A bit mislabeled–the French title is Une affaire de femmes, which translates better as “Women’s Business”–Claude Chabrol’s accomplished and generally uncharacteristic period film (set in World War II occupied France), loosely adapted from a nonfiction book by lawyer Francis Szpiner, gives a plausible and wholly unsentimental account of a housewife and mother (Isabelle Huppert at her finest) who becomes an abortionist and winds up being sent to the guillotine for it....
For years gurus have both repelled and attracted me. One of them ran an ashram in India where I lived for a while with my first husband. No sex for enlightenment, no divestiture of your life savings–simple bhakti yoga, devotion to the guru, who would show you the emptiness of all desiring and thus the love which moves through all things. The indubitable draw was the workshop’s leader, Gordon Lish, a senior editor at Knopf as well as a writer and a teacher....
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been annoyed at the fact that hot dogs come ten to a package while buns come in either eight- or twelve-packs (usually eight around here). My girlfriend says it’s because kids often eat wieners without buns, and it’s just thoughtful packaging by the meat packers. I think she’s suffering from a sodium nitrite overdose, and that what we have here is a conspiracy between Oscar Mayer and Mrs....
The teenage girl ringing orders at Al’s #1 Italian Beef is questioning the man ahead of me in the lunch-hour line. He looks puzzled, an expression of passive amusement slightly lifting the corners of his mouth. The guy is mum. Froze solid. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A black cashmere topcoat, a silk scarf, and wavy black hair give him a continental look. In his 40s, the gentleman–if he were not so slim –could be a credible Marcello Mastroianni look-alike, or an actor you glimpsed in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits....
BALLET CHICAGO In their first full downtown season, Ballet Chicago put musicians on the stage at Orchestra Hall and bravely dispensed with the elaborate sets, stories, and costumes often used to cloak a multitude of weaknesses. They emerged as a genuinely new company, not just a new arrangement of Chicago City Ballet; their programming, dancing, and staging underscored the differences between Ballet Chicago and their predecessor, and emphasized how seriously they take their endeavor....
John R. Regalbuto had a good Catholic upbringing, but it wasn’t until he was 23 years old and a graduate student in chemical engineering at Notre Dame that he came across the notion of an absolute ethical system based on “immutable and universal natural law.” In a world of messy moral dilemmas, crumbling standards, gray areas, exceptions, and exceptions to exceptions, here was something to hang on to. “My jaw dropped and I said, ‘That’s just what I’ve been looking for....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » (1) Simply because Ms. Foster has no romantic involvements and is confident in the film is not the reason that this film has feminist overtones. The character deals with the death of her father and her involvement with other father figures in a patriarchal society. Her mother was dead, “she did not know her mother,” which is a metaphor for our society which stifles women....
The title refers to a cameraman (Byron Thames) who accompanies a six-man reconnaissance unit in the central highlands of Vietnam in 1969 (“Mopic” is an abbreviation for “motion picture”). A tour de force, this first feature by Patrick Duncan shows us only what the cameraman records–an intensely physical rendering of the unit’s experiences on a mission, with the sound often carrying as much impact as the images. By “dedramatizing” the material and at the same time contriving to hold an audience’s interest, Duncan takes a courageous dive straight into the contradictions of what makes an honest yet compelling film about combat in Vietnam; what we see and hear certainly registers as real, although the verisimilitude seems at times to get in the way of story telling (we don’t always make out everything that the characters are saying)....
Art of Our Arrogance As long ago as 1820, future Secretary of State Henry Clay opined: “It is in our power to create a system of which we shall be the center and in which all South America will act with us . . .” Seen up close, the letters that state Clay’s vision are nothing but unintelligible blips. The artist drives the viewer back–to a distance that reminds us of the distance that Washington is from Managua–and from afar Clay makes sense....
This festival of films and videotapes from more than 25 countries continues at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton, from Friday, October 19, through Sunday, October 21. Single tickets are $2.50 for adults and children; a pass good for five films is $10. For more information call 281-9075. DREAMSTONE A 53-minute animated fantasy from England, directed by Martin Gates and Phil Robinson. To be shown with live-action shorts from the U....
Harmonica virtuoso Corky Siegel has assembled some high-quality talent for this light concert, in which traditional blues idioms will be playfully processed through the orchestral styles of classical and romantic chamber music. Violinists Lisa Wurman and Katherine Hughes, violist Richard Halajian, and cellist Felix Wurman, known collectively as the Consortium String Quartet, have been touring the country with Siegel; they’re equally adept at providing elegant accompaniment to Siegel’s harmonica and piano solos and matching him in sections of exhilarating contrapuntal improvisation; percussionist Frank Donaldson, a veteran of the Ramsey Lewis Trio, will contribute propulsive energy and diverting showmanship on the tabla....
