Posts

Although there are times when the narrative seems excessively streamlined, this is the best Disney animated feature to come along in years (not that it even mildly threatens Jean Cocteau’s luminous version of the same fairy tale). Full of charm and humor, it seems to benefit from the benign influence of Pee-wee’s Playhouse (anthropomorphized household objects that manage the Beast’s castle like enlightened domestics), as well as the filmmakers’ fond memories of Busby Berkeley production numbers and the village night scenes in Frankenstein....

Friday 9 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Truly unique holiday gifts will be on the block during the Chinese American Service League’s Year of the Dragon Dinner/Auction. Embroidered silk clothing, antique Chinese furnishings, cloisonne jewelry, and original artwork will go to the highest bidders during the league’s annual fund-raiser. In addition, students from the organization’s chef training program will offer an international buffet. The fun starts at 5:30 PM at 310 W....

Competition by the Book: The British Are Coming Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The understated Waterstone established a bookselling concept that caters to the heavy book buyer (defined as one who purchases more, than 20 books a year) and spotlights classics and backlist titles instead of pushing the newest best-sellers to drive up volume. Despite its size, Waterstone’s operates in a highly decentralized fashion, with each store’s staff making the decisions about the books they stock....

Ed Steiger is sitting in the Upper Avenue Lounge at the Marriott on Michigan Avenue waiting for his singles. Steiger always gets here about an hour before they do, just to make sure everything is OK–that the buffet is hot and fresh, that the bartenders are ready, that the DJ is here with all his gear. Just in case the person who is supposed to collect the $7 a head doesn’t show, Ed picks up his mother on the way over–she can fill in if necessary....

This is British writer-director Mike Leigh at his near best–that is, not quite as good as High Hopes, but still a must-see. Most of the focus here is on a dysfunctional family consisting of a compulsively cheerful mother (Alison Steadman), a pipe-dreaming father (Jim Broadbent) who works as a chef, and twin daughters, one a well-adjusted plumber (Claire Skinner), the other an anorexic-bulimic malcontent (Jane Horrocks) in a perpetual state of agitation....

Mary T. Schmich is a hard woman to find. Based in the Tribune’s Atlanta bureau, she’s usually on the road, writing news features on the offbeat in the southeastern United States. Originally from the beautiful old seaport town of Savannah, Georgia, she speaks with a soft coastal drawl, and many of her statements end with the upward pitch of a question. Her accent has been only slightly affected by her years in other parts of the south, and not at all by her two years (1985 to 1987) spent writing feature stories in Chicago....

Pianist Lovie Lee is best known as Muddy Waters’s last keyboard man, and that’s probably unfortunate–his sparse, glissando-laden style, more evocative than propulsive and too often dependent on a predictable repertoire of trademark flourishes and patterns, didn’t lend itself well to Waters’s driving deep-blues impetus. On his own, though, Lee is a suprisingly versatile purveyor of myriad styles–stripped-down boogie-woogie, classic Chicago shuffles, even the odd New Orleans-tinged rumba novelty number. But it’s his voice that stands out the most: a deep-chested roar remindful of the great Kansas City blues shouters (Big Joe Turner et al), it comes pouring out of his diminutive frame with a declamatory force....

One of my favorite things is seeing an artist self-destruct onstage. My favoritest recent example was at last year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, when Michelle Shocked stumbled through a keynote speech of offensive stridency. The erratic singer-songwriter, who followed up the almost perfectly realized folk album Short Sharp Shocked with a bozo excursion into jumping R & B, Captain Swing, told the assembled what her latest left turn was going to be: an album that would expose rock ‘n’ roll’s roots in “blackface minstrelsy....

PEN MEN Pen Men is the result of a project in a Northwestern University performance-studies class that required students to develop creative one-person pieces based on the lives and works of historical figures. The aim was to eliminate the dryness of the typical biographical one-man show by using creative performance techniques. Patrick McNulty as E. E. Cummings and Jon Mozes as Jerzy Kosinski are both capable performers, but what makes Pen Men rewarding is its subjects....

While “art rock” is usually neither, Pere Ubu and John Cale are both. Sure, the first time you hear Pere Ubu’s plump, stately David Thomas crooning like an aroused mountain goat in hot pursuit of Allen Ravensteine’s spooky synthesizer fills, these newly revitalized Ohio veterans might seem like long shots to get your mojo working. Listen closely, though, and the band reveals a startling musical vocabulary that’s as original now as it was in their heyday a decade ago....

Dynasty Club Bar, 5447 N. Lincoln: How sad for Fraulein Schnitzel! Here she was on holiday, sitting alone at a small table beneath the silver spheres and red, green, and yellow balloons, watching the others have fun. For days she had longed to merengue but no one would or the wrong music was playing. Overwrought, unable to chew or swallow, she thought back over her doomed journey: her wanderings near the Ungererstrasse, the nights of exclusion and abandonment in Venice while the dreaded sirocco gathered its ill force to the south....

SLEEPLESS AND WITHOUT NURTURE A young woman grabbed a prop–a popcorn bucket–and placed it beneath the drips. The two performers carried on without so much as a glance at the water coming down from the ceiling center stage at the Bop Shop. The leak wasn’t part of the performance, but in retrospect it added to a certain atmosphere against which all the performers that night struggled, from botched light and sound cues to laughter overheard from the comedy club in the next room....

The Cubs came north a few days early this year to play a rare pre-opening-day exhibition game, and the gods were well pleased. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky; it was a shorts-and-short-sleeves day, with temperatures in the 80s and the wind blowing out. I was seated with the former writer of this column in our regular seats in the upper deck behind home plate; while the shade there, under the roof, usually keeps things nippy until mid-May–even on the sunniest days–on this afternoon there wasn’t a hint of a chill....

My company manufactures and markets feature stories for newspapers and magazines. I own the firm and serve as chief executive officer, marketing director, and head of production. I am a hands-on manager: all projects, large and small, must be approved and supervised by me. Because of current revenue levels, I can afford to employ only one person (myself). But if I should ever decide to expand, God help the individual who joins my staff....

Based on Henry James’s chilling ghost story, Benjamin Britten’s chamber opera The Turn of the Screw is an intricately organized and tightly wound psychodrama that many believe to have transcended the original. Not only does the opera capture and intensify the story’s erotic tension, febrile atmosphere, and sense of unspeakable evil, but the music (an eloquent sequence of short variations on a theme without tonal centers) stirs listeners to terror, pity, and love–to “identification” far beyond that felt by the readers of the tale....

Judging by the blasts of hot air whooshing around in the final days of this campaign season, the Cubs can expect a warm day for their home opener on Tuesday, April 4. That, coincidentally, is election day, and as it approaches the city seems to be getting hotter and windier. While political crystal balls are even less reliable than those hurled by the average Cub relief pitcher, there does appear to be a pattern in the Daley and Evans campaigns that portends a real difference between the two, and thus posits a fundamental question for voters to decide on Tuesday....

Peter Dominowski, the new program director at WFMT, feels ill-used by the Chicago press. When I called him for an interview, although I identified myself as someone with a viewpoint–that the old WFMT was a pretty good station–he sounded relieved. “I’m so glad to talk to you. All these reporters from other papers have been writing things about me and what I’ve done, and none of them have bothered to talk to me....

To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I thought other Reader readers might be interested to know that that feisty little group of volunteers, working the oil spill clean-up near Homer, is still at it, too [“On the Spill,” September 8]. Their Alaska Recovery Coalition (ARC) just shut down clean-up activities on the demonstration beach at Mars Cove on November 1, hanging in for at least six weeks longer than the Exxon crews....

A golden-haired girl in a wooden swing sweeps across a lush landscape animated by vivid colors: turquoise skies with gauzy white clouds, horses with thick auburn manes flying behind them, a meadow so green you can almost smell the new grass. The canvas is dizzying, stretching nearly ten feet wide and four feet high. But the dreamlike idyll of Through Verna’s Window dissipates when you spot the jagged trio of rumbling volcanoes behind the swinging child, the sharp-toothed fox stalking her, the deep water rushing beneath her bare feet, and Verna, somber and still, looking on....

BABYLON SISTERS at Angel Island Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That said, let me state that Babylon Sisters isn’t really bad. Certainly for audiences with a taste for Kramer’s music–glossy jazz pop of the sort one heard on records by Steely Dan, Gino Vannelli, and Stevie Wonder in the mid-1970s–this is an enjoyable, if unfulfilled, display of potential by an emerging young writer. And it’s by no means the disaster many first-night observers found it to be; seen a week after its premature opening, it exhibited signs of having improved considerably and of being likely to continue improving....