Results tagged “johnnycash”

Earlier today, our pals at Pitchfork shared this unsettling image and video of Johnny Cash in his Guitar Hero 5 incarnation. Johnny Cash in a video game? Nothing should shock us anymore, but this still kinda...disturbs us. We prefer our Johnny Cash sitting back and singing country tunes with green Muppets.

To say that many of us at Chicagoist are news and politics junkies is a gross understatement. We devour it. And several of us are the nerdy types that enjoy a Sunday morning viewing news shows, including Face the Nation with the incomparable Bob Schieffer. Schieffer has been covering the news for over 30 years and has established himself as one of the premiere broadcast journalists of his (or any) generation, as well as an oft-called upon debate moderator. And, lucky us, Schieffer is hitting town this week for a pair of appearances to promote his new book, Bob Schieffer's America, a collection of commentaries Schieffer has offered at the end of Face the Nation over the years.

Like many Chicagoans, we cried a little in 2006 when the Berghoff restaurant closed its doors after 108 years in the loop. While the Berghoff was never known for its “gourmet” cuisine, it did serve up hearty portions of German cooking and nostalgia for old Chicago. We were delighted to see that part of the Berghoff legacy would carry on “17/West at the Berghoff.”

• The local film DIMENSION is screening tomorrow at the prestigious Cinequest Film Festival in San Jose. In the film, three lonely residents of a Chicago neighborhood are divinely granted a wish. But it comes with a condition: they can only change exactly three inches about themselves. The movie was shot in Chicago during the summer of 2005, and it's one of only fourteen movies in competition in the festival's Maverick Narrative Category. Let's hope a Chicago screening is on the horizon.
• On Saturday, the really cool Intuit Center concludes their ELUSIVE Evidence series of film screenings about extraterrestrials with John Carpenter's cult classic They Live. And 80's WWF wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper plays a drifter who stumbles upon a weird set of sunglasses; when he dons them he's able to see the truth: evil aliens have disguised themselves as businessmen and politicians, keeping the earth's population docile through the use of subliminal messages. This flick has always been a favorite of ours, fondly remembered from countless Saturday afternoon showings on a local low-powered UHF channel. The Intuit Gallery is at 756 N. Milwaukee Ave.; the show begins at 2 p.m., and admission is free (donation suggested).
• Saturday night at Chicago Filmmakers you can see what Dick's Staff Shot. (Get your minds out of the gutter!) "The Nixon White House Staff Super-8 Films" consists of ultrarare "home movies" from the Nixon Administration! The footage was shot by Tricky Dick's staffers between 1969 and 1974 and later confiscated from John Erlichman's office by the FBI. Included are scenes from a performance of the musical 1776; Nixon visiting a Washington Redskins football practice; and appearances by Johnny Cash and June Carter Cash, Indira Ghandi, Bob Hope, and Pat Boone. Admission is $8; more info at the Chicago Filmmakers site.

The Sun-Times ran an AP wire story today that's mostly good news with a sprinkle of bad news for lovers of music, though that depends on your persepctive. Overall, music sales were up for the year 2006. While sales of physical albums declined 4.9 percent, digital album sales doubled, and sales of digital singles increased 65 percent. What’s refreshing about this story is that it doesn’t feature any dunderheaded analysis (or fulminating quotes from industry...

Last night, Chicagoist was nursing yet another vodka tonic and talking with a friend of ours who’s a fellow music snob and avowed Johnny Cash fan. We asked him if he had seen Walk The Line. He hadn’t and didn’t plan to. Why, we asked. “Marxism,” he replied.

With the exception of The 40 Year Old Virgin getting shut out of all major categories,* there were few surprises when the Oscar nominations were announced this morning. The full list is up at Oscar.com. Brokeback Mountain picked up eight nominations; Crash and Good Night and Good Luck snagged six; Capote and Munich picked up five, while Syriana and History of Violence garnered two each. In technical categories, Memoirs of a Geisha scored six nominations,...

As we quietly nurse away the after-effects of last night’s Happy Hour, it seems appropriate that we discuss a film about the dangers of alcoholism. Duane Hopwoood stars Northwestern grad and Lookingglass Theatre gadfly David Schwimmer as a man who fights to keep his life and family together as he struggles with his addiction to booze. The Trib’s Michael Wilmington draws the inevitable comparison to The Weather Man in a 2 ½ star review while...

It sounds like a Johnny Cash song: a convicted felon, escaped from prison and wanted for a string of bank robberies, walks into a bar to have a few drinks, then lays his gun on the bar and turns himself in. Randy Rencher did just that, giving himself up four months after escaping the Cook County Jail. He had been watching a news report about himself on the bar's television, and asked a stunned waitress to call the TV station and alert the authorities. The kept him calm by talking to him and serving him drinks until the FBI led him away.

When Chicagoist was growing up our musical influences were not, shall we say, diverse. Before we learned to use the buttons on the radio, they consisted of classic country (Loretta Lynn, Johnny Cash) and the local oldies station. We eventually expanded our musical tastes, but when certain artists become the bedrock upon which you form the rest of your musical experience, you never really get past them. Our heart still melts when we hear naked emotion accompanied by acoustic guitar and we still thrill to a good three-minute pop song.