I went rattlesnake hunting last Saturday. Guided by Tom Anton, who works in the fish department at the Field Museum and pursues snakes as an avocation, I wandered through several forest preserves along the Des Plaines River peering under hummocks of grass and turning over logs. I am still trying to decide whether this was a rational activity. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Finally, moved by that deepest human terror, the fear of looking silly, I started to walk around with an assurance I usually didn’t feel....
FIFTH OF JULY Still, Chekhov is unquestionably the finer and more durable playwright, and Wilson’s emulation of the Russian writer’s quirky mixture of pathos and humor can seem a little obvious unless it’s played by a fine company. Similarly, the collection of eccentric yet easily labeled personalities Wilson has assembled for this portrait of Carter-era “national malaise” can come across as cliched without multidimensional individual performances. Such is the case with Kelly Loudon’s staging of the work for Argyle Gargoyle Productions....
To the editors: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The first line in Hoekstra’s letter cracked me up. “I’m shocked and stunned by the Bill Wyman-Jae-Ha Kim critic’s war,” he wrote. Funny. I thought it took two to create a war and as far as I can tell, it is Wyman [July 19] who has tried to instigate a one-man war against Kim, who has been too smart to let his professional jealousy bother her....
Mike Leigh’s very watchable up-to-the-minute bulletin from Thatcher England centers on a posthippie working-class couple in London named Cyril (Philip Davis) and Shirley (Ruth Sheen), who are beautifully conceived and realized, as well as on Cyril’s mother (Edna Dore), his middle-class sister (Heather Tobias) and brother-in-law (Philip Jackson), and his mother’s yuppie next-door neighbors (Leslie Manville and David Bamber), most of whom live around King’s Cross. The texture of everyday life in contemporary London is precisely rendered....
In 1974 the U.S. Comptroller General released a report that said 60 percent of American children with disabilities were not being appropriately educated and one million were being excluded entirely from the public school system. In 1975 the federal Education for All Handicapped Children Act was passed. It guaranteed a “free and appropriate public education” in the “least restrictive environment” for all children with disabilities. So in 1980 Rogers and others created the master’s in special education program at Loyola, designed to produce teachers dedicated to integration....
The Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra, which was founded in 1882 as the court orchestra of the Romanovs and turned into an official state-sponsored ensemble after the Russian Revolution, is the Soviet Union’s oldest symphony orchestra. Its fabled past included memorable collaborations with luminaries such as Glazunov, Rachmaninoff, and Bruno Walter; and during the half-century tenure (beginning in 1938) of Evgeny Mravinsky as its chief artistic guardian, it excelled in promoting 20th-century Russian music–especially the landmark works of Prokofiev and Shostakovich....
In 1986 Chester Kiercul opened the Capitol Club at 4244 N. Milwaukee, featuring a band that one patron describes as a Polish Miami Sound Machine, and catering to a crowd of young, newly arrived Polish immigrants. Kiercul billed it as his attempt to run an orderly but upbeat nightclub for the immigrants, but it hasn’t exactly worked out that way. Over the last six years Kiercul has been in and out of court, locked in a bitter feud with neighbors and city officials who want the club’s liquor license revoked....
No one is certain how the rumor got started, but by mid-July word was that the Daley administration planned to close most, and perhaps all, of the city’s 18 community mental-health centers. “We are not–repeat, not closing the mental-health centers. We have no plans to do that, and we have never had any plans to do that,” says Tim Hadac, spokesman for the city’s Department of Health, which oversees the centers....
EMERGING VISIONS: THE CHOREOGRAPHERS’ MENTOR PROJECT Strangely, it sometimes takes an outside eye to refine, even to evoke an artist’s true vision. “Emerging Visions: The Choreographers’ Mentor Project,” a new undertaking by the Dance Center, has done just that: apprenticed four of Chicago’s most interesting choreographers–Ann Boyd, Bob Eisen, Mary Johnston- Coursey, and Kathleen Maltese–to two of Chicago’s most intelligent and mature choreographers, Jan Erkert and Shirley Mordine. Each of the four produced a new work (Boyd in collaboration with Julia Neary, an actress) for this concert, and the distinctive, rich, polished results suggest just how valuable an outside eye can be....
