CHICAGO — It's April Fools' Day, so we've been dodging fake pregnancy announcements and fake news stories all day. Here are some real stories we liked.
The Woman Who Froze in Fargo: Grantland explores the bizarre story of a Japanese woman who thought "Fargo" was real — and died searching for the fictional buried suitcase full of cash. Did it really happen that way? Well, it's hard to say:
"The woman was real, even if the story isn’t entirely true. And it’s been told before, by a documentarian. So where is the line between fact and fiction, and just how strong is it?"
It's Already Summer in Hollywood: With film studios pressured to make more high-stakes, high-budget blockbusters (and less of everything else), more "popcorn movies" are getting earlier release dates as the traditional summer season fills up, David Matthews is reading in the Wall Street Journal. Hollywood used to save its biggest films for after Memorial Day, but such movies as "The Hunger Games" (which opened to $152.5 million in March 2012) have shown box-office returns can be friendly during the school year, too. "Furious 7," a definite "popcorn movie" (shown above), opens Friday, and the Journal notes Hollywood's summer season will begin during the winter in 2017, when the next "Wolverine" movie starring Hugh Jackman opens on March 3.
Work-Study Program: One of Senior Editor Andrew Herrmann's favorite movies, "The Breakfast Club" about a disparate group of high school kids in detention, was released 30 years ago. To mark the anniversary, actress Molly Ringwald recalls how she and Anthony Michael Hall were so young they had to actually take classes between takes on the suburban Chicago set. (Her co-stars Ally Sheedy, Emilio Estevez and Judd Nelson were in their 20s.) "I had a studio teacher ... who I loved dearly. She was great. She was Jodie Foster's teacher, and then she was mine, and then she was Winona Ryder's," Ringwald tells moviefone.com.
Is Public Housing Being Privatized?: In These Times takes a look at a new program that will give the CHA new ways to raise funds from the private market to maintain its units. Sam Cholke is interested in Rebecca Burns reporting on the RAD program, which could allow CHA to sell off properties and get out of the business of running buildings itself. The agency appears to be most interested in applying the program to properties it owns in North Side neighborhoods and senior housing that has already received the bulk of CHA funding in recent years.
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