Last night, I went to the Winter Program for my daughter’s school over at the Copernicus Center on Lawrence near Milwaukee in Chicago. What a sumptuous auditorium that place is! I had no idea. It was formerly the Gateway Theater, the first movie palace built in Chicago for talking pictures, so the acoustics were very [...]

As our planned Saturday excursion fell through, due to the ridiculously warm weather in Chicago (I don’t like or desire 50 degree days in February — they’re just plain ugly), I took the family and my nephews to see “Coraline” in 3D. We decided to go to the 4:00 show, just in case the flick [...]

Last Saturday night, I settled in to watch a very old-school horror movie, all by myself. “Son of Frankenstein” is not fancy in its storytelling, or even very coherent. Somehow the monster had been struck by lightning and fell into a coma, yet while in that coma Igor had sent the monster off to murder [...]

The summer movie season relies heavily on fights, crashes and explosions. And sometimes those on the screen are more interesting than the ones in the box office rankings. But only by a little. I think there should be a name for the summer schadenfreude I feel when a big budget movie, starring vegetable-brained celebrities, written [...]

This household has been socked with a one-two punch of chest colds and winter ennui, so last night, the kids watched “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” eating carry-out Thai, and after they went to bed, my ever-lovin’ wife and I watched the Oscars. We were aided by the TIVO, of course, which let us [...]

For all you lovers, here’s a lobby card promoting the steamy silent picture “”Frozen Justice.” Check out the pair of noses here!! I found this among a great collection of lobby cards on the Vanity Fair website. They were taken from a private collection of a screenwriter named Leonard Schrader, the brother of Paul Schrader [...]

Had a very busy, typically Christmas-season kind of weekend. Hope you did too. Decorating, skating, sledding, shopping, party-going, and a glorious service of “Lessons and Carols” downtown at church, where I got to watch my progeny make use of their talents to the greater glory. I’ll admit I was a little misty-eyed at the end [...]

It’s a public service film from the authors of the ultimate tome of High-larity, Comedy by the Numbers. Check it out at SuperDeluxe! And buy the book from McSweeney’s! You deserve to be the hit of the party RIGHT NOW!

You know how sometimes you go to a movie with someone who has a certain occupational specialty, and that person cannot enjoy the movie because of the huge gaffes spotted by his trained eye? The worst situation is going to a scifi flick with an engineer, who will happily show off his knowledge by telling [...]