Posted inNews & Politics

This Checks Out

Mike [Miner]: I want to attempt to set the record straight and end all the nonsense of posters, plaques, and reminiscences about who coined the advice to young reporters “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” [Hot Type, December 9]. City News Bureau legend A.A. Dornfeld, better known as Dorny, is continually […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Yearning

This week the Gene Siskel Film Center launches a two-month retrospective on Japanese filmmaker Mikio Naruse (1905-’69) with two features: the 1952 melodrama Mother (see listings) and this late masterpiece (1964) about a war widow whose beverage store is being supplanted by a supermarket. The film clarifies why Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu […]

Posted inNews & Politics

The Straight Dope

It’s a staple of ghost stories, horror films, spooky TV shows, and creepy books. And I suppose for someone with a heart condition, it may well be true. But can a young, healthy person be literally scared to death, without any physical cause? –Rebecca S., Seattle For once fiction writers and doctors agree: it’s possible […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Match Point

Woody Allen’s streamlined erotic thriller is similar to his Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) but with more clever and intricate plotting, less rhetorical flab, and no distracting one-liners. An Irish upstart (Jonathan Rhys-Meyers) marries into the London aristocracy but betrays his new wife (Emily Mortimer) by having an affair with an American expatriate (Scarlett Johansson) who […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Thank God for Hip-Hop Film Festival & Action Conference

Presented by Kennedy-King College and the Chicago Local Organizing Committee for the 2006 National Hip-Hop Political Convention, this series of screenings, lectures, and panel discussions runs Wednesday, January 11, through Sunday, January 15, at Kennedy-King College, 6800 S. Wentworth. Following are programs through Thursday; for more information visit www.chiloc.com/events.html. WEDNESDAY 11 The Birth of a […]

Posted inArts & Culture

Be Here to Love Me

“I think my life will run out before my work does,” singer-songwriter Townes Van Zandt predicts in the voice-over that opens this documentary portrait. “I’ve designed it that way.” He wasn’t kidding. When he died of a heart attack in 1997 he’d spent 30 years boozing and courting death (he once jumped off a fourth-floor […]

Posted inArts & Culture

MED, Outerlimitz

Veteran SoCal rapper MED (formerly Medaphoar) rounded up some impressive company on his debut album, Push Comes to Shove (Stones Throw), and the guests wind up outshining the host. Most of the tracks were produced by Madlib, who brings his trademark mix of clipped, bumping beats, soul and jazz samples, and digitized slicing and dicing; […]