Posts

Manglehorn Ben Sachs has four stars for Eden, the latest from French director Mia Hansen-Løve; check out his long review. And we’ve got capsule reviews of: Domestic Life, a fictional chronicle of four French suburban housewives; Dope, a teen comedy about a self-described “black geek” who must reinvent himself as a gangster; Guidelines, a Canadian documentary about juvenile delinquents; Infinitely Polar Bear, starring Mark Ruffalo as a bipolar man trying to care for his two young daughters; Krasno, a Czech drama about two middle-aged guys who return to their hometown and try to solve a mystery; A Little Chaos, with Kate Winslet as a landscape designer hired to help build the gardens at Versailles; Macaroni and Cheese, a French comedy about three gal pals whooping it up at the Locarno film festival; Manglehorn, starring Al Pacino as an aging locksmith still pining for his lost love; The Overnight, an indie sex comedy from executive producer Mark Duplass; and They Are We, a documentary about the Banta tribe in Sierra Leone....

Opening this Friday at two local theaters, the 2014 documentary Lambert & Stamp looks at the pair of aspiring filmmakers who, in 1964, adopted a fiery but directionless R&B band in North London and molded it into the guitar-­smashing pop-art sensation we know as the Who. Kit Lambert, son of classical composer and conductor Constant Lambert, encouraged the band’s creative ambition, eventually taking over as the Who’s record producer and prodding guitarist Pete Townshend to create the career-­transforming rock opera Tommy....

It’s not often that I praise Donald Trump, but recent circumstances force me to do just that, so . . . But don’t kid yourself into thinking Trump released Blago out of compassion for the Blagojevich family. C’mon, people, you’re too smart for that. As we all know, compassion is not a Trump thing. Three: Trump wants to legalize extortion—at least the extortion he apparently commits all the time. I mean, the guy’s as fit as a fiddle....

Leonard C. Goodman is a Chicago criminal defense attorney. Trump may well deserve to be impeached for inciting a riot, even though his trial in the Senate will be largely symbolic as it won’t take place until after he has left the White House. But the focus on Trump as the villain will allow other culprits to avoid scrutiny. For example, the assault on the U.S. Capitol was planned for weeks out in the open on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube....

No libretto survives from the first hip-hop opera, written in Berlin in 1788, but Got Me Under Prussia is believed to have been performed by a bewigged ensemble led by MC Frederick the Competent. Luckily, the art form has advanced significantly since then! Chicago Fringe Opera first presented The Rosina Project, a modern retelling of Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, this May as part of the Pivot Arts Festival. Gossip Wolf heartily recommends the production, which features old-school boom-bap from talented local rappers (including Pinqy Ring and K....

Leor Galil, Reader staff writer Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck I’ve suffered from Nirvana fatigue for at least a decade, so I never expected to like—or even watch—this new documentary on the life of Kurt Cobain. I gave it a shot after realizing it was the work of Brett Morgen, who codirected The Kid Stays in the Picture; he avoids hagiography and makes Nirvana’s rise feel improbable instead of inevitable....

Dear men of the Chicago comedy scene, Our comedy institutions aren’t helping by segregating women into separate shows. Second City is currently running a “mimosa-and-madness-fueled” all-women sketch show entitled She the People: Girlfriends’ Guide to Sisters Doing it For Themselves. The iO Theater hosts the excellent improv group Virgin Daiquiri but bills it as an “all-women ensemble.” When will female comedians be known simply as “comedians?” So the next time you improvise, introduce your female scene partner as an architect or a senator....

The six members of Chicago’s Cardinal Harbor formed an indie-rock band in 2011, after meeting as students at Wheaton College. On their 2013 debut, Faces on Parade, they made popped-collar roots rock and wore their affection for Dave Matthews on their proverbial sleeves, but they’ve since drifted toward more experimental fare. From the sound of their new, self-released fourth album, Vulture Hottub, I’d say they’ve been paying close attention to Bon Iver’s more provocative recent material....

Come November, the music press will start churning out “decade in review” pieces. Though I can’t predict their contents (and frankly don’t want to), I anticipate there’ll be several listicles ranking Chicago rappers—and any such roundup would be incomplete without Lucki Camel Jr. He dropped his debut mixtape, Alternative Trap, in 2013, and though he was just 17 at the time, he already showed a tremendous gift for drawing in listeners with his storytelling....

Twenty-six years ago, four-man suburban DJ and production team 20 Fingers teamed up with local rapper, dancer, and singer Sandra Gillette on a record that made them all hometown heroes. As 20 Fingers, Carlos “Charlie Babie” Rosario, Manfred “Manny” Mohr, J.J. Flores, and Onofrio Lollino worked primarily with Brookfield’s SOS Records, run by Chicago house-music impresario Frank Rodrigo. In 1994, Mohr and Rosario wrote the single “Short Dick Man” and quickly found a singer in Gillette, an old friend of Flores who was working as a receptionist and living in Berwyn....

Q: I’m a bi, white, married man—35 years old and living in a big midwestern city. I’d like to know what’s going on in my psyche—from a sex-research perspective. I’ve been hung up on cuckold fantasies with my female partner for years now. But nine times out of ten, I’m spinning a yarn about her fucking other men, whether it’s a threesome, cuckolding with me watching, or her going out on dates and coming home a delicious mess....

Houses have been disappearing lately on my Logan Square street. Last fall, a pile of rubble appeared in the space where a home had stood just a few days before. Soon after that, the building a few doors north of mine was gone. They were frame houses, like most of the others on the street, which lies just north of an area in rapid transition. Since 2013, construction workers have been turning what was once an abandoned rail line nearby into the 2....

On a chilly Sunday morning in mid-May, packs of leather-clad bikers descend on a field at the outskirts of the municipal airport in Baldwin, Michigan. From the hum of distant engines becoming a thunderous roar to the skull-print face masks and black balaclavas the motorcyclists wear to block the unseasonable cold—all of it evokes some portentous scene from Mad Max: Fury Road. But instead of a future desert wasteland, the setting is a drab midwestern winterscape....

Mainstream pop audiences were largely introduced to country singer Maren Morris through last year’s smash hit “The Middle,” her collaboration with Russia-born German producer Zedd and electronic duo Grey. The song—which showed off her powerhouse vocals—went platinum certified in several countries. About a dozen singers, including Demi Lovato and Bebe Rexha, had recorded demos of the track before Morris was selected for the final version—which serves as a testament to her singular chops....

In late summer 2014, Dayton lo-fi kings Guided by Voices called it quits, bringing a sudden end to their four-year, six-album reunion run. But as any faithful follower of GBV and their fearless leader, Robert Pollard, could tell you, it’s gonna take more than the demise of Pollard’s main creative outlet of more than 30 years to keep him down. He’s been putting out records nonstop ever since, not just under his own name but also with a variety of other projects, among them Teenage Guitar, Ricked Wicky, and Circus Devils—and they’ve all been good....

This past weekend saw the Chicago release of Sunset, László Nemes’s first feature since his widely debated debut, Son of Saul. Regardless of how one feels about these films (which have inspired strong reactions both pro and con), their prominence in film discourse confirms that Nemes is the most internationally visible Hungarian filmmaker since Béla Tarr—which is to say he’s one of the few internationally visible Hungarian filmmakers working today, period....

Nao is a British singer whose music nestles in the space between neosoul and the new generation of alternative arty R&B. Her light, dextrous vocals have some of the texture of Billie Holiday, while electronic soundscapes on tracks such as “Another Lifetime” from 2018’s Saturn (RCA) suggest a mellower FKA Twigs. At times, Nao’s contradictory impulses leave her mired neither here nor there; “”Love Supreme” weds a Coltrane title to a default midtempo beat and banal lyrics about “palm trees and breeze....

Azeez “Laka” Alaka and Brandon Holmes have a clear vision for their production company, No More Heroes, even if their headquarters is still under construction. In November 2020 the friends and business partners bought a vacant commercial building on 19th near Douglass Park, and on an overcast May afternoon they lead a tour of it, explaining over the sound of power tools how everything will eventually be laid out. They point out the eventual locations of recording studios, common spaces, a grassy backyard for cookouts, and sets being built to resemble jails, hospitals, and courtrooms—which, they joke, will get you far in the world of rap videos....

Election season in Illinois brings the usual accusations of corruption, copious paperwork, and byzantine bureaucratic processes to get on the ballot. Here’s how a seemingly simple, constitutionally sound, taxpayer-dollar-conscious, efficiency-oriented state law can seed doubts about election integrity. Once petition challenges are received, the State Board of Elections keeps one copy of the objection on file at the Thompson Center (a place whose glassy postmodern architecture deliciously reflects the spirit of the winding, tubular state election bureaucracy), and transmits the original and the other copy to the designated local election board that will examine the validity of the objections....

I learned a lot about outside society too, even if obliquely. When the police marched a sobbing seventh-grade boy out of school because he had stolen another student’s iPod, the mood in our classroom was one of stunned, somber incredulity. How could it be that these adults did not understand the feeling of a child looking at something they desperately wanted but could not afford? What was the thought process that allowed criminality to encroach on a 12-year-old?...