Bombs Over the Holidays Christmas wasn’t exactly a bonanza for the city’s movie exhibitors. While Hollywood continues to churn out scores of new movies to fill the burgeoning number of screens locally and nationwide, the quality of many of these films and Chicagoans’ interest in seeing them seem to be diminishing, at least judging from this holiday season. Many of 1989’s big Christmas star vehicles ran out of gas early, according to local exhibitor Bene Stein, who has tracked film grosses with a passion for years....

Friday 25 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If you are thinking of shelling out $20 to see the Who pay-for-play cable broadcast tonight at 10, hold it. This from a Cablevision press release: “This uncut, uncensored version will be presented weeks before broadcast television airs its edited version.” In other words, there will be another showing of the concert that won’t cost $20 pretty darn soon, allowing one to (a) see the concert without (b) forking over dough to Cablevision, Budweiser, or greedy Pete Townshend....

The seventh annual edition of the Chicago Latino Film Festival, produced by Chicago Latino Cinema and Columbia College, continues from Friday, October 4, through Thursday, October 10. Film and video screenings will be held at the Three Penny Cinema, 2424 N. Lincoln; at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton; at the Chicago Historical Society, Clark at North; at the Instituto del Progreso Latino, 2570 S. Blue Island; and at individual branch libraries listed below....

Chicago Invaded by Canadian Theater Impresario! Garth Drabinsky’s Live Entertainment Corporation of Canada has its eye on Chicago. The Toronto-based theatrical production company, founded by the former head of the Cineplex Odeon movie-theater chain, wants to make Chicago its base of operations in the U.S., according to Drabinsky, who built Cineplex Odeon into one of North America’s largest movie-theater chains. “The first city we would look to is Chicago,” he says, “because we believe it is the most exciting city in the U....

Does the Tribune Love Its Free-lancers? The trouble with Chicago magazines, speculated James Warren recently in the Tribune’s Tempo section, could be “editorial ennui.” It could be a lack of “a cohesive community here of magazine editors and writers . . .” Well, sure they do! Everyone’s a writer; we turn away the same reams over here at the Reader. They’re turned away at Vanity Fair and Esquire and Rolling Stone, too....

EMILY at Ruggles Cabaret Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » By all rights, these should be very shallow, unpleasant people; but playwright Stephen Metcalfe is acutely aware that little in life is simple. He’s created his characters with a surprisingly compassionate maturity and sensitivity. Although Emily’s broker buddies are as obnoxious a pack of dead-end kids as any female has ever been forced to fraternize with, they loyally proffer advice and assistance to the lady when she’s in distress, though it’s along the lines of: “Tell him the truth....

FILMS BY MICHAEL SNOW Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » An impressive trio of Snow’s most recent films, showing at Chicago Filmmakers this Saturday, reveals his entertaining engagement with the weighty ideas of life and death, time and truth. Unlike the purposely difficult movies with which avant-garde filmmakers usually address these subjects–movies that often end up proving only that a little bit of theory is a dangerous thing–Snow’s films prove that a little bit of film can be a powerful tool in the hands of a philosopher....

Two albums after the demise of the Commotions, the band he fronted for five years, Lloyd Cole is still doing his best to be both sexy and bookish. He succeeds a lot of the time: his solo records–both almost irreproachable collections of sultry but radio-friendly pop-rock–combine extremely sophisticated arrangments, tarted up guitar playing (courtesy of Cole cohorts Robert Quine and Robert Lloyd), and Cole’s rumpled bedroom voice, sometimes raspy, sometimes fluty, dishing out his knowing lyrics (“You sit around sticking pins on dolls,” “He thought that women and drink’d make a man out of him”)....

ENEMIES OF THE MOON It has to do with all these plays I’ve been seeing lately in which some horror, some awful foreign thing, makes its way into a family and destroys it. No, the thing’s not AIDS or cable television. It’s not really even a thing. At its most virulent, as in Maria Irene Fornes’s The Danube, it’s a kind of invisible vapor–or elusive germ or strangely attenuated bomb–that attacks a man and a woman, eventually destroying them, their loved ones, and maybe the world....

Lead Story Dave Ten Eyck of Anniston, Alabama, was injured recently after he attempted to replace a fuse in his Chevy pickup with a .22-caliber rifle bullet because it was a perfect fit.) When electricity heated the bullet, it went off and shot Ten Eyck in the knee. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Astrophysicist John Middleditch told an American Association for the Advancement of Science audience in February that a signal thought a year ago to be the fastest-spinning object in the universe (and thus the subject of many scientific papers) was just reception from a TV monitor in the Chilean observatory where the “spinning object” had been discovered....

