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A person is more than the sum of their parts, but sometimes it is crucial to examine the parts so the sum can be better understood. In her debut documentary writer-director Rebeca Huntt examines the details of her Afro Latina heritage to provocative effect, embracing the beauty as well as the scars that blight her and her family’s history. A self-proclaimed daddy’s girl, she’s especially close with her father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who came to the United States to escape General Trujillo’s despotic rule; her mother, with whom she has a more complicated relationship, hails from Venezuela, where Huntt (nicknamed Beba by her mother) as a younger girl enjoyed a certain lyrical freedom she’s never experienced stateside. She also profiles her siblings, an older sister and brother who are similarly complex, likewise impacted by generational trauma and the difficult living arrangements (the whole family shared a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment near New York City’s Central Park) that exacerbate strained familial tensions. Lastly, Huntt interrogates her college experience at Bard, where she was but one of a handful of minority students, and what’s come after, delving into the unique circumstances of temporarily dallying among the privileged class and exiting that fabled microcosm with more questions about their inborn entitlements than answers. Huntt doesn’t let herself off the hook, however, confessing past indiscretions and generally showcasing some of the more impudent parts of herself with aplomb. Poetically shot and edited, it’s an audacious coming-of-age documentary-memoir that’s wholly singular to the filmmaker herself. R, 79 min.

Gene Siskel Film Center

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Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a maximalist dream. It’s a loosely focused biopic of one of America’s greatest musical creations that jumps and shimmies through the early infatuation of the young Presley with the Black gospel music of his downtrodden youth, to the stardom of his 20s and 30s, and through his decline into drugs and despondency. Flashes of color, lightning cuts, and the camera spins and needle drops are at times overwhelming, but it’s an overall enjoyable experience that washes over you in waves of excitement.

Austin Butler does an excellent job expressing the barrage of emotions that Presley undergoes in his meteoric rise and fall, evoking pathos through his eyes. And the performances throughout the film are poignant reminders of the lasting impact Elvis has on American pop culture.

Luhrmann’s film is best described as hagiography; events seem to happen to Presley—run-ins with the law, financial crisis, family drama—without any real insight into how our hero causes or contributes to them. Even the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are shown less in terms of their cultural impact and more as things that cause Elvis to have a bad day. Elvis’s relationship with the Black community is portrayed as one of a friendly enthusiast who’s welcomed into the fold and suffers more consequences from the white political elite than the Black musicians who were unable to reach his stature due to their race, who he uses as mentors and confidants.

More confusing than some of the quick cuts, temporal shifts, and squeaky-clean race relations is Luhrmann’s choice to utilize manager Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as the narrator of this story. He’s a character who I doubt even a mother could love, played with an accent from Hanks that can most charitably be described as “ethnically insensitive to Cajuns.” It’s a bizarre choice of a narrator who offers surprisingly little insight into his actions and who we spend more time hating than wanting to learn information from. PG-13, 159 min.

Wide release in theaters

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Last Saturday night at the House of Wah Sun in North Center, Mark Chiang lingered at the table of a few of the night’s last customers. His wife, Young Ja Kim, had already wheeled over the egg rolls, crab rangoon, and heaping platters of crispy chow fun, cumin lamb, and Sichuan green beans, but Chiang was preoccupied by the imminent relocation of his Cantonese-Mandarin restaurant to a recently shuttered Golden Nugget two miles to the west in Irving Park.

“If can I would stay here,” he said. “I don’t want to go but I take this opportunity. Twenty-one years I been here and it’s finally time.”

Kim was simply ready to call it a night. “Will you leave them alone?” she said as she scooted past. “They came to eat.”

The House of Wah Sun’s original location opened across the street from the Davis Theater in 1947, making it one of the city’s oldest operating Chinese restaurants. But it maintained a low profile over the decades, relative to the nearby 95-year-old Orange Garden with its once-dazzling, now-darkened neon sign (now in the possession of a similarly weathered rock star). And perhaps the House of Wah Sun’s rep has suffered from confusion with Uptown’s comparatively juvenile Hong Kong-style barbecue specialist, Sun Wah (35 years).

Both names translate into roughly “New Chinese,” but the House of Wah Sun is a neighborhood institution that traffics in a nostalgic style of Chinese American food that hardly feels new, but is executed at a level that surpasses its remaining fellow dinosaurs.

