Mark Zuckerberg, who created Facebook as a Harvard undergrad in 2004, has labeled this movie about him fiction. But as one character memorably remarked in John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” Aaron Sorkin, best known as creator and writer of The West Wing, and David Fincher, the ambitious director of Se7en (1995), Fight Club (1999), Zodiac (2007), and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), based their forthcoming feature on Ben Mezrich’s royally entertaining nonfiction book The Accidental Billionaires, which chronicles the genesis and exploding popularity of Facebook and portrays Zuckerberg as a sort of Zen nerd who collaborated with and then blew off a series of business partners as his invention became a multibillion-dollar enterprise....

Walking through the Stern Pinball factory, you’re rarely out of sight of Angus Young’s sneering gaze. It’s the very same sneer that appears on the cover of AC/DC’s 1979 album Highway to Hell, only here it’s rendered in silk-screened and airbrushed paint on large wooden boards. Follow the boards down the assembly line and you’ll see Angus’s face become steadily more embellished with lights, bundles of wires, and complicated-looking mechanical assemblies before the board is fitted into a cabinet where it will become the playing surface of Stern’s current flagship product, a pinball machine dedicated in loving detail to this most massive and gloriously boneheaded of rock bands....

A founding member of the Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians and a pillar of Chicago’s jazz community, venerable tenor saxophonist Fred Anderson turns 81 on Monday, March 22. He’s celebrating at his club, the Velvet Lounge, with special tribute shows this Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Wednesday. A host of top-notch improvisers, most of them Velvet regulars, are making appearances, including vocalist Dee Alexander, saxophonist Ernest Dawkins, pianist Willie Pickens, trumpeter Corey Wilkes, and of course Anderson himself....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In a City Council committee meeting earlier this week, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce president Jerry Roper joined other local business leaders in stressing how critical it is for Chicago to build a green economy (though in his typical diplomatic fashion Roper called council plans to define “green” “half-baked”). But Chicago isn’t the only place holding these conversations. Roper’s organization recently banded with the chambers of other cities in the Great Lakes region to set goals for rebuilding the Rust Belt through environmental cleanup, natural resource protection, sustainable economic development, and related issues like transportation and border policy–on the northern end of the country....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Starting on Monday, November 12, TV host and one-time Reader contributor (and, full disclosure, my best friend) Ignatiy Vishnevetsky will teach a class on writer-director Alan Rudolph at Facets Multimedia. As Vishnevetsky notes in his course description, Rudolph has all but dropped off the radar since he quit making movies about ten years ago. This class should be a good reminder of why he still matters—or, for those who are unfamiliar with him, a wonderful introduction to his work....

History, née the History Channel, drags itself further down a new (as of 2008) and questionable programming path with yet another reality show: God, Guns & Automobiles, which follows Mark Muller, the founder and owner of the Max Motors car dealership in Butler, Missouri, and his younger brother, Erich, who until now has been been a silent partner in the business. The money Erich’s invested in the dealership comes from a long career in broadcasting: You might know him as the titular Mancow of Mancow’s Morning Madhouse, or from one his subsequent short-lived radio shows, or from his current morning show on WPWR....

When Michael Johnson goes out to photograph a landscape, he brings along his 1937 Deardorff view camera, five-by-seven black-and-white film, and patience. He goes to the place he’s been wanting to shoot–a barn a short drive from his home in Mount Carroll, Illinois, perhaps, or someplace just across the Mississippi River in Iowa–sets up his equipment, and waits. Waits for the sky to fill with the particular type of clouds he believes will complement this particular patch of ground....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Christmas wish of a lonely eight-year-old boy brings his new teddy bear to life; 27 years later they’re still inseparable, blowing bongs on the couch every morning and endlessly rewatching the kitsch classic Flash Gordon (1980). Mark Wahlberg gives a sweet performance as the overgrown kid, whose bromance with his loutish stuffed animal threatens to derail his relationship with long-suffering girlfriend Mila Kunis....

Sarah Nardi Mystery date There’s a reason we obsess over food the way that we do—a reason why we fetishize it, write paeans to it, or make it the object of our merciless excoriation. Food is like romance, with all the attendant expectations. When we eat out, we want to fall in love. Staying with the analogy, small-plates dining is the equivalent of a first date, when we attempt to communicate the breadth of our personality in a condensed period of time....

The 18th Asian American Showcase continues through Thursday, May 30, at Gene Siskel Film Center; tickets are $11, $7 for students, and $6 for Film Center members. Following are reviews of selected features; for a full schedule see siskelfilmcenter.org. The Crumbles Akira Boch’s first feature has the breezy appeal of an early sound comedy, the inconsequential story providing an opportunity for lively, affectionate characterization. A shy young woman in the bohemian Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles agrees to put up her party-girl best friend, who’s out of work; they form a rock band and start playing clubs, but personal differences strain their partnership....

There’s a scene in Gus Van Sant’s new film Milk in which San Francisco gay-rights leader Harvey Milk and his followers formulate a response to Anita Bryant’s antigay “Save Our Children” crusade. Aside from the middle-aged Milk, who’s played by Sean Penn, the group consists mostly of young men in their 20s and early 30s, so it’s hard to miss the grizzled old guy wearing the Greek sailor’s cap and sweater emblazoned with the slogan anita the hun....

Born in Cuba, Henry Godinez came to the U.S. with his family when he was three years old. “I literally was Cuban-American: Cuban at home and American at school,” says Godinez, now an associate professor at Northwestern and, since 2003, curator of the Goodman Theatre’s biennial Latino Theatre Festival, whose fifth edition starts Saturday. He studied acting at the universities of Dallas and Wisconsin, specializing in Shakespeare and classical theater. But in 1985 Godinez performed in Broken Eggs by Cuban-born playwright Eduardo Machado, and, he recalls, “woke up to the potential of exploring my heritage through theater....

Q I’m a happily married, happily nonmonogamous male. We are not wild swinger types. For us it’s more about the fact that monogamy doesn’t work than about nailing everything that walks by. Anyway, I’ve encountered an odd situation a few times now—and again last night—where I’ll be flirting with a potential fling and she knows I’m married and she’s very interested. But when she finds out my marriage is nonmonogamous, she suddenly backs out....

February 26, 2008: the day music bloggers all over the world threw up in their mouths a little. That was when the New York Times reported the rumor that Warner Brothers is negotiating with celebrity blogger and fashion disaster Perez Hilton to give him his own imprint at the label—a deal that would effectively turn a guy who’s most famous for using Microsoft Paint to scribble jizz on the faces of celebrities he thinks are gay into a for-real music-industry player....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Editorial columnist Steve Huntley asked for and received a buyout, though he’ll continue his column as a freelancer. TV critic Doug Elfman has been laid off. Special Barack Obama correspondent Jennifer Hunter, wife of former publisher John Cruickshank, took a buyout. Columnist Esther Cepeda was laid off, though there’s a possibility she’ll continue to freelance her column. Religion reporter Susan Hogan/Albach (known as “Slash” around the office) was laid off....

I don’t know how many visits it would take to truly feel comfortable ordering in a place like Momotaro, the triple-decker Japanese behemoth from the Boka group (which seems incapable of opening an unsuccessful restaurant). I visited a few times, and when I go back again I’ll still probably dither anxiously over the seven-page menu. It’s a lot to take in, divided among snacks, cold and hot appetizers, skewers from the robata grill, items brought to the table on live hibachi grills, a seasonal category titled (for now) “autumn,” and, from the sushi side of the operation, donburi, sashimi, makimono, nigiri, and a separate “chef selection nigiri....

True. But we hope metropolitan Chicago comes away from this episode with more than one dead cougar and a communal sadness that perhaps didn’t have to be. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We suggest a cougar protocol. A reliable one. Does the cougar have a cop protocol? I would like to think so. If you are thinking that I am just having unfair sport with a piece of writing that was destined to be boilerplate and wondering what I would have done (other than argue in favor of an editorial on the authorization of torture in the White House and then go hide in the bathroom), I probably just would have run the last few paragraphs from Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” and called it a day knowing that people would have been reading something more interesting than I could have written....

Bucket of Blood On the first Sunday of every month, Cinema Minima hosts a free screening in the back of Cole’s Bar, a quasi-dive in Logan Square that also features a performance space and has hosted art exhibitions. The programming at Cinema Minima is surprisingly eclectic—everything from Ivan Reitman’s Meatballs to a program of short films by Maya Deren. Tonight, flying in the face of the almighty Super Bowl, Cinema Minima will host a screening of Death Race 2000, the classic science-fiction actioner produced by none other than Roger Corman....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Just getting in on the tail end of this, but there’s a feisty appreciation of action director Tony Scott in the winter issue of Cinema Scope, the invaluable Canadian film quarterly, that–up to a point, anyway–seems to me very long overdue. The two authors, Christoph Huber and Mark Peranson, insist that Scott’s critical reputation, as “ADD action hack” and axiomatic Jerry Bruckheimer house pet, isn’t nearly what it ought to be, and I’d say bully to that–yeah, he’s way better now than stodgy old Ridley, the brother from another planet whose search for the respectability of Oscar (“maturity” is what they call it, I guess) has turned him little by little into the cinematic equivalent of a stately mahogany chest....

It’s been a little more than two years since I profiled local electronic-pop duo Houses—aka Dexter Tortoriello and Megan Messina—as they prepared to release their debut album, All Night. Tortoriello was just beginning to pour his energy into supporting himself with his music, and it looks like things have turned out pretty well in that capacity; his solo side project, Dawn Golden & Rosy Cross, got picked up by Diplo’s Mad Decent label, and Houses recently inked a deal with Downtown Records, which has released albums by Gnarls Barkley, Justice, Santigold, and Kid Sister....