QI’m a straight man at that age where the general public still considers me young. Although I’ve attended many weddings, I have no interest in marrying or even being in a relationship. I never have. Forgive me for working my own sexuality into this, but I have to say: When I was at that age the general public unanimously considers young—still a teenager—I walked into my mother’s bedroom and informed her that I was a faggot....
Presented by Chicago Filmmakers, the 22nd Onion City Experimental Film and Video Festival runs Thu 6/17-Thu 6/24. For more information call 773-293-1447; a complete schedule is available at chicagofilmmakers.org. Following are selected works from the festival’s nine programs; most of the things I previewed were interesting at the very least, and many are either boldly original or surprising variations on existing forms of experimental filmmaking. Best of Chicago voting is live now....
I’m So Excited, Pedro Almodovar’s 20th feature film, begins with the disclaimer “What you are about to see is a work of fiction and fantasy. It bears no connection to reality.” This seems peculiar because it’s so unnecessary: Almodovar has never been mistaken for a realist, and the opening scene of I’m So Excited is particularly cartoonish. Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas turn in cameos as blue-collar airport workers, an unsubtle bit of stunt casting that’s funny all the same....
“Have any of these people actually BEEN to Hyde Park? I know this effort to paint Obama as an elitist has now caused Hyde Park to be lumped in with other bastions of elitism, but having been to both Berkeley and Cambridge I can say safely that Cholie’s and Nathan’s Taste of Jamaica are not exactly Chez Panisse, and 51st and Cottage Grove is not exactly Central Square. We tried to have a gourmet grocery store there; it did not end well....
(1) It was outsourced. (3) The public part of the process has been dumbed down. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We’ve been wrangled and patronized, but who doesn’t like those cute little buttons, Post-it boards, photo collages, catchy slogans, and “ground-truthing” meetings where you get to play with a transponder? As for the widespread public participation on the Internet we were led to expect, well, you can follow the plan on Twitter and “like” it on Facebook....
Thursday3 Pieta Brown Friday4 Katya KabanovaRusko Saturday5 The Dutchess & the DukeField Music cancelled Sunday6 ImplodesDave Rawlings Monday7 GwarKatya KabanovaMew Wednesday9 FrequencyPriestessRaekwon cancelledWelcome to Ashley friday4 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » RUSKO Like drum ‘n’ bass before it, dubstep in its uncut form is too deep, dark, and weird to find a large mainstream audience, which is fine by me. I don’t mind if the real heavy shit never spreads beyond a small group of addicts....
The tenth Annual Chicago African Diaspora International Film Festival runs Friday, June 15, through Thursday, June 21, at Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton, 773-281-4114. Tickets are $9 ($15 for the opening-night program). Following are selected programs; for a full schedule see facets.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Come Back, Africa Shot clandestinely in Johannesburg with a nonprofessional cast, this 1959 feature by director Lionel Rogosin (On the Bowery) is an extraordinary document of black life under apartheid....
The Great Gatsby will always be an unfilmable novel because most of its drama resides in the space between the characters’ snappy dialogue and their unspoken feelings of ennui, disappointment, and despair. This may explain why, transposed to the screen, Gatsby tends to become the very thing it abhors: a wild, loud party. The hyperbolic Australian director Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) is exactly the wrong person to adapt such a delicately rendered story, and his lengthy 3D feature plays like a ghastly Roaring 20s blowout at a sorority house....
If you were young and on fire and in anguish over the war in Vietnam, was there anyplace to be in late August of 1968 but the streets of Chicago? The trouble with the standard Chicago ’68 story is its limited cast of characters. No one associates Bill Singer with Chicago 1968. Or James Houlihan, Grace Barry, or, for that matter, Edward Burke. Actually getting him nominated wasn’t likely, but maybe, against the fierce opposition of the loyalists to Lyndon Johnson and his chosen successor, Hubert Humphrey, they could get the convention to adopt their so-called peace plank repudiating the war....