Customers are invariably greeted inside the doors by a giddy dancing wooden Buddha, and in contrast, Kim, whose MO is initially stern but ultimately endearing. There’s a full bar known for its sweet, potent Mai Tais and Zombies in ceramic tiki ware, and a sprawling menu that covers all the classic Chinese American bases and then some.

Chiang says it’s little changed since he bought the place from founder Melvin Gin, a World War II navy vet who served primarily Cantonese dishes at his original carryout spot, and at the current location, which he opened in 1978.

Back then Chiang—who’s 61—was still a kid in Daegu, South Korea, one of thousands of Chinese expats from the northeastern Shandong Province who dominated the nascent restaurant economy there. “For a Chinese born in Korea, they don’t give us opportunity,” says Chiang. “You cannot work in the bank—they’re not gonna hire you. A lot of other fields are really limited. We actually work in the restaurant as no choice.”

At 24, Chiang was working in a 600-seat Mandarin restaurant in Seoul’s Gangnam District when he left for the U.S., where a prep cook job was waiting for him at Yu’s Mandarin in Schaumburg. He didn’t train to become a chef until he lit out for St. Louis, where a friend opened a new place. Three years later he returned to Yu’s, where he began cooking and where he met Kim—and two of his current chefs: his brother-in-law Fung Chin and Ping Du, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of Sichuan (the same school Tony Hu attended).

When Chiang bought the House of Wah Sun he inherited Gin’s peanut butter-kissed egg roll recipe, along with the predominantly Cantonese menu, to which he added Mandarin and Sichuan dishes. He opened right after 9/11, and business was slow at first, but they slowly built it. Those egg rolls, 600 to 800 handmade each week, put their two daughters through college (one’s a doctor now, the other a chemical engineer). Wok-toasty almost-caramelized fried rice with fat chunks of pineapple had something to do with it too; as did soup swimming with chubby wontons and thick slices of barbecue pork; swollen egg foo young saucers that might levitate if they weren’t smothered in sheets of thick, glossy gravy; and salt-and-pepper shrimp fried so delicately you can eat the shells. These are some of my favorites anyway—there are nearly 100 items on the menu, including that Sichuan-style cumin lamb, served sizzling atop a bed of fragrant cilantro, a newer addition and a hint of things to come.

Gin, until he passed away six years ago, was also Chiang’s landlord, but for the last 11 years, he’s been on a month-to-month lease. Late last year Gin’s children sold the building to a developer, and Chiang was told he had until the end of 2022 to get out. After more than two decades of 13-hour days, he was thinking of retiring in five years or so, but now he had to scramble.

The rent’s higher at the old Golden Nugget, but he won’t have to share the parking lot (like he would have with the COVID testing center that almost moved in until he threatened to leave)—and the taxes are lower. The Buddha’s coming with him, and so are his chefs, and he sees a market in Irving Park for some of the iconic dishes he prepped as a young man in Seoul, such as the black bean noodles zha jiang mian, the spicy seafood soup jjamppong, and the sticky sweet hot chicken wings known as gampongi. The new neighborhood has historically been a stronghold for this particular Chinese-Korean hybrid cuisine, but Chef Ping, who went to culinary school in Chengdu, will also introduce more rigorously Sichuan dishes such as whole fish hot pot and the Taiwanese beef noodle soup niu rou mian.

Chiang, who also handles the restaurant’s deliveries in his Prius, is just waiting for his final health department inspection before he can open in the new place at 3234 W. Irving Park.

Kim is coming too, of course. The customers, “they come to see me,” she says.

Read More

Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a maximalist dream. It’s a loosely focused biopic of one of America’s greatest musical creations that jumps and shimmies through the early infatuation of the young Presley with the Black gospel music of his downtrodden youth, to the stardom of his 20s and 30s, and through his decline into drugs and despondency. Flashes of color, lightning cuts, and the camera spins and needle drops are at times overwhelming, but it’s an overall enjoyable experience that washes over you in waves of excitement.

Austin Butler does an excellent job expressing the barrage of emotions that Presley undergoes in his meteoric rise and fall, evoking pathos through his eyes. And the performances throughout the film are poignant reminders of the lasting impact Elvis has on American pop culture.

