A charming black-and-white fantasy by Tim Burton about the late Edward D. Wood Jr., a writer-director-actor at the lowest reaches of 50s Z-budget filmmaking, recently accorded cult pantheon status by virtue of his eccentric personality (he was a straight transvestite) and his very personal form of ineptness. Suggested by Rudolph Grey’s oral history Nightmare of […]
Tag: Vol. 23 No. 52
Issue of Oct. 6 – 12, 1994
Posted inNews & Politics
Environmental Disaster
Dear Editor: In the course of my activities since 1981 as a Sierra Club volunteer, I have met Harold Henderson on several occasions and past Reader articles by Henderson demonstrate that he has a deep understanding of a number of environmental problems. I was surprised, then, to see Henderson at least apparently endorse fundamentally flawed […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Night of the Living Dead: The Play
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD: THE PLAY, Who Threw That Ham Productions, at Red Bones Theatre. It all started so innocently, with transcripts of The Brady Bunch performed by a cast of inspired comic actors. But now the imitators have imitators, and what started as a charming way to satirize beloved TV shows and movies […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Cinecopia
The 30th Time’s the Charm for the Chicago International Film Festival
Posted inNews & Politics
Another New Low
The Reader has sunk to a new low: Walt Disney fun for snobby yuppies–blowing up the new library [“Building Boom,” August 5]. E. Geilen W. Wellington
Posted inArts & Culture
Music Notes: the sounds of solidarity
Violist Max Raimi first got to know music lover and local political activist Joel Finkel during the 1991 CSO strike. Finkel was there the day the strike began, immediately following a free performance in Grant Park. “After the concert [the musicians] put down their instruments and picked up their picket signs,” Finkel says, “and they […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Mats Gustafsson
Thirty-year-old Swedish saxophonist Mats Gustafsson is a striking free-improviser obsessed with the sound of his instrument and the power it’s capable of unleashing. Greatly influenced by brawny German sax uebermensch Peter Brotzmann, Gustafsson channels his power into gorgeously finessed machinations. When he’s blowing full on, his tone cuts through any setting like a scythe, a […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Rose Gets It Wrong
To the editors: Re: Don Rose’s Around the Coyote Restaurant Tour [September 9]. First of all, most of the “review” is little more than menu reporting, which we can all figure out ourselves, but when he does recommend or slam, for the most part he gets it wrong. Buona Fortuna has been one of my […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Bourgeois Melodrama
SWAN LAKE American Ballet Theatre at the Auditorium Theatre, September 27-October 2 Ballet has always had its superstars–its Baryshnikovs and Pavlovas, its Petipas and Balanchines. Somewhere in the hype, the ballets themselves get lost. American Ballet Theatre’s presentation of its stock version of Swan Lake is a good opportunity to look just at the dance […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Hamlet
HAMLET, Folio Theatre Company. There’s only one thing worse than bad Shakespeare, and that’s merely adequate Shakespeare. At least a crappy production has pompous performances, absurd costumes, and ridiculous accents, which may not inspire deep thought but can stimulate convulsive giggle fits. When Shakespeare isn’t brilliantly awful or awfully brilliant, he’s usually just plain dull. […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Feed Me
BEYOND THE FRIDGE Lisa Kotin at Chicago Filmmakers, September 23 and 24 “How do you ever expect to catch a man with all that mime going on?” a father says to his mime-besotted teenage daughter in one of the vignettes within Lisa Kotin’s skillful, funny one-woman show Beyond the Fridge. Following this accusation/musing/indictment, Kotin first […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Get Someone Hipper
Dear Editor: Hey, is this Don Rose guy nuts or what [“Restaurant Tours: dining Around the Coyote,” September 9]? We’ve been going to Buona Fortuna for years since it opened and we’ve never been disappointed. My wife and I moved to the (oooh, should I even have this part printed in the Reader?) suburbs two […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Cinephiles
My local Teen Movie Panel is hanging out on the sidewalk across from the Irving Park Y: six or seven of the neighborhood’s finest 14-year-olds, all attired in the latest superbaggy prison garb, baseball caps skewed to the proper semiotic angle. A couple of the boys are loudly and heartily throwing culturally intricate insults at […]