Category: default || By jt3y

More Chicago media news, because after all, what else would a McKeesport-based Web site focus on?

After several weeks of seemingly liking everything (three stars for "Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle"?), the irascible Roger Ebert that we all know and love is back, and he's out for revenge:

"The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement" offers the prudent critic with a choice. He can say what he really thinks about the movie, or he can play safe by writing that it's sure to be loved by lots of young girls. But I avoid saying that anything is sure to be loved by anybody.

In this case, I am not a young girl, nor have I ever been, and so how would I know if one would like it? Of course, that's exactly the objection I get in e-mails from young readers, who complain that no one like me can possibly like a movie like this. They are correct. I have spent a long time, starting at birth and continuing until this very moment, evolving into the kind of person who could not possibly like a movie like this, and I like to think the effort was not in vain.

Alert Reader Jonathan passes along an excerpt from Ebert's vicious review of the M. Night Shyamalan melodrama "The Village":

Eventually the secret of Those, etc., is revealed. To call it an anticlimax would be an insult not only to climaxes but to prefixes. It's a crummy secret, about one step up the ladder of narrative originality from It Was All a Dream. It's so witless, in fact, that when we do discover the secret, we want to rewind the film so we don't know the secret anymore.

And then keep on rewinding, and rewinding, until we're back at the beginning, and can get up from our seats and walk backward out of the theater and go down the up escalator and watch the money spring from the cash register into our pockets.

Now, by crackey, that's what I calls some movie reviewin'!

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There's something fairly fascinating about sneaking around in abandoned buildings --- maybe because it brings out the voyeur in all of us. We get to snoop around, peeking into other people's lives, and without real consequence; the victims of our spying are usually long-departed.

Urban explorers are gradually sneaking out of the shadows, thanks to the Internet. Copeland, for instance, has written about exploring the old Dixmont State Hospital in Kilbuck Township, which is solely being torn down to make way for a Wal-Mart (which is just what the Sewickley area has been sorely lacking).

I don't explore abandoned buildings very often, myself, probably because I'm a timid, law-abiding goody-goody at heart. Oh, I've been inside a few --- mostly buildings that were being demolished and were open to the elements (Cox's in 1994, parts of National Tube in the early '90s) --- or which had no pretense of being sealed up. (Old abandoned farmhouses, left to the elements, for instance.) But I don't make a habit of it.

Some people do; I stumbled onto Detroitblog this week. The writer is apparently an editor at a Detroit-area newspaper (it doesn't appear to be the Detroit Free Press or the Detroit Gannett Product ... I mean, Detroit News ... because he slags them off fairly regularly), and his pieces are sharp and full of feeling.

He also shares my distaste for people who trash empty structures, ruining any remaining historical value and any reason for preserving them. Detroitblog features many good photos inside and outside of many of Detroit's abandoned buildings.

I've never been to Detroit, but based on what I've read at Detroitblog and ForgottenDetroit.com, the devastation of the downtown area must be pretty thorough --- they paint it as a city of abandoned skyscrapers of all ages and sizes, ringed with urban blight. The Mon Valley has some pretty rough areas, and most of the urban areas are studded with abandoned buildings, but I guess it's nothing like Detroit, where the corporate inhabitants just picked up and left 30- and 40-story buildings behind to rot.

You can blast Mayor Smurphy for proposing one after another redevelopment scheme for Dahntahn Picksberg, some of them fairly outlandish, but having a shiny new convention facility, two stadiums and new skyscrapers like the Mellon Client Service Center seems to be a damn sight better than having several square miles of squalor and decay.

We can argue about Hizzoner's methods --- which have buried the city with decades of debt and allowed the other neighborhoods to go to seed --- but the results are fairly impressive. At least to outsiders, who aren't stuck paying the bill.

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To do this weekend: Tune into WEDO (810) at 3 p.m. Sunday and hear "Tradition Bearers," a new program launched by the Rivers of Steel National Heritage Center that focuses on the history and ethnic diversity of the Mon-Yough area and surrounding region.

The debut program, called "Pierogi, Paczki, and Paska: The Three Ps of Lent," features St. Maximilian Kolbe Parish Lenten Kitchen in Homestead; Good Samaritan Parish in Ambridge talks about its paczki sale; and Becky Bobich of Jacobs Creek.

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Also on WEDO, next Tuesday through Thursday: Live coverage of International Village, from 6 p.m. until signoff at 8:15 p.m., anchored by longtime local broadcaster George Bowes.

Which reminds me: Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! Four days until the Village opens! See ya there.