Effective January 1, 2009, Corporation Commissioner Bob Anthony will assume the chairmanship of the Commission, with Commissioner Jeff Cloud serving as vice chair.

The commission consists of three members elected statewide to staggered six-year terms.  Commissioner-elect Dana Murphy will take office January 12, 2009. The State Constitution calls for the commissioners to elect a chairman from among themselves.  A vice chair is elected to preside in the chairman’s absence.

Anthony joined the Commission in January, 1989, following election in November of 1988.  He is presently serving in his fourth consecutive six-year term and will be serving as chair for the fifth time.

The Day the Earth Stood Still
United States, 2008
Directed By: Scott Derrickson
Written By: David Scarpa
Starring: Keanu Reeves, Jennifer Connelly, Jaden Smith
Running Time: 103 min.
Rated PG-13 for some sci-fi disaster images and violence
2.5 out of 5 stars

Three years ago, I made the acquaintance of a little horror picture called The Exorcism of Emily Rose.  I didn’t walk in with high expectations – history told me that horror films about demon possession were, as a rule, terrible (thanks to the fact that genre-definer The Exorcist couldn’t possibly be improved upon, of course), and director Scott Derrickson’s only previous credit was that direct-to-video classic Hellraiser V: Inferno – but I walked out pleasantly surprised.

The film was a funky little exercise in eclecticism – combining courtroom drama with spooky atmosphere and jump scares – plus, it spoke directly to the times, and while it might not have reached Bergman levels of profundity, it surprised me with its depth of emotion and it even made me reexamine bits of my worldview.  It wasn’t a particularly well-reviewed film (though it made the Chicago Film Critics Association’s list of the “Hundred Scariest Movies of All Time”), but it did manage to change the way I thought about horror movies, and – most importantly – it got me interested in Derrickson.