Subway

"Subway. " A New Wave fantasy starring Christopher Lambert and Isabelle Adjani. Directed by Luc Besson from a screenplay by Pierre Jolivet, Alain Le Henry, Sophie Schmit, Marc Perrier and Besson. Production design by Alexandre Trauner. Photographed by Carlo Varini. Edited by Schmit. Music by Eric Serra. Running time: 104 minutes. In French with English subtitles. An Island release. At the Ritz Five, 214 Walnut St. Luc Besson, France's reigning Golden Boy filmmaker, brings a moony, messy, love-struck quality to his movies.

James E. Oubre, 50, was killed yesterday when he jumped in front of an eastbound Market-Frankford subway train that was pulling into the 8th and Market streets station at 3:32 p.m., according to police. The line was shut down for 85 minutes, reopening at 4:57 p.m. SEPTA ferried Market-Frankford riders past the scene on shuttle buses.

This time, it turns out, the victim was SEPTA's subway system. At 1:45 p.m. yesterday, a 20-year-old woman told police that on Tuesday night she had been grabbed from behind while on the SEPTA subway platform under City Hall, dragged behind a pillar, and raped. By 6 p.m., she had recanted the whole thing. But in the intervening hours, a subway system that has been the site of three serious attacks since March 26 - including the death of a Starbucks manager who was beaten and kicked on the concourse at 13th and Market Streets - was under another cloud.

You know the spaghetti sauce commercial where the guy keeps saying, "It's in there"? That's the way I felt about "Subway to the Stars," a Brazilian film that opens today at the Roxy Screening Rooms. The movie starts off as a piece of conventional realism. We're introduced to Vinicius (Guilherme Fontes), a struggling musician who plays along with Charlie Parker records, and his girlfriend Eunice (Ana Beatriz Wiltgen), who works in a shop. But no sooner can you say "love story" than Eunice myseriously disappears and the cinematic equivalent of all heck breaks loose.

Police have arrested a 14-year old boy and charged him with groping assaults on four women on the Broad Street subway since May. The youth, not indentified because of his age, was taken into custody Friday, but police announced his arrest yesterday. The teenager has been charged with aggravated assault, unlawful restraint, false imprisonment, and four counts each of reckless endangerment, indecent assault, and simple assault. The attacks began on May 25 and all took place on subway platforms or stairwells.

It was about 9:30 p.m. on New Year's Eve 1996, and the two groups of teen-age boys began glaring at each other on a Broad Street subway. According to one witness, that means it was time for a fight. So, at the Cecil B. Moore Avenue stop, after two boys exchanged words, one of the groups chased the other from the train and a shot rang out. Darryl "Kareem" Shackleford, 18, of Marvine Street near Duncannon Avenue, was struck in the neck and killed on the steps leading to the street, said Assistant District Attorney Thomas Margiotti yesterday.

Tips on surviving a subway ride: Be alert for "posse groups. " Don't isolate yourself. Stay out of the last car on any train. Locate the emergency handle in your car and don't hesitate to pull it at the first sign of trouble. Those and other safety pointers for SEPTA riders concerned about the recent rash of subway crimes come from Howard Patton, chief of SEPTA's police force, and Curtis Sliwa, founder and president of the Guardian Angels. "Older subway systems, such as you have here in Philadelphia, are bad when it comes to security," Sliwa said.

In Subway to the Stars, director Carlos Diegues attempts a gritty, romantic look at the underbelly of urban Brazil. But the movie, teeming with sterotypes, just goes belly-up. As he did in his bawdy 1980 travelogue Bye Bye Brazil, Diegues paints a vivid backdrop: Subway, showing a Rio de Janeiro not seen in the tourist brochures, offers sleazy strip joints, graffitied housing projects, shantytown shacks and rubble-strewn vacant lots. But the folks ambling through this colorful squalor, including its young saxophonist hero (Guilherme Fontes, the Rob Lowe of Brazil)

Special Victims detectives are looking for a heavyset man who has groped four women in South Philadelphia subway corridors and who pushed his latest victim to the ground. Three of the assaults happened in the Tasker-Morris station on SEPTA's Broad Street Line, and one happened in the Ellsworth-Federal station. The attacks began in April and the latest was Wednesday. The victims, all lone women, ranged in age from 20 to 50, police said. In each case, the man grabbed the women over their clothes or tried to put his hand into their pants before fleeing up the stairs to the street level.

If you're going to the Phillies game on Sunday, take the subway if you want to avoid a potentially elephant-sized traffic jam. Starting at 9 a.m. Sunday, the north and southbound exit ramps to Broad Street from I-95 will be closed to all vehicles except Republican National Convention buses. The convention doesn't officially start until Monday, but there will be plenty of activity over the weekend at the First Union Center, the official RNC site, adjacent to Veteran's Stadium.

