Roger Ebert's passing has dredged up a repressed childhood memory that I share with no little embarrassment. Growing up, I fantasized that my daily life was a movie, and that Roger Ebert reviewed it. By which I mean, lying in bed at night, I would assume in my head the...

Director Bill Forsyth's Local Hero, starring Peter Riegert and Burt Lancaster, recently marked its 30th anniversary. As befits this modest, understated film, there has been no fuss, no 30th anniversary DVD or Blu-ray. But as Roger Ebert wrote in his original four-star review, it is "a small film to treasure."...

After being lowered via harness from 20 ft. above the stage, spun around on a Christmas tree, and wheeled out in a box, Bruce Kapler, saxophonist in the CBS Orchestra on The Late Show with David Letterman, has long since stopped asking what the writers have planned for his eagerly...

Season one of Dennis the Menace just out on DVD from Shout! Factory, is a bracing throwback to a bygone era when kids on TV were allowed to be kids. In the golden age of the family sitcom, children (with the exception of wiseacre Rusty from Make Room for Daddy)...

At a dire moment for the Three Stooges in Space Ship Sappy, Joe Besser wails, "I can't die, I haven't seen 'The 'Eddy Duchin Story' yet." I used to feel the same way about Hellzapoppin, the obscure Olsen and Johnson comedy I read about as a teenage movie comedy buff...

Rod Blagojevich's defense team rested its case and the jury could begin deliberations next week. Incarceration or exoneration? Stay tuned. In trying to get a handle on Blago's strange and sordid saga, I took inspiration from the songs of his idol, Elvis Presley. What follows are actual song titles from...

At the Movies, now in its last picture shows, was a Chicago innovation. You'd think a talk show devoted to the serious and passionate discussion of film would originate in Los Angeles, but At the Movies' earliest incarnation premiered in 1975 on local PBS station WTTW. And...

We have giant ants to thank for bringing Fess Parker to the attention of Walt Disney, who was looking for an actor to portray Davy Crockett. I interviewed Mr. Parker, who passed away on Thursday at the age of 85, in 1994 on the occasion of the home video release...

Proclaiming his innocence in interview after interview, Rod Blagojevich seems to be auditioning for a remake of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, casting himself as James Stewart's naïve and embattled freshman senator, Jefferson Smith. As he told "The Early Show," "If you're asking me do I see myself like a...

When groundbreaking comedian David Brenner takes each of Zanies' stages this weekend (November 20 in Chicago, November 21 in St. Charles, and November 22 in Vernon Hills), he will have the daunting challenge of trying to find the funny in depressing times.

As a topical comedian, Brenner is not...

On Nov. 17, 1978, the Star Wars universe was rocked by a disturbance in the Force more calamitous than the destruction of Alderon, more catastrophic than the Clone Wars, and more devastating than the introduction of Jar Jar Binks. It was The Star Wars Holiday Special (or TSWHS), a two-hour...

My mother loved Paul Newman, whose most memorable characters were a rebellious, disreputable 180 from the faithful, respectable man she married. My father was secure enough in their marriage that would last nearly 60 years that he wasn't jealous when she joked about running away with him.

When Mr....

My son made me a mixtape. Caught me completely by surprise, and I was oddly moved. How cool that he wanted to share these songs with me.

My son is 14, and we're good. We talk. I know enough not to press him about girls or his plans for the...

My son made me a mixtape. Caught me completely by surprise, and I was oddly moved. How cool that he wanted to share these songs with me.

My son is 14, and we're good. We talk. I know enough not to press him about girls or his plans for the...

It is in tune with Neil Innes' whimsical sense of the absurd that the 32nd Annual Fest for Beatles Fans recently at the Hyatt Regency O'Hare featured what was billed as "the second world premiere" of the documentary, "The Seventh Python."

Innes, who has been hailed as...