A helpful Web 1.0-style counter at the bottom of Ebertfest.com reminds you that there's only 36 days until the 13th Annual Ebertfest (formerly the Overlooked Film Festival). A glance at the recently-released schedule verifies that it's time to make plans to be in Champaign April 27-May 1. more ›

Torontoist immediately wins our heart by using the word "Jackass" in a headline. In fact, we love their use of it so much that we're going to use it as much as possible throughout this post. For example, it looks like there are Toronto-area jackasses besides those who misuse the sidewalk: look at the crap on sale on Toronto's craigslist. But it looks like Toronto doesn't contain the kind of jackasses who pee in public... more ›

SFist commeters pose for before and aftershocks when the mayor commemorates a 1906 earthquake...at 4:30 in the morning. A hot tip on the Chronicle vending machines comes in and the SFist war correspondent risks life and limb to post this dispatch from the frontlines. Houstonist announces their new Cops spinoff "World's Funniest Tazer Videos" and the possible cancellation of their pervs' "World's Grossest Bathroom Videos" and PBS trains cams on cows at, uhg, Mootube. Also,... more ›

Chicagoist was chatting it up with the clerk in our local video store last Saturday (Netflix is fine if you’re a movie junkie but sometimes you need a certain kind of fix RIGHT NOW) when a customer walked in and said he wanted a story that was similar to The Terminal. We tried to recommend Before Sunrise—Richard Linklater’s dictionary definition of a sleeper hit about two people who meet, fall in love, and talk a lot during a brief encounter on a Vienna-bound train—but after a few moments of listening to us with glazed eyes the customer turned to the clerk and said “yeah something like that only more fun.” Burn! What more could you ask for? You wanted a story of love, funny accents, and chance meetings against a backdrop of mass transit and that’s what we gave you! Go rent Wimbledon next time and see how much fun that isn’t. more ›

Dave Chamberlain, music critic for NewCity, can be a rather cantankerous fellow. But when he gets excited about something, boy, does he gets excited. (Something Chicagoist sees as the mark of any good critic.) Case in point, his Tip of the Week, playing tonight at Metro with the Suicide Girls Burlesque Show, is The Mooney Suzuki. more ›

With all the attention surrounding Fahrenheit 9/11 and Spiderman 2 (released today and yes, we really want to see it, too) a sure-to-be-great small movie may get lost in the fold. That movie is Before Sunset, the aptly titled sequel to Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, one of the best romantic films (or films period, really) of the last ten years. So simple and so beautiful, the original follows two people (Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, neither of them better before or since) as they stroll around nighttime Vienna until having to depart the next morning. Like an American Eric Rohmer movie, it's full of smart, witty dialogue and, like a Richard Linklater movie (see: Waking Life), it's full of rambling, confused and confusing post-graduate monologues. But unlike the director's Slacker � which will be released on an incredible Criterion DVD this August � the movie isn't one big conversation spread amongst a hundred people, but one focused discussion centered around two complete characters. We watch them first get to know each other, then slowly fall in love � all just through the magic of talking. more ›