Every month or so, the Screengrab bigwigs indulge me by allowing me to take a look at what's happening on the film scene in my beloved hometown of Chicago. Here's what's up in the City of Big Shoulders: in the Tribune, film critic Michael Phillips winds up the "2007 Chicagoans of the Year" feature in an interview with Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody, who, like many others, made what she calls "the mass exodus from cow college to Chicago" in order to spend a hipster sojourn in the big town before moving on to Minneapolis and, eventually, Los Angeles. Cody discusses how living in Chicago shaped her writing and turned her into a raging cynic, an attitude that persisted through the early stages of Juno ("Oh, won't I be the little edgy-pants, writing a dark movie about a pregnant teenager") until its outlook was leavened into something more hopeful during the collaboration with director Jason Reitman. In the Sun-Times, grand old man of Chicago film writing (and outspoken Iraq War critic) Roger Ebert takes a look back at William Wyler's celebrated 1946 naturalist post-war drama, The Best Years of Our Lives. Calling for a more comprehensive DVD package of the film, Ebert claims that "as long as we have wars and returning veterans", the movie will not be dated. He also discusses the film's down-to-earth approach, reflected in its visual storytelling: "The film makes no effort to paint these men as extraordinary," he says of the wounded and psychologically damaged WWII vets who are its central characters. "Their lives, their characters, their prospects are all more or less average, and Wyler doesn't pump in superfluous drama. That's why the movie is so effective...Wyler employed remarkable visuals to make some of his points. He was working with the great cinematographer Gregg Toland, known for his deep-focus photography on such films as Citizen Kane, and often Wyler uses deep-focus instead of cutting, so that the meaning of a scene can reveal itself to us, instead of being pounded down with close-ups." Finally, over at the Chicago Reader, the big news surrounds the announcement that lead film writer/national treasure Jonathan Rosenbaum will be retiring from the weekly in February. Devotees eagerly await the official word, which will come next week in his best-of-2007 column (which is also expected to be his last regular column for the paper). Although he will continue writing sporadically, the Reader's "On Film" section is already sparse, tissue-thin and infrequently updated; without Rosenbaum's sometimes frustrating but always intelligent criticism, it may lose a lot of readers it'll never get back.