HollywoodChicago.com Content

CHICAGO – About a year ago, after a particularly fruitful perusing of my OkCupid quiver, I started up a conversation with a very sweet girl named Maria. She was in law school, liked cats, bad reality tv, drinking heavily, and wearing heels that made her appear about a foot taller than she actually was.

CHICAGO – Jay Roach’s “The Campaign” should have been a slam dunk. A political comedy during an intense Presidential campaign with two of the funniest actors in movies today from a director who knows how politics can make for bizarre behavior after helming HBO’s stellar “Campaign Change” about Sarah Palin & John McCain. How could it fail? While “The Campaign” isn’t an outright disaster, it’s ultimately a disappointment, taking easy shots at physical humor and sex jokes instead of the clever satire it could have been.

CHICAGO – When we last saw teen idol Josh Peck (“Drake & Josh”), he was selling special ice cream in the 2008 film, “The Wackness.” That film established him as an actor who could handle more adult themes. He expands further in the action movie “Red Dawn,” playing a student turned soldier.

CHICAGO – Wrestling games have always been a curious genre. They’ve always treated matches as if they’re actual athletic competitions, where one guy is attempting to beat the other guy within an inch of his life and pin him or make him submit. This is problematic since we all know that a real pro-wrestling match is more akin to a heavily muscled dance number than an actual fight (though they both get colorful outfits) and the excitement of a match - innovative moves, heightened drama, near falls - are all but absent in the “wrestling is real” gameplay model because simply put, the better you are, the shorter and less fun your matches will be, especially against the historically brain-dead AI you find in wrestling games.

CHICAGO – The great Anthony Bourdain, who entertained viewers for seasons with his foodie adventures around the world on “No Reservations,” has altered his recipe a bit for The Travel Channel’s “The Layover with Anthony Bourdain,” which returns tonight for a second season premiere which finds the chef/personality spending 43 hours in our favorite city in the world, Chicago.

CHICAGO – It starts with a moment from Skyfall in which Bond is shot by a sniper as he fights on top of a train. Falling helpless into a river he has a series of flashbacks which form the basis of the rest of the game. It’s an apt setup for a game that suffers from loss of vision and ultimately has all the energy of a project that is in desperate need of rescue.

CHICAGO – Sacha Gervasi’s “Hitchcock” (which we will review Wednesday) takes moviegoers back to the landmark year when the Master of Suspense reached the final peak of a career that spanned over five decades.

CHICAGO – Sean Penn picks his roles carefully, and famously said he didn’t know what the story meant in “Tree of Life.” His attachment to “This Must Be the Place” continues the vague journey through movieland, as he plays a bizarre and aging rock star whose life is about to get interesting.

CHICAGO – It’s funny that a movie with the word “Playbook” in its title is so clearly about how those of us who think we know exactly where life is taking us are merely kidding ourselves. Like so many of us, the hero of “Silver Linings Playbook,” Pat Solatano (Bradley Cooper), has a plan to find happiness, to find his silver lining.

CHICAGO – Storefront theater is the lifeblood of new works in Chicago, and it is often where a performance of true fire can be found. The new play “Loom,” presented by the theater group “Nothing Without a Company,” is a prime case-in-point, advancing a passionate new voice for the stage.