April 2010

CHICAGO – Shaquille O’Neal AKA Shaq AKA Shaq-Fu, is a famous basketballer known by many names. Currently with the Cleveland Cavaliers, he took a break to be with his mother, Lucille O’Neal, as they appeared at Borders Books.

CHICAGO – We’ve spent the last few weeks working our way through the fourth collection of the series subtitled “8 Films to Die For” and found a few highlights and lowlights of the fourth annual “After Dark Horrorfest” that we would are now unafraid to share.

CHICAGO – Timed perfectly for both the start of the 2010 Major League Baseball season and with Father’s Day only a few months away, MLB’s “The Essential Games of the Detroit Tigers” box set is the perfect gift idea for the member of your family who follows America’s pasttime, even if they’re not the biggest fan of one of the most popular sports teams of the last century.

CHICAGO – With the heralded release this week of Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy on Blu-ray DVD, the opportunity to appreciate the epic scope of the visionary Middle Earth in the home theater has never been so highly rendered.

CHICAGO – Her eyes are always looking forward, as if they possess the ability to peer into the parallel dimension next door. She feels most alive in the presence of nature, and feels great joy in recreating images of god’s creation. Her closest acquaintances seem to be of an otherworldly essence, and she acknowledges them every time her twinkly gaze is directed toward the sky.

CHICAGO – The first words we hear are those of the beguiling elf Galadriel, whose ethereal voice haunts an empty screen while declaring, “The world is changed.” And so it had in December 2001, when Americans were reeling from 9/11, and more eager than ever to escape into a fantasy where moral certainty was never in doubt, and pure-hearted heroes clung to the belief that there was still good in the world, and it was worth fighting for.

CHICAGO – In our latest edition of HollywoodChicago.com Hookup: DVD, we have 20 DVDs up for grabs to the new documentary “We Believe,” which is narrated by Oscar nominee Gary Sinise!

CHICAGO – When moviegoers think of John Woo, the first image that comes to mind isn’t legions of ancient armies fighting each other with bows and arrows, but rather two men holding each other at gunpoint (as in his 1992 classic “Hard-Boiled”). His best action set-pieces are the most intimate, with gunplay and bloodshed taking on an almost balletic grandeur.

CHICAGO – Television drama is usually a formulaic proposition but rarely has a show been more blatantly derivative of other programs currently on the air than CBS’s new hospital drama, “Miami Medical,” a bizarre, ineffective hybrid of “CSI: Miami” and “Trauma”. Buried in the ratings nether regions of Friday nights, this Jerry Bruckheimer-produced show might just barely deliver for viewers exhausted after a long week of work, but they’ll have forgotten it by Saturday morning.

Rating: 2.0/5.0

CHICAGO – The unjustified remake of the ’80s camp-fest “Clash of the Titans” may have been re-purposed for the trend of 3-D but its performances are still tragically 2-D and its plot practically see-through.

Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – Not much happens in “Mid-August Lunch.” It’s as uneventful and often benign as the title suggests, though that’s not to say it’s dull. Some films are primarily about plot, while others are about behavior, and this quietly observant international crowd-pleaser certainly fits in the latter category.

Rating: 3.0/5.0

CHICAGO – A blue collar worker father who has a secret Marlon Brando obsession (gasp!), a son with an improbable fetish and a daughter who quits college to…strip, this is a normal day-in-the-life in the new film “City Island.”

CHICAGO – It’s taken me longer than most film buffs to warm up to the cinema of Wes Anderson. He’s a designer at heart, and his obsessive eye for intricate visual detail makes the medium of animation an ideal one for him to inhabit. With an army of stop-motion wizards at his command, he has finally come into his own. And unlike Tim Burton, whose “Nightmare Before Christmas” was directed by Henry Selick, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is wholly the vision of one singular artist.