Luhrmann’s film is best described as hagiography; events seem to happen to Presley—run-ins with the law, financial crisis, family drama—without any real insight into how our hero causes or contributes to them. Even the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are shown less in terms of their cultural impact and more as things that cause Elvis to have a bad day. Elvis’s relationship with the Black community is portrayed as one of a friendly enthusiast who’s welcomed into the fold and suffers more consequences from the white political elite than the Black musicians who were unable to reach his stature due to their race, who he uses as mentors and confidants.

More confusing than some of the quick cuts, temporal shifts, and squeaky-clean race relations is Luhrmann’s choice to utilize manager Tom Parker (Tom Hanks) as the narrator of this story. He’s a character who I doubt even a mother could love, played with an accent from Hanks that can most charitably be described as “ethnically insensitive to Cajuns.” It’s a bizarre choice of a narrator who offers surprisingly little insight into his actions and who we spend more time hating than wanting to learn information from. PG-13, 159 min.

Wide release in theaters

Read More

A person is more than the sum of their parts, but sometimes it is crucial to examine the parts so the sum can be better understood. In her debut documentary writer-director Rebeca Huntt examines the details of her Afro Latina heritage to provocative effect, embracing the beauty as well as the scars that blight her and her family’s history. A self-proclaimed daddy’s girl, she’s especially close with her father, an immigrant from the Dominican Republic who came to the United States to escape General Trujillo’s despotic rule; her mother, with whom she has a more complicated relationship, hails from Venezuela, where Huntt (nicknamed Beba by her mother) as a younger girl enjoyed a certain lyrical freedom she’s never experienced stateside. She also profiles her siblings, an older sister and brother who are similarly complex, likewise impacted by generational trauma and the difficult living arrangements (the whole family shared a rent-controlled one-bedroom apartment near New York City’s Central Park) that exacerbate strained familial tensions. Lastly, Huntt interrogates her college experience at Bard, where she was but one of a handful of minority students, and what’s come after, delving into the unique circumstances of temporarily dallying among the privileged class and exiting that fabled microcosm with more questions about their inborn entitlements than answers. Huntt doesn’t let herself off the hook, however, confessing past indiscretions and generally showcasing some of the more impudent parts of herself with aplomb. Poetically shot and edited, it’s an audacious coming-of-age documentary-memoir that’s wholly singular to the filmmaker herself. R, 79 min.

Gene Siskel Film Center

Read More

Now that the Colorado Avalanche are the Stanley Cup champions and the season is over, the offseason is officially underway. Teams aren’t waiting. There were reports of it last week but the Chicago Blackhawks made it officially official on Monday morning that they have a new head coach.

Luke Richardson is going to be the 40th head coach in franchise history. That is exciting news as this Chicago Blackhawks team needs something new. He isn’t from the organization which is something that might be a really good thing right now. Kyle Davidson did this right.

Read More

Last Saturday night at the House of Wah Sun in North Center, Mark Chiang lingered at the table of a few of the night’s last customers. His wife, Young Ja Kim, had already wheeled over the egg rolls, crab rangoon, and heaping platters of crispy chow fun, cumin lamb, and Sichuan green beans, but Chiang was preoccupied by the imminent relocation of his Cantonese-Mandarin restaurant to a recently shuttered Golden Nugget two miles to the west in Irving Park.

“If can I would stay here,” he said. “I don’t want to go but I take this opportunity. Twenty-one years I been here and it’s finally time.”

Kim was simply ready to call it a night. “Will you leave them alone?” she said as she scooted past. “They came to eat.”

The House of Wah Sun’s original location opened across the street from the Davis Theater in 1947, making it one of the city’s oldest operating Chinese restaurants. But it maintained a low profile over the decades, relative to the nearby 95-year-old Orange Garden with its once-dazzling, now-darkened neon sign (now in the possession of a similarly weathered rock star). And perhaps the House of Wah Sun’s rep has suffered from confusion with Uptown’s comparatively juvenile Hong Kong-style barbecue specialist, Sun Wah (35 years).

Both names translate into roughly “New Chinese,” but the House of Wah Sun is a neighborhood institution that traffics in a nostalgic style of Chinese American food that hardly feels new, but is executed at a level that surpasses its remaining fellow dinosaurs.

Customers are invariably greeted inside the doors by a giddy dancing wooden Buddha, and in contrast, Kim, whose MO is initially stern but ultimately endearing. There’s a full bar known for its sweet, potent Mai Tais and Zombies in ceramic tiki ware, and a sprawling menu that covers all the classic Chinese American bases and then some.

