six-foot-two, 250 pounds of big. He was big like that, even in high school. A star linebacker on the lousy Wildcats. Until the fight with his coach. Proud but not arrogant proud. Quiet proud. Distinguished...
Rene Balcer, like you and everyone you know, can't stop talking about what we now refer to simply as The Attack. We may resume our lives, fall back into our routine until it again feels mundane and comforting, but sooner or later, The Attack becomes the only topic of conversation...
Cuddly outsider #63178D, please step forward. Well, my goodness, you are so alternative, so fringe, so punk! So artsy and alienated! So utterly aimless and oozing with angst! That's one reaction a viewer might have to Thora Birch's power-moping in Ghost World, the new collaboration between director Terry Zwigoff (Crumb,...
News flash to today's youth: Nu Metal is old. That's a bit of shocking news that often goes unreported by the media, and unfortunately such ignorance leads young bands to experiment with doses of enraged vocals and heavy guitars that often result in numbness of the public's ears, not to...
