The Fog of War

CHICAGO – There are movie exhibitors, screening rooms, multiplexes and grindhouses, but there is only one Music Box Theatre, and Chicago is privileged to have it. The movie theater of all movie theaters opened on August 22nd, 1929, and is celebrating its 90th Anniversary all week at the venue, in the Southport Corridor neighborhood.

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 – We like to think that mass murderers are pure monsters. They don’t have kids. They don’t walk around free. They couldn’t possibly have a moment of joy after causing so much pain. This is, of course, nothing more than a comforting fallacy.

CHICAGO – Errol Morris’s “Tabloid” is the sort of documentary so probing and inquisitive that it can’t help questioning its own validity. It’s a story about storytelling, a documentary that deconstructs the artifice of documentary filmmaking and a nonfiction narrative that may very well be comprised entirely of fiction. Such boundless ambition and self-reflexive irony is only typical of Morris, who is surely one of the greatest filmmakers in the history of the medium.

CHICAGO – The power of a single image is often far greater than any amount of written words. In a culture as visually over-saturated as our own, it’s so easy to take images for granted. Our days are too hectic, and our minds are too cluttered to view every piece of footage filtered down to us from the mainstream media with the same critical eye and healthy dose of skepticism.