Much to the surprise of the Hollywood studios that snubbed it in its infancy, Leaving Las Vegas has emerged as one of the most lucrative movies of 1995. The art-house film made for $3.5 million has earned nearly ten times that amount at the box office. Larry Gleason, president of theatrical distribution for MGM/United Artists, says Leaving Las Vegas is “one of the most successful specialized films of all time.”...
Documenting Doo-wop Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raised in and around Chicago, Pruter, 52, got hooked on rock ‘n’ roll as a teenager in the mid-50s, listening to the new sounds on WLS. But during his college years in the early 60s he gravitated toward the more provocative sounds of rhythm and blues on WVON. A weekly oldies program hosted by legendary DJ Herb Kent clued him in to the music of the previous decade that he’d missed listening to WLS: doo-wop....
Ending a seven-year hiatus from recording and public performances that began with a broken finger he got playing basketball, Greg Ginn overcame his antistar mentality last year and went back on the road. Ginn, of course, is the founder of LA’s Black Flag–the band that not only started Henry Rollins on the road to Gap commercials but was also one of the two or three most important hardcore groups ever. He’s also the owner of SST Records, the label that’s served as a home to Husker Du, Meat Puppets, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr....
Peter Sellars, now in town directing The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theatre, is “daring,” “innovative,” “a genius,” and “brilliant,” according to critics from around the United States and Europe, who’ve hailed him as the most exciting thing to come down the artistic pike since Andy Warhol. He’s been the subject of an astounding number of newspaper and magazine articles, most of them unstinting in their admiration of his work, including a pair of recent puffs by the Tribune’s Sid Smith....
Lead Stories Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brian Smith, 42, was charged in Cassville, Missouri, in July with locking his three kids in 55-gallon drums during the day while he was at work. Jeffrey Hoveland, 50, pleaded guilty in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in July to using an electrified dog collar to punish his two sons, ages 9 and 11. And Jan and Joyce Duplantis were arrested in New Orleans in June and charged with forcing their two female wards, ages eight and nine, to live outside in a crude playhouse so as not to mess up their apartment....
SON OF THE PINK PANTHER With Roberto Benigni, Claudia Cardinale, Herbert Lom, Debrah Farentino, Robert Davi, Shabana Azmi, and Burt Kwouk. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » To the best of my knowledge, neither of these postmortem productions performed nearly as well commercially as the preceding five features. Yet as Edwards himself has indicated, hopes of striking paydirt again after a string of relative flops persuaded him to reanimate the series....
The coffeehouse tradition goes back to 1672, when an Armenian named Pascal opened a coffee stall at the Saint-Germain Fair in Paris. He called it a “cafe.” Gradually cafes became hangouts and began to offer food and wine. But these days in Paris–if not in Chicago–cafes are dying out, and chic wine bars where Parisians on the fast track can choose from a variety of wines by the glass to complement their tartine or pate are taking up the slack....
By Ben Joravsky It’s sort of hard to picture the Blue Line unless you’ve read it. Think of it as a combination of the Sporting News and Spy–a 16-page tabloid filled with statistics and sports gossip as well as wickedly crude portraits of powerful politicians, team owners, and stars. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Their favorite target is Blackhawks owner Bill Wirtz, routinely depicted as an oafish, Scotch-abusing, mean-spirited robber baron who “fucks over fans and players alike, laughing all the way to the bank, which he also owns....
THE BIG FUNK “Our fear is thick,” Shanley tells us through one of his characters in The Big Funk. “It’s casting a shadow like a thunderhead.” And before we can pull ourselves out of this funk we’ve got to admit we’re in it. “Look at your fear,” Shanley advises. “See the funk. See the funk we’re in. Look at nothing else. It’s our fear that’s created the thunderhead.” Best of Chicago voting is live now....
American Divine The 21 actors–7 in each of the three programs, about a third of them Dolphinback members–have a firm grasp of their multiple characters. The regional accents are almost always convincing, as is the mime used to create a situation on a nearly bare stage: when an actor “sees” a photograph on an invisible wall or “talks” to his pet bird through a hooded cage, the verisimilitude of the moment is flawless....
Annie Get Your Gun, Drury Lane Oakbrook Terrace. Fifty years after its premiere, the slightest ditty in Irving Berlin’s heartwarming musical outweighs all the easy-listening pop-pap-poop of a Jekyll & Hyde. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Yes, the gun-crazy plot carries a sexist moral: sharpshooter Annie Oakley must settle for being second best if she’s to win the love of rival shootist Frank Butler....
