As Rupert Murdoch emerges as a suitor for the Tribune Company, a Trib alum asks that the board consider the public interest.
Tag: Vol. 36 No. 18
Issue of Jan. 25 – 31, 2007
Posted inBlogs
The Bloodless Revolution: which side are you on?
Two contrasting reviews of Tristram Stuart’s “The Bloodless Revolution.”
Posted inBlogs
A bike you can’t fall off of
I wanted a jetpack, but all I got was this bicycle that won’t even fit in the garage.
Posted inArts & Culture
The Pendragon
You’re more likely to be awed than entertained by Matthew Sauer’s ambitious new verse drama based on Arthurian legend. Sauer and director Jeff Harris of Riddlemark Theatre Company went back to an ancient Welsh text made up of numerous stories to stitch together this tale, centered on Guinevere and Lancelot’s betrayal of King Arthur and […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Larry the Cable Guy
The line between Dan Whitney and his hick alter ego, Larry the Cable Guy, is frustratingly fuzzy. Like Andrew Dice Clay, Larry spouts obnoxious jokes (on a “retarded” girlfriend: “I’d say tomatuh, she’d say bowling chairs”), and like Minnie Pearl, he’s hyperbolic in his southern dress and dialect. Whitney, however, is far from poor, doesn’t […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Just Another Junkie
While I can believe that many people in Chicago are curious about what became of Kevin Junior of the Chamber Strings [“Heroin Hell” by Bob Mehr, January 19], I can’t help but stifle my yawn at reading another narrative about a drug-addicted musician and his recovery, his making amends, his attempted comeback, and the all-around […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Radio Golf
August Wilson’s ten-play cycle on African-American life ends with this well-made but definitely minor look at gentrification and the loss of roots. It’s funny and sometimes thought provoking, but not transcendent. Kenny Leon’s staging features fine work from Hassan El-Amin as Harmond Wilks, a black real estate developer and potential mayoral candidate bent on razing […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Harmless
At first glance Brett Neveu’s new play looks like yet another ripped-from-the-headlines docudrama: a troubled college freshman submits a disturbingly violent first-person story to his fiction-writing class, consequently pitting an adjunct professor’s insistence on the student’s free-speech rights against the college president’s need to protect his institution’s reputation. (The story is based on a 2003 […]
Posted inNews & Politics
Screenwriting by Committee
I just wanted to state to [Jonathan Rosenbaum] that in his review for Children of Men [“Thinking Inside the Box,” January 5] he dismissively suggests that the film’s script is the result of “creation by committee” given the number of writers credited. However, Cuaron has stated absolutely that only himself and Sexton wrote the movie […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sordid Lives
This pleasant cartoon by Del Shores (who also wrote Southern Baptist Sissies) revolves around the wacky doings occasioned by a funeral in small-town Texas. Among the characters are a chain-smoking Jesus freak in culottes, a gun-toting compulsive eater looking to punish her cheating legless husband, and a mental patient who dons drag to emulate Tammy […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Inland Empire
David Lynch’s first digital video is his best and most experimental feature since Eraserhead (1978). Shot piecemeal over at least a year and without a script, this 179-minute meditation builds on Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (2001) as a sinister and critical portrait of Hollywood. But it resists any narrative paraphrase, with several overlapping premises rather than […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Choice
In her one-woman show Courtney Berne says that the experiences of the women she’s met as a surgical assistant at an abortion clinic have stuck with her. But they don’t stay with us very long after this 50-minute evening of monologues ends. The clinic patients fall mostly into one of three camps: overwhelmed teen, rape […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Sounds of Silents (The Essanay Years)
That Chicago was an early center for the film industry is a fun fact to know and tell, but not in itself a plot for a play. Paul Peditto proves as much in the long first half of Sounds of Silents, which supplies loads of lore and no momentum at all. It isn’t until Charlie […]
Posted inArts & Culture
David Lynch
If The Empire Strikes Back was the cultural flash point for a teenage Generation X in the 80s, David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) was omega to its alpha, the herald of young adulthood for the generation’s maturing art-school subset. And unlike George Lucas, once Lynch had captured those imaginations, he never really let go. So […]
Posted inArts & Culture
Feast
Aline Lathrop’s messy new domestic drama feeds on overworked formulas, symbols, and shock effects: a tense Thanksgiving family reunion, a festering dark secret, a sluttish teenager’s seduction of her mother’s middle-aged boyfriend, a faded rose memorializing a father who died under questionable circumstances. Unforgivable things get said without observable consequences, and after a lie is […]