Dick Cheney

CHICAGO – Director Adam McKay has come to the meatiest part of his long and successful career. He began with comedy in TV and film, and was first known for hilarious movies like “Anchorman,” “Talledega Nights,” and “Step Brothers.” Recently, he has moved into more complex filmmaking, like the highly touted (and Oscar nominated for Best Picture and Director) “The Big Short” in 2015, and this year’s “Vice,” nominated again for Best Picture, Best Director and for his Best Original Screenplay.

CHICAGO – “Vice” is an occasionally very funny attempt to demystify the life and legacy of former Vice President of the United States, Dick Cheney. Using some of the same gimmicks and narrative trickery he employed to great effect in “The Big Short,” writer/director Adam McKay goes deep into the weeds to try to explain how Cheney made it to the second highest office in the land.

CHICAGO – The 40th anniversary edition of ‘Close Encounters of the Third Kind,’ directed by Steven Spielberg and starring Richard Dreyfuss, is in a limited run in theaters now. What better time to resurrect a 2009 HollywoodChicago.com interview with Dreyfuss, and publish it as a podcast talk.

CHICAGO – Former president George W. Bush appeared in Naperville, Ill., at Anderson’s Bookshop to promote his book, “41: A Portrait of My Father.” The tome is a memoir of the Bush patriarch, George H.W. Bush, who was the 41st president.

CHICAGO – The reason some people fit into government service is fairly well defined in the latest film of iconic documentary maker Errol Morris. His profile of ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in “The Unknown Known” is a tale of history – affected by war, death, torture and justification.

CHICAGO – The key line in “Fair Game,” a distillation of Valerie Plame’s outing as a CIA operative in 2003, is intoned by character actor Bruce McGill, in a scene reminiscent of the “Mr. X” moment in the “JFK” movie. Pointing to the White House and the Bush Administration, he simply says, “there are the most powerful men in the history of the world.”

CHICAGO – Doomsday prophecies are a dime a dozen at the movies these days. We’ve become all too complacent in staring at visions of our planet’s fragility, and the preventable threats to our survival. Most apocalyptic thrillers are pitched at the level of B-movie fantasies that make credible issues like global warming seem as frighteningly real as Godzilla.

CHICAGO – Here is the legendary documentarian Errol Morris on the infamous 2003 photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which are the subject of his new film entitled “Standard Operating Procedure”: