FAIR GAME

Presuming that it might not open locally, I caught director Doug Liman's Fair Game - in which Naomi Watts plays outed CIA operative Valerie Plame, and Sean Penn plays Plame's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson - in Chicagoland on Thanksgiving night. I thought the movie was intelligent and intensely well acted, but still didn't feel much toward it, and with so many of the film's characters arguing over events that, by 2010, have become old (if still infuriating) news, my eyelids grew droopy during a few scenes too many.

HARRY POTTER & THE DEATHLY HALLOWS: PART I

About two-thirds of the way through Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows: Part I, Rupert Grint's Ron Weasley finally has it out with Emma Watson's Hermione Granger and Daniel Radcliffe's Harry. Fed up with the apparent hopelessness of their latest quest, and more than a bit peeved about his eternal status as Harry's second banana, Ron angrily asserts that the three wizards-in-training aren't finding anything and aren't getting anywhere, and eventually storms off in a huff. Never in my life have I felt so connected to Rupert Grint.

Music

Third Sunday Jazz featuring Maggie Brown

The Redstone Room

Sunday, November 21

"There is a lot of great music out here," says performer Maggie Brown in a recent Chicago Defender interview. "It is not popularized. It's not going to come to you on the radio, or on a CD. You have to look for it."

Well, folks, you can stop looking; great music can be found at Davenport's Redstone Room on November 21. Appearing as the latest guest in Polyrhythms' monthly Third Sunday Jazz Series, the Chicago-based Maggie Brown will present a 3 p.m. jazz workshop and a 6 p.m. concert of bound-to-be-thrilling solos, underscoring why the Defender describes her as "a phenomenal artist who has loads of individual style."

Todd Green, the latest guest in Quad City Arts' Visiting Artist series, began his professional career as a guitarist. Yet the musician knows that whenever he performs at one of his many school engagements, the guitar is perhaps the last instrument the kids will be interested in.

"I have a berimbau," says Green during a recent phone interview, "which is a very unusual, bow-and-arrow-looking thing that you play percussion on. They really like that. And then, you know, there's silly stuff. Like, I have animal toenails, I call them. It's actually goat hooves that are all hooked together and make a percussion sound.

"Usually it's the weirdest ones, you know?" says Green with a laugh. "Especially with the really young kids. You can read their faces - their mouths are open and their eyes are all big - and you can just see them going, 'Whoa. What is this?!'"