Chiang says it’s little changed since he bought the place from founder Melvin Gin, a World War II navy vet who served primarily Cantonese dishes at his original carryout spot, and at the current location, which he opened in 1978.

Back then Chiang—who’s 61—was still a kid in Daegu, South Korea, one of thousands of Chinese expats from the northeastern Shandong Province who dominated the nascent restaurant economy there. “For a Chinese born in Korea, they don’t give us opportunity,” says Chiang. “You cannot work in the bank—they’re not gonna hire you. A lot of other fields are really limited. We actually work in the restaurant as no choice.”

At 24, Chiang was working in a 600-seat Mandarin restaurant in Seoul’s Gangnam District when he left for the U.S., where a prep cook job was waiting for him at Yu’s Mandarin in Schaumburg. He didn’t train to become a chef until he lit out for St. Louis, where a friend opened a new place. Three years later he returned to Yu’s, where he began cooking and where he met Kim—and two of his current chefs: his brother-in-law Fung Chin and Ping Du, a graduate of the Culinary Institute of Sichuan (the same school Tony Hu attended).

When Chiang bought the House of Wah Sun he inherited Gin’s peanut butter-kissed egg roll recipe, along with the predominantly Cantonese menu, to which he added Mandarin and Sichuan dishes. He opened right after 9/11, and business was slow at first, but they slowly built it. Those egg rolls, 600 to 800 handmade each week, put their two daughters through college (one’s a doctor now, the other a chemical engineer). Wok-toasty almost-caramelized fried rice with fat chunks of pineapple had something to do with it too; as did soup swimming with chubby wontons and thick slices of barbecue pork; swollen egg foo young saucers that might levitate if they weren’t smothered in sheets of thick, glossy gravy; and salt-and-pepper shrimp fried so delicately you can eat the shells. These are some of my favorites anyway—there are nearly 100 items on the menu, including that Sichuan-style cumin lamb, served sizzling atop a bed of fragrant cilantro, a newer addition and a hint of things to come.

Gin, until he passed away six years ago, was also Chiang’s landlord, but for the last 11 years, he’s been on a month-to-month lease. Late last year Gin’s children sold the building to a developer, and Chiang was told he had until the end of 2022 to get out. After more than two decades of 13-hour days, he was thinking of retiring in five years or so, but now he had to scramble.

The rent’s higher at the old Golden Nugget, but he won’t have to share the parking lot (like he would have with the COVID testing center that almost moved in until he threatened to leave)—and the taxes are lower. The Buddha’s coming with him, and so are his chefs, and he sees a market in Irving Park for some of the iconic dishes he prepped as a young man in Seoul, such as the black bean noodles zha jiang mian, the spicy seafood soup jjamppong, and the sticky sweet hot chicken wings known as gampongi. The new neighborhood has historically been a stronghold for this particular Chinese-Korean hybrid cuisine, but Chef Ping, who went to culinary school in Chengdu, will also introduce more rigorously Sichuan dishes such as whole fish hot pot and the Taiwanese beef noodle soup niu rou mian.

Chiang, who also handles the restaurant’s deliveries in his Prius, is just waiting for his final health department inspection before he can open in the new place at 3234 W. Irving Park.

Kim is coming too, of course. The customers, “they come to see me,” she says.

Read More

The Chicago Blackhawks have made a lot of mistakes through the years. There have been more mistakes than triumphs lately and that is why they are one of the worst teams in the National Hockey League right now. Then there are the successful teams that take advantage of the bad team’s mistakes.

One of those elite teams is the Colorado Avalanche. They won their franchise’s third Stanley Cup on Sunday in six games over the Tampa Bay Lightning. It was an amazing performance for them as they finally reached their true potential.

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Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky riffs on the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty, and interviews politicians, activists, journalists and other political know-it-alls. Presented by the Chicago Reader, the show is available by 4 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays at chicagoreader.com/joravsky—or wherever you get your podcasts. Don’t miss Oh, What a Week!–the Friday feature in which Ben & producer Dennis (aka, Dr. D.) review the week’s top stories. Also, bonus interviews drop on Saturdays, Sundays and Mondays. 

Chicago Reader podcasts are recorded on Shure microphones. Learn more at Shure.com.

Chicago Reader senior writer Ben Joravsky discusses the day’s stories with his celebrated humor, insight, and honesty on The Ben Joravsky Show.

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