Saturday 6/ 2 @ Bottom Lounge
Battles are a complex clockwork machine made of ordinary human limbs and musical instruments doing extraordinary, MC Escher-like things. Their songs are at once brute muscular jams — propelled mightily by John Stanier's hard-hitting drumming — and delicately interlocking melodic fractals of looping synths and guitars. Listening to them is dizzying; watching them play live is exhilarating. They hit the Bottom Lounge in support of last year's excellent Gloss Drop (Warp) and its strong, just-released remix companion, Dross Glop.
Coming Up
Today @ The Venue at Horseshoe Hammond
Danny Tanner returns to Chicago — well, sort of. Bob Saget has done much to distance himself from the squeaky-clean family guy image that he got stuck with after his tenure on Full House and hosting the equally saccharine America's Funniest Home Videos — not the least of which was his jaw-droppingly dirty take on the titular joke in The Aristrocrats. We're well-aware of that other side of him thanks to his recurring role on Entourage, yet we still need to remind ourselves (i.e., our former Full House-watching selves) that his routine includes plenty of four-letter words and moments of sublime comedic discomfort.
Today @ Landmark Century Centre Cinema
The Shining opens with John Alcott's aerial shots of empty Colorado byways with their eerie, edge-of-the-world beauty. This gorgeous yet unsettling cinematography is a preview of the spooky atmosphere that plays a main role in Stanley Kubrick's adaptation of Stephen King's novel. In the slow-roast suspense, punctuated intermittently by bursts of breakneck aggression, struggling writer Jack Torrance (a scenery-chewing Jack Nicholson) volunteers his family to be winter caretakers at the mountain-locked Overlook Hotel. At the gloriously decadent hotel, Jack's son Danny stumbles upon profoundly creepy twin wraiths while his dad grins and grimaces his way into homicidal mania. Though it's been parodied into familiarity, Kubrick's singular vision of psychosis still unsettles.
Today @ Profiles Theatre
Leslye Headland's runaway off-Broadway hit makes its Midwest premiere at Profiles Theatre in a brazen production helmed by Artistic Director Darrell W. Cox. It's a strange mean-girls-gone-wild scenario, a foul-mouthed comedy that intensifies into something of a horror show, particularly for those of us in the examined age range. On the eve of a friend's (frenemy is probably more like it) wedding, a group of young women get smashed, high, and into varying degrees of trouble in a seemingly endless parade of substance abuse. Headland shows a gift for humor, but in this portrait of semi-privileged, young, urban self-destruction, the irony is that we're most definitely laughing at them and not with.
Today @ The Goodman Theatre
Goodman delivers Eugene O'Neill's monumental, four-act play with beautiful staging and an all-star cast (Nathan Lane, Brian Dennehy), completely embracing one of America's greatest period dramas. It's 1912 and a Greenwich Village rooming house has attracted a motley crew of half-dead barflies. The only thing keeping them sane is their constant buzz of self-delusions and glorified goals. This palace of pipedreams longs for the arrival of Hickey (Lane), who energizes them with newfound optimism each year — little do the habitués know that Hickey's visit this time will be different, sobering, and push each one over the edge. Shattered illusions give rise to the ultimate truths and consequences of reality, and one wonders if some enchantment is necessary to battle the feelings of frustration and hopelessness.