CANADIAN BRASS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Canadian Brass is more than just five white guys tooting their own horns. Though classically trained, the quintet–Frederick Mills and Ronald Romm (trumpet), David Ohanian (French horn), Eugene Watts (trombone), and Charles Daellenbach (tuba)–has over the last 25 years compiled a wide-ranging repertoire for its instruments, showing its versatility as a crossover ensemble. Equally at ease with the varied idioms and postures of classical music and jazz, the five play with precision and verve, and their camaraderie serves as a vivid reminder of the popularity that brass music has enjoyed since Gabrieli’s time....
EATON OPERA COMPANY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his latest chamber operas University of Chicago composer John Eaton has taken on topical satires from disparate eras. Like his hugely entertaining Peer Gynt–which debuted three years ago in performances by the New York New Music Ensemble–Don Quixote, faithfully adapted from the Cervantes novel, is an “opera for instrumentalists”: musicians not only play the instruments but act out the roles....
This intriguing bill pairs two bands that understand the primary source of inspiration for indie rock: boredom. The Tampa foursome Home have whiled away their empty hours recording no less than eight cassette-only albums. Their ninth effort, IX (Relativity)–the first to be widely available and released on CD–is a maddeningly inconsistent battle of influences to which each band member brings a plethora of interests. Devo, Eno, Steely Dan, Sebadoh, Pavement, Frank Zappa, and scores more play themselves out in their songs....
Priest With Linus Roache, Tom Wilkinson, Cathy Tyson, Robert Carlyle, James Ellis, Lesley Sharp, Robert Pugh, and Christine Tremarco. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At the presbytery Father Greg meets Father Matthew (Tom Wilkinson), another older priest, and almost immediately the political and temperamental differences between the two are spelled out, when Greg delivers his first sermon. Defining “society” as the contemporary scapegoat for people trying to shirk their moral responsibilities, Greg quickly establishes himself as a by-the-book neoconservative....
The differences between recent Japanese experimental filmmaking and the older American experimentation that in part inspired it have fascinated me. The seven films on this program don’t use images to express emotions or to explore human perception or the nature of the medium–the principal American tendencies. In fact, their images defy easy explanation. Perhaps the most successful is Hassieshoku (“Eclipse for Occurrence,” 1992), by Jun Miyakzaki. It begins with a shot of still water reflecting the sun; the shadow of a hand, and then the hand itself, enter the frame; soon the hand pierces the water, setting the reflection of the sun in motion....
Day two dawns with cold rain. Even in the early morning, the music persists–it gets mysteriously louder, in fact, when you close your eyes. The campsite looks like a place where a plane’s gone down. There’s soggy party wreckage everywhere: soggy paper plates, soggy hot dog buns, soggy shoes and socks, and soggy fazed-out kids. At least 50 still dance, while hundreds more mill about in the mud. One guy sits in the ashes of a bonfire, head between his hands....
Lead Story After its plans were rejected in October in the town of Bushnell, Florida, Pyramids Unlimited said it would approach several other towns with its idea of building a 50-story, pyramid-shaped tomb that could contain 300,000 crypts and would house a chapel at the top. Said Pyramids spokesman Ben Everidge of the $200 million project, “We’re not talking some tacky mall here.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After David May resigned in October from the office of the registrar of vital statistics in Buffalo, New York, he asked to be paid the $8,500 in unused annual leave he’d accrued....
CARLEEN ANDERSON I AIN’T MOVIN’ SHARA NELSON Carleen Anderson, Shara Nelson, Des’ree, and Joi have recently released powerful alternative-R-&-B statements that break out of such narrow confines, using self-determination as a platform, not a pose. Nelson’s first song starts with these lines: “I’ll boldly go / Where no one else has / Gone before me / I’ll stand alone / Even when its / Cold outside / Don’t go asking / Me to change....
When the Chicago Bears won the Super Bowl in 1986, lights in the windows of three downtown skyscrapers–the CNA, Prudential, and Amoco buildings–spelled out “BEARS #1.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Fitz started staging “public installations” in 1984. His most infamous work was in 1991, when he commemorated the 120th anniversary of the great fire by projecting images of a fireplace from inside the upper windows of the Latino Chicago Theater Company on Damen Avenue....