NEW YORK - A New York man was convicted Tuesday of plotting an aborted suicide mission against New York City subways in 2009 - a case that featured the first-time testimony from admitted homegrown extremists about al-Qaeda's fixation with pulling off another attack on American soil. A jury found Adis Medunjanin guilty of all counts for his role in a terror plot that federal authorities say was one of the closest calls since Sept. 11, 2001. "This is Terrorism 101," Assistant U.S. Attorney Berit Berger said in closing arguments in federal court in Brooklyn.

Company description: Subway's "fresh take on Italian. Juicy chicken, zest-errific pepperoni, and our signature recipe marinara sauce toasted with melty cheese on your favorite freshly baked bread. Molto buona!" Chain: Subway. Calories: For a foot-long, 900 calories, 30 grams fat, 150 mgs cholesterol and 2,500 mgs salt. Yikes. Location: 1701 Ben Franklin Parkway. Order time: Three minutes. Price: $6.75. Review: This is an interesting idea for an unhealthy sandwich that would be worth the grief with better ingredients.

NEW YORK - Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tuesday that he hoped the subway would be extended underneath the Hudson River to New Jersey "in somebody's lifetime" after a top transit official said it would be too expensive. Bloomberg, whose administration more than a year ago pitched the concept of extending the No. 7 train to the Garden State, was responding to comments by the chief of the city's subways, who said he couldn't see extending the system under the river "in our lifetime" or "anybody's lifetime.

Subway and bus riders said they were glad to see the return of SEPTA's transit police Saturday after a nine-day strike. Negotiators for SEPTA and the Fraternal Order of Transit Police reached a tentative agreement Friday night, and officers returned to work at midnight. Katie Del Russo, 18, of South Philadelphia, uses the subway and SEPTA buses fairly often. "When I come down here and I see the cops, it makes me feel better," she said while waiting for a Broad Street subway train to the Flyers game Saturday.

Subway and bus riders said they were glad to see the return of SEPTA's transit police Saturday after a nine-day strike. Negotiators for SEPTA and the Fraternal Order of Transit Police reached a tentative agreement Friday night, and officers returned to work at midnight. Katie Del Russo, 18, of South Philadelphia, uses both the subway and SEPTA buses fairly often. "When I come down here and I see the cops, it makes me feel better," she said, awaiting a Broad Street subway train to the Flyers game Saturday.

THE DAY was almost over for Jonathan Lowe, a man who had seen some rough patches in life. But Oct. 1 had been pretty good for the retired Marine, who had recently survived several strokes and a heart attack that required him to wear a monitor. Lowe, 57, spent the evening at a fish fry at a friend's North Philadelphia house and headed home after 10 p.m. That simple journey, it turned out, led Lowe to what is likely the roughest patch he's ever known - and he never made it home.

The Market-Frankford Line opened 105 years ago this month, in 1907, with the Norristown High-Speed Line (then called the Philadelphia & Western Railroad) starting a few months later. The Broad Street Line opened along its northern portion in 1928, and PATCO started service in 1969. Underground rapid transit, "the subway," is a transportation model that began in London in 1863. New York City and Boston developed their own systems in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with New York's first line opening in 1904.

The artist Robert "Peanutbutter" Woodward has painted the guests' bodies at Cher's birthday party, played basketball with a French team in Tunisia, regaled Martha Stewart on her television show, exhibited his sculpture in some of the hippest galleries in the United States, and appeared publicly in costumes that would make Sacha Baron Cohen blush. His current project may be one of the most out-there (or rather, down-there) adventures yet. With a $150,000 grant from SEPTA, Woodward is transforming the Broad Street subway station at Girard Avenue into an interactive art gallery.

MEXICO CITY - After two hours' grueling drive southeast from the center of Mexico City, through paralyzing traffic jams and clouds of throat-burning smog, the bleached-white haze of air pollution gives way to pale-blue sky. In a flat-bottomed boat tied to a willow tree, Crispin Matteos Galicia hauls up sediment in a plastic bucket to fertilize squash seedlings for his chinampa, an island farm built in the shallow waters flowing from the Lake of...

SEPTA opened a new "accessible travel center" in Suburban Station on Thursday to make it easier for commuters with handicaps to learn to use buses, subways, and trains. The center has a full-size replica of the front third of a SEPTA bus and mock subway and rail platforms, as well as training videos and piped-in street and train sounds. "It was really real. It was like sitting on a real bus," said Roderick Powell of Chester, a blind man who chairs SEPTA's advisory committee for accessible transportation.