Last Saturday night, just after the Magnificent Mile parade, I'm looking at the drinks menu in a popular River North joint and I'm thinking:
When it comes to vampires and shape-shifters, and romance between humans and otherworldly creatures, give me the gory, violent, sexy, grown-up madness of "True Blood" over the relatively tame "Twilight" series any time.
Maybe we should come up with Stupid Crime legislation to cover alleged misdeeds that might not be hateful but are certainly stupid.
The rich white Southern family with the fancy mansion takes in the poor black athlete who's practically an orphan, and if a story like that isn't handled right, you'll cringe every step of the way. Indeed I might have winced once or twice during the more syrupy moments in "The Blind Side," but on balance, this romanticized version of a true-life tale is one of my favorite sports movies of the decade.
Every weekend in Chicago, you see football fans walking around wearing jerseys from out-of-town teams such as Ohio State, Michigan, the Vikings, the Colts.
The new "Twilight" film premiered at L.A.'s Westwood Village Theater on Monday night -- and some hardcore "Twi-hards" started lining up as far back as last Thursday for the chance to get a glimpse of Robert Pattinson or that girl who's always chewing gum and looking pained to be in the spotlight.
Oh yeah, I'd forgotten all about that. I have Michael Douglas' jacket. I'm moving down the hall to a different office at the Sun-Times, and as I was packing stuff up and throwing stuff out, I came across the jacket, which has spent the last four or five years tucked away in the back of a large file drawer, along with such collectors' items as a vintage Steve & Garry coffee mug, some yellowed clippings of columns from the Mullet Era, a signed photo from Julia Louis-Dreyfus circa 1994, and press kits from movies such as "Shrek 2," "The Grudge," "Meet the Fockers" and "Dodgeball."
Geez, do I have to come to Oprah's defense AGAIN? Nearly 55,000 people have signed up for a Facebook page titled, "1 Million Servers Strong Against Oprah's Comments."
Over the last couple of days, the most famous Miss USA pageant contestant in history has enjoyed a spotlight and a platform for her views that 99.9 percent of Americans will never know.
In the recently released "Whip It," which is not the story of Devo but is surely one of the 10 best roller derby movies of all time, there's a scene where a dispute between two rival teams gets physical.
Given the whole Joker-in-jail storyline of "The Dark Knight" and given that Chicago is Gotham City, the story about the brother of the film's director plotting a jail escape is beyond bizarre.
A tree grows in Palos. Heights. Fifty-six feet later, it has been chosen as the city's Christmas tree.
Before I was allowed to park my car in a Soldier Field lot last Sunday, a security guard with a mirror device checked under the vehicle and then asked me to pop the trunk so he could check the contents.
One of the most impressive casinos in the country outside of Las Vegas or Atlantic City is right here in the Chicago area.
Balloon Boy has landed in Wilmette. Along with Sarah Palin, President Obama, David Letterman, Bernie Madoff and a host of other familiar characters.
When I attended a screening of "The Blair Witch Project" in early 1999, the hype was already beginning for the low-budget indie horror film that featured no recognizable stars, a relentlessly shaky camera style and a boatload of scares created not from blood and guts and gore, but from sounds and ideas and mood.
Noah Cyrus is the 9-year-old sister of Miley Cyrus. Over the weekend, Noah attended a benefit for Children Affected by AIDS Foundation. She posed for photographers on the red carpet in front of a banner bearing the logos of two major toymakers, Mattel and Toys R Us, and the foundation.