The Critics will be screened Friday and Saturday, February 18 and 19, at the Gene Siskel Film Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Seeing so many plays and writing so much about them had distorted my sense of perception; my world had narrowed and become increasingly self-referential. My standards had become less and less related to the so-called real world and more and more related to other shows I had seen....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In an alarmist and hastily reasoned “think” piece for Time‘s entertainment website, Graeme McMillan recently pondered whether implausible, spectacle-driven blockbusters like The Bourne Legacy and Men in Black 3 signal an age of “story-less” movies. “Almost everything about [Legacy] is so unoriginal,” he writes, “as to feel as if it’s come from another movie; the fact that there’s no real connective tissue or narrative through line to connect those scenes almost becomes unimportant in the face of the accidental nostalgia and emotional connections they evoke....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “In the 60s [federalism] grew fat on segregation, taking up the states’ rights argument for allowing jim crow to die in bed. The Tribune couldn’t countenance the [1963] Birmingham bombings, but William Buckley’s National Review, which would champion Barry Goldwater for president the following year, was able to. ‘Let us gently say,’ it said, ‘the fiend who set off the bomb does not have the sympathy of the white population in the South; in fact, he set back the cause of the white people there so dramatically as to raise the question whether in fact the explosion was the act of a provocateur–of a Communist, or of a crazed Negro....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I missed this in the dailies, but was interested to see that there are plans to open a kosher restaurant in Chicago this fall–according to the Jewish Press there hasn’t been one since La Misada closed at the Hyatt: “Now comes word that the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies and Wolfgang Puck Catering Inc. are bringing kosher back to downtown Chicago....
Corrected Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Wait, it’s better than that sounds! Called “parklets” elsewhere—the phrase “people spots” is a Chicago bureaucrat’s invention—they’re repurposed parking spaces with greenery and a few places to sit down. People seem to be pretty attached to them, if the triumphant reaction from a San Francisco native I know is to be trusted. There are more than 30 in that city, where the idea was born, and they’ve spread to other cities, like Vancouver and Philadelphia....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » On Wednesday, Danny Brown released another preview track from his upcoming record Old, due out on 9/30, and, just like the other handful of songs that he’s been slowly sharing, it’s really great. It’s called “ODB,” and it’s today’s 12 O’Clock Track. “ODB” is a perfect example of what makes Danny Brown the best rapper out there right now: rhymes that are both sophisticated and schizophrenic, one of the sharpest and most unique voices you’ll ever hear, and a trippy beat that mixes outer-space soul with drugged-out Detroit house music....
The Tribune‘s 1975 review of the play that put David Mamet on the map, followed by Jones commenting: “Roger Dettmer was not an especially insightful theater critic, his skills in the music field notwithstanding. This first review of the world premier of ‘American Buffalo’ . . . joins that undistinguished group of opening-night reviews of great plays by critics who completely missed the point . . .” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Jim Boylan was Scott Skiles’s right-hand man, both in Phoenix and here in Chicago with the Bulls, so everyone rightfully wondered what the difference would be when he replaced Skiles as the Bulls’ coach. Quite a bit, as it turns out. Boylan must have been Skiles’s better half, for lack of a better phrase, in dealing with players, and he quickly proved himself a players’ coach compared with Skiles’s taskmaster as the Bulls won four of their first six under his leadership....
The last thing dancer-choreographer Adam Rose wants is for you to enjoy his work. He aims to inspire fear and dread. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rose, 28, speaks haltingly but articulately; a self-described shy young man, he’s transformed onstage. About half the time he performs as a woman. Pretty much all the time his movements are contorted, transfiguring his face into a mask of rage or grief and his limbs into agents of violence, sometimes directed at himself or, more rarely, someone else....
Matana Roberts Quartet, The Chicago Project (Central Control)A former Chicagoan, reedist Matana Roberts returned from New York to make the best record of her career, working with guitarist Jeff Parker, bassist Josh Abrams, and drummer Frank Rosaly (and cutting a few duets with tenor titan Fred Anderson). The rippling, muscular music pushes a postwar Chicago blues feel through ideas laid out by the AACM in the 60s, and its final stop is the present....
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For this week’s paper I wrote a Best of Chicago blurb about Dusty Groove, but I didn’t mention that this excellent record store has also become a reissue label. Last month DG released an album I’d never heard before, a recording both bizarre and ultraprescient. Badfoot Brown and the Bunions Bradford Funeral & Marching Band is one of a handful of noncomedy records credited to Bill Cosby over his long career–some of the others were cut with Quincy Jones and with Charles Wright and the Watts 103rd Street Rhythm Band–and it originally came out on UNI back in 1971....
