Cody Dehart

We’ve all been there. You’re waiting for a train with your friends in the wee hours of the morning and a completely empty train car rolls up. It’s every commuters dream—your own mobile playhouse. But hey, why wait until 3am when you can spend your whole evening living it up on a train? Starting at $2,000 (plus a deposit), you can charter your own personal CTA train. Trains can be chartered anytime except weekday rush hours (6–9am, 3–6pm) and cars can hold up to 35 people. Food, non-alcoholic drinks, sound systems and live music are all allowed on the train. DIY house shows are cool and all, but a DIY train rave trumps everything. Crisscrossing the city while listening to music seems like a pretty killer Saturday night. Trains will also drop you off wherever you want and pick you up later. Never has traveling from the Double Door to the Green Mill been easier. And yes, I know what you are thinking, what about a wedding? According to Bill Reilly, Rail