I sit in my living room, lit as if for a movie scene of a gentleman reading in peace. The natural conclusion to a day that began at 2'F and progressed all the way to 9'F, with high winds lashing any exposed flesh. Shoppers scurrying to and fro trailing wisps...

Every night when I turn off the light, I conjure up an image: a summer's day in Satellite Beach, Florida, the surf three to four feet, a slight offshore breeze, I wheel my board around to paddle into a wave. Two strokes at precisely the right time as the wave...

N.B.: Ishtar, starring two of the hottest stars of the seventies: Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman, was one of the 'biggest' movies released in 1987. Its can't miss premise involving two American lounge singers wandering in the Moroccan desert was directed by Elaine May of Mike Nichols and Elaine May...

On one of the always fascinating, sometimes funny, oft times racist, rarely boring, Chicago 'cop blogs' I found an appalling story: "One in Seven Girls at Robeson High are Pregnant."

It was linked to a report done by WBBM-TV.

The actual video was more startling than written words, as...

Two of my favorite people exchanged emails today on the President winning the Nobel Peace Prize. I thought it representative of what is going on all over the world as the subject is discussed. They both voted for President Obama and contributed to his campaign. One remains a fervent supporter,...

You have to love zombie flicks. They are almost all good, if not great. As a genre, compare zombies to almost any other genre of recent movie history: Iraq War, graphic comics, remakes of old television shows ... and zombies rule. Well, okay, maybe I was the only one of...

I have loved Quentin Tarantino's movies. He is an evocative translator of historic movie traditions into modern sensibilities. He has written terrific dialogue that no one, before or since, has ever written. His movies play off what has gone before: hard film noirs, gangster movies, heist movies, in his hands...

It was after my "I have to remember that line to tell people" software crashed from too many great lines to remember and my grin-o-meter clicked over to four hundred in a half hour that I realized that I was watching a seriously good movie. A seriously good, topical, deadly...

I once read about a blood red moon rising out of the Aegean Sea in a novel about hippie adventurers discovering life. I lay in the grass in Japan and watched my first eclipse of the moon on a night when there were so many stars the sky glowed as...

It takes a while, but this movie finally gets under your skin, and you lose yourself in Michael Mann. As I sat there and ticked off things to criticize -- comparisons to 'Bonnie and Clyde,' little attention paid to the Depression, why a Welshman plays Melvin Purvis -- what happened...

In Paul Fussell's classic meditation on World War One, The Great War and Modern Memory, he tells of how the British Government convened the great writers of that age to come up with words to give solace to the relatives of the hundreds of thousands killed amid the carnage of...

As we watch the slow, sad decline to irrelevance of newspapers someone would actually want to read, we find "The Guantanamo Labyrinth" in Sunday's thinner-than-a-menu-at-IHOP Chicago Tribune Magazine. The reporter, Tom Hundley, lately returned from decades of "reporting around the world," delivers more fuel to the view that newspapers...

What fun. What a mess. What a fine mess. A movie with plot holes large enough to fly the new Airbus 380 through. Russell Crowe, as a Woodward-Bernstein-Royko-Breslin American reporter for a DC daily. I say 'American', he being Australian, with the entire theater under influence of the RC based...

I didn't. I saw 'Milk' Tuesday, after the Academy rewarded the idea of the film a number of Oscars. They like to do that: make statements to the world of what they think is important through nominations and awards rather than the movies or actors that are the best in...

I read recently of a shooting at a movie theater near Philadelphia. One man, a veteran, enraged by the incessant talking of another during the movie, enraged that the talking went on despite several shhhhssss-es, took matters into his own hand, with a hand gun. Yet, he was charged with...

Blago Bobby Rushed them today. Heck, he could care less about being impeached. Losing the governorship is chump change against the possibility of spending years in the gray bar hotel. His strategy is to use the impeachment process to influence the potential jury pool. Thus, the hanging (read: lynching) metaphor.

It was as if the wine suddenly went off. It was a Rioja. Strong red wine, she had always liked it. She liked how it smelled. How it tasted. She had first had it when she and Laura traveled in Spain one year while they were in grad school. No...

I just watched Rod Blagojevich jog to the podium with his improbable hair caressing his eyebrows and do a full Bill Clinton. I read on a blog somewhere that a political associate of the governor's called him Bill Clinton with morals. As the governor jogged off into the sunset he...

Let those without a heart beating in their breasts give Australia less than four stars. Those who boo kids at Easter Egg hunts, yell at referees at junior hockey games, sneer at sunrises, cut in line in front of little old ladies, give out healthy snacks at Halloween, talk during...

Tens of thousands of people from all over packed Grant Park Tuesday to be part of history. Millions more watched on television. The improbable rise of an Illinois State Senator to United States Senator to the Presidency of the United States thrilled the world and filled all of us with...