Guitarist Phillip Walker’s music resides in a challenging middle territory. With his high-energy approach and love for up-tempo variations on traditional blues, he’s got one foot in the modernist camp. On the other hand, his smooth, string-bending leads are fired out with tough-toned aggression, and supported by a hard shuffle that easily recalls the musicians who were his idols when he was growing up in Louisiana and Texas–B.B. King, the young Lonnie Brooks (then known as Guitar Junior), and regional legend Lonesome Sundown....

The throngs pressing toward the door of the Civic Opera House on the damp opening night of “Stars of the Bolshoi” were greeted by a curious sight and sound: On the concrete island in the middle of Wacker Drive were 14 musicians in concert black. They were playing Elizabethan dances arranged for brass choir, and they had signs taped to their heavy black music stands that read “This is the only live music you’ll hear tonight....

A few years ago, while browsing through a local bookstore, I came across what I now regard as a minor treasure of my home library, a book called By George. Compiled by someone named Donald Oliver, this is a collection of some of the lesser-known writings of George S. Kaufman, the man once widely known as “the gloomy dean of American comedy.” Kaufman was one of the greatest wits of the golden age of the American humorous essay, the era of James Thurber, Robert Benchley, Dorothy Parker, S....

The premiere performance of Ballet Chicago was a colossal production; it consisted of nine ballets, four of them performed by guest artists who arrived in town only the day before the event. The single rehearsal that preceded it, uniting for the first time all the dancers, costumes, and music, was hardly a graceful undertaking. It was a battle of wits and will between two groups who barely spoke each other’s language: the dancers, cranky and tired, who use an esoteric sign language to indicate the steps that they’re too tired to dance, and the musicians, cranky and tired, much of whose jargon is Italian, the rest odd mathematics....

Like most Chicagoans who entertain an interest in the city’s sporting events, last Sunday morning we rolled out of bed, turned on the television, and watched the end of the Chicago Marathon. We stayed near the television, because the marathon course no longer runs through our north-side neighborhood. It used to be we’d wake up, throw on some typically loose and scruffy Sunday-morning clothes, and walk down to the corner, where we’d wait for the leading runners to pass....

THE WILD DUCK Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The head of the Werle family is a prosperous and well-respected businessman, but 15 years earlier he and his partner Ekdal were tried for illegally harvesting government-owned timber. Werle was acquitted, but Ekdal went to prison and his reputation and then his health were ruined. There was also the matter of Gina Hansen, the Werles’ housekeeper who left under suspicion of having been Werle’s mistress after, or perhaps before, the death of Mrs....

Inside the Sweeney Animal Hospital in west Woodlawn, a mixed-breed puppy named Kieko shimmied around on top of a metal examination table. “Ah, no. No thanks,” Thomas replied. But his nine-year-old son hustled off for a viewing. Brown stopped for a moment to sip from a cup of cold decaffeinated coffee, then walked into an alcove adjoining the exam room, where he met his next patient, Butch, an aging shepherd-collie mix....

WILD HONEY Bailiwick Repertory But I dunno. He seemed like a jerk to me. Puerile and adolescent. With this shit-eating little grin he’d put on and dance around in, as a substitute for charm. His conversation was less witty than sarcastic–even bullying, at times, as when he made a point of fawning over a very timid woman for whom his attentions were clearly a form of torture. Or when he seemed expressly to insult his wife by flirting with Anna Petrovna in her presence....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A station like WFMT pulls in only a tiny share of the Chicago radio audience–but what it gets is choice. It makes a lot of money and it is discriminating in its tastes (which means it pays $12 for a pound of coffee). That audience does not want to hear ads about MONSTER TRUCK RALLIES AT ROSEMONT HORIZON THIS FRIDAY AND SATURDAY–BE THERE!...

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Never has this awesome power of the press and the extent of its range been brought into such sharp focus as when a car I was a passenger in was forced to stop by a vendor thrusting a Chicago Tribune at the windshield. (Gary Hart’s name was in the headline.) Like the Ayatollah Khomeini’s suicide children, kids wearing aprons with display newspapers strapped to their bodies dart in and out of traffic, defy and charge moving vehicles....