Plays and Movies

Since we are so close to the big city we have been checking out local plays and independent movies when I catch reviews in the free paper (it's called RedEye, it's like Creative Loafing). The two pictures below are of our walk to the Gene Siskel Film Center to see Box Elder. The film center is part of the Art Institute up here and it was founded by Gene Siskel (Siskel and Ebert) and they show independent, foreign films, documentaries, redistributed films, stuff you can't normally see in the regular theater. This last Thursday we went to one of the four movies in a movie tour called Slacker Bliss. The movie we saw was called Box Elder, four college roommates and their adventures with beer, women, and sandwiches (wait this is a movie? Nick, John, Jason, Josh? You guys made a movie?). The best part about seeing it at the film center was that there was a Q and A afterwards so we really got to know why the director made the movie, wrote it, how it was funded, etc. It was a lot of fun. You can check out www.siskelfilmcenter.org if you wanna read about some of the other movies that played with Slacker Bliss. I think we'll be heading down there again soon(-:



A few weekends ago we went to the Gorilla Tango Theater to see Shakesploitation. The theater only shows plays written by people from Chicago or about Chicago so we thought that would be a good place to start. Shakesploitation was split into three mini plays: "Romeo and Juliet: Apocalypse", "Grand Theft Othello", and "Ninja Hamlet: Flying Fist of Denmark". It was the hands down funniest play we have ever seen and it was not just the foul language and obscure references or the Japanese style dubbing on a LIVE performance (amazing)...nevermind it was all of those things that made this play incredible. I really wish it was still playing when the family comes up but it only played a few weekends )-: We'll have to catch something else equally amazing(-: