A work in constant progress (and occasional regress).
Release Date:
January 1, 2007
Original Title:
Southwest Suburbs: Birthplace of Chicago
Ratings / Certifications:
US: NR
Runtime: 141
It's a part of Chicago that's full of surprises. It's home to a 28-square-mile forest with a rock canyon. It's where one of the Blues Brothers did time (along with thousands of other real-life convicts). And it's the setting for Chicago's most famous ghost story. It's home to major league soccer and minor league baseball. Chicago's largest Arab and Ghanaian communities are here. It's also home to a bustling industrial canal where salty mariners navigate a Panama Canal-sized lock past a hundred-year-old hydroelectric dam. This modern waterway follows the path of a 19th century canal that first connected the Great Lakes to the Mississippi. That earlier canal transformed Chicago from an isolated trading post on the edge of the American frontier into the fastest-growing city in the history of the world.
Most data and links to images for the Movies section come from TheMovieDB (TMDB).
Additional data for Film Titles come from The Open Movie Database (OMDb).
At least one plug-in comes from IMDb.
Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)
While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:
Regarding profile removals and data corrections:
Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).
Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.
Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.