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CHICAGO – Not many web series start out as music videos, but the new online (YouTube) drama “Deadbeat 2” was just that. Created, written and directed by Danny Froze, the made-in-Chicago story recently premiered episodes five and six in the series, which features actor Kiwaun Stoutmire in the lead role of Ronnie.

CHICAGO – We’ve all been there. Depending on what school structure you lived through, everyone had issues in “Eighth Grade.” Writer/director Bo Burnham puts those universal issues in a modern context (social media, online video), and portrays them through a girl struggling to belong while navigating the choppy waters of adolescence. It’s difficult, awkward and representative.

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Dua Lipa at Aragon Ballroom on Nov. 26, 2017

CHICAGO – YouTube star Dua Lipa performs at Aragon Ballroom on Nov. 26, 2017. HollywoodChicago.com photographer Jeff Doles brings you the photos!

CHICAGO – The Chicago energy for local production keeps picking up, and the latest creative burst is the web series “Mad Scientists Consortium.” Created, written and co-directed by Harry Bauer, this wonderfully funny production – putting a modern spin on the Mad Scientists genre – is available for download now.

CHICAGO – Had you told a person 50 years ago that someday we would be able to personally record television and broadcast it to the whole world, they might have laughed and said maybe on the futuristic cartoon “The Jetsons.” But the future is now, and it lives in “Presenting Princess Shaw.”

CHICAGO – There are show business stories, and then there are show business miracles. In the tech age we’re living through, the needle-in-a-haystack hope that a song, video or rant will go “viral” online is part of the experience. Singer Samantha Montgomery was one such singer, and her story is in “Presenting Princess Shaw.”

CHICAGO – The new media is not without its share of stars, and one of the biggest on YouTube is Tyler Oakley – podcaster, activist and author. He was in the Chicago area in October to promote his new book “Binge,” a series of humorous personal essays. Numerous fans lined up at Anderson’s Bookshop in Naperville, Ill., to meet Oakley at the book signing event.

CHICAGO – The headline is a quote (“Don’t say that you love me!”) from Fleetwood Mac’s song “Tusk,” which Kevin Smith gratefully includes in his film of the same name. The movie is either the most outrageous audacity of the year or a blatant middle finger from Smith to the audience. You decide.

CHICAGO – Marlon Wayans will do practically anything for a laugh, and that is to the audience’s advantage in the sequel to last year’s smash comedy, “A Haunted House 2.” Joining him for the second go around is hot comic Gabriel “Fluffy” Iglesias and the reliable Affion Crockett, who is reprising his role as Cousin Ray Ray.

CHICAGO – A great percentage of the population inevitably gets to the moment in their life when co-mingling becomes the next phase of interaction – the loss of virginity. Despite braggadocio to the contrary, for most people it is fraught with a bit of the undiscovered country. “The Virginity Hit” mines that territory with some cyber-age big brotherism thrown in.