Peter Sellers in a nonexistent adaptation of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man I was planning to write an April Fools’ Day post about discovering a long-lost movie that didn’t actually exist. Then I realized that by the time it went up, most people would be tired of April Fools’ pranks, and I decided against pulling a ruse. I still want to write about this nonexistent film because I like it more each time I think about it, and because I suspect I’m not alone in dreaming up a movie I wish had been made....

Kikuyo Zendo, the subject of Shohei Imamura’s funny, shocking, and seemingly effortless 1975 documentary, was one of thousands of impoverished Japanese women forced into prostitution and shuttled across southeast Asia in the early 20th century. The director clearly regards her story as a vehicle for numerous perennial themes: the resilience of women, sex as a function of capitalism, and the radical idea that the oppressed economic underclass are the most reliable commentators on Japanese history....

Ellen Greene If the legend is to be believed, then the Facebook we know today was born of an algorithm created by a stung Mark Zuckerberg, who’d retreated to his dorm room lair to fuel up on beer and exact a nerd’s revenge. Having allegedly been stood up by a girl, he designed a program that would allow users to rate the looks of female classmates, presumably exposing a significant portion of the student population to the same sense of rejection he was experiencing....

Jim Frost/Sun-Times Media Hot Doug’s comes alive at Soup and Bread. How would you like a piece of Hot Doug’s to live on at your very own sausage superstore? Memorabilia from the legendary Chicago encased meat emporium and line-based social platform will be among the raffle items at a fundraiser for Soup and Bread, the weekly winter event at the Hideout that will kick off again in January. It’s happening on Saturday, December 13 from 5:30 to 9 PM, admission is a $20 donation, and there will be soup from Doug Sohn himself, as well as from Smoque, Harmony Grill, and others, plus bread from Publican Quality Meats and cornbread from All on the Road Catering....

Will Claytor Magnolia Electric Company (Jason Molina, second from right) Extraordinarily talented singer-songwriter Jason Molina (known best for the music he made as Songs: Ohia and Magnolia Electric Company) died on Saturday night in Indianapolis at age 39. According to his longtime record label, Secretly Canadian, his death was from natural causes, but Molina’s good friend Henry Owings of Chunklet writes that he “died from a body that had been drowned in alcohol for years on end....

Run in collaboration with Northwestern University, Steppenwolf Theatre Company’s Next Up program gives a few lucky MFA candidates the chance to stage a show with a professional cast and the imprimatur of one of the bigger fish in America’s theatrical pond. I hope the kids get some useful lessons from the experience—but even if they don’t, wow, you can’t beat Steppenwolf for a resume credit. The really insufferable aspect of The Drunken City is Bock’s energetic attempt to draw comedy from stupidity....

Michael Gebert Julia Pham I wanted to have lunch with Julia Pham of Relish Underground Dining for two reasons. One, because she had just gotten a citation from the city, which had led her to announce that she was no longer hosting dinners in her Lincoln Square apartment. I thought it might have been my fault that the Man came down on her; I had just announced one of her recent events on this blog, not to mention that I’d written about her serving as host for this underground dinner, and, shortly after that, she was featured in the Reader‘s 2013 People Issue....

On March 16, 2011, just two months before he left office, Mayor Richard M. Daley held a press conference in a vacant lot at 76th and Ashland. The event ended up illustrating many of the complexities and contradictions of his 22 years in power, the longest tenure of any Chicago mayor. The lot, which took up most of a city block, had once been home to industrial warehouses and small manufacturers, but the businesses had left and the empty buildings were razed....