Chicago Using the classic musical form as a foundation and throwing in just a dose of MTV razzle dazzle, Rob Marshall’s Chicago is the musical Moulin Rouge wanted to be. Chicago shows far more restraint than Baz Luhrmann’s overrated exercise in excess by eschewing MoulinRouge’s seizure-inducing editing. Instead, Marshall favors sharply choreographed dance numbers executed […]
Arts & Culture
Posted inArts & Culture
Knoepfle 6-19-03
old man on his birthday the family all flying in pray god I don’t die they would never forgive me I would never get over it © John Knoepfle 2003
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Bards of the Sangamo 6-12-03
By Lee Gurga This week we have a special treat for our readers: haiku by Cindy Strong’s students at Lutheran High School. Passionate warmth, The sweet kiss of sunshine, Summer heat heals winter blues – Hannah Rucker A hit, dust flying A player races the ball Which one is faster? – Ricky Harkins […]
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Knoepfle 6-12-03
lines for an old friend when oswaldo juarez diedsome of us did not know he was in lima a musician for musicians and that music in his country would never be the same once he had touched it with the soft chords of his guitar everyone mattered to him you felt what can be the […]
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Strange Weather Lately
The following was adapted from a Clemens Lecture presented in April for the Mark Twain House in Hartford, Connecticut. It originally appeared in the Chicago-based political magazine In These Times. What other American landmark is as sacred to me as the Mark Twain House? The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Mark Twain and Abraham Lincoln […]
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Movie Review
2 Fast 2 Furious A more apt title for Universal’s sequel to its surprise 2001 hit The Fast and the Furious, would be 2 Stupid 2 Boring. Director John Singleton and his screenwriters jettisoned everything that was interesting and exciting about the original, replacing them with, well, nothing really. Perhaps Singleton believes in doing things […]
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Movie Reviews
Bend It Like Beckham Fox Searchlight Pictures has gone out of its way to tout the British import Bend it Like Beckham as the next My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s easy to see why. Both feature repressed female heroines in the unenviable position of having to reject rigid cultural conventions and familial traditions. Both […]
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Movie Reviews
Confessions of a Dangerous Mind You can tell that veteran actor George Clooney has wanted to direct for a long time. In Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his directorial debut, he uses elaborate camera moves, meticulously choreographed scenes, various film stock and video footage, and a non-linear narrative line to adapt game show producer Chuck […]
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Bombay Invasion
I saw the most popular Indian film of 1997 in an art-deco movie palace in Calcutta. The actors spoke Hindi, and the film wasn’t subtitled, but I could still figure out what was going on. That’s because the movie Judaai lifted its plot from the Hollywood tearjerker Indecent Proposal. In Indecent Proposal a billionaire playboy […]
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Bards of the Sangamo 6-5-03
Holiday at Normandy This June morning my skiff rides toward shore, grinds bottom; I hit the beach in my father’s steps– twenty seven, twenty eight, twenty nine . . . thirty yards the letter said. This morning a pale regiment patrols, white gulls drive the tide, falling back without casualties. Then one more wave attacks […]
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Backstage Pass
The Springfield Muni Opera opens this weekend with the Broadway show Titanic: the Musical (June 6-8 and 11-15). With a score by Maury Yeston (Phantom), Titanic won five Tony Awards six years ago, including Best Musical. The tragic story was turned into a stage musical almost a year before the release of the 1997 blockbuster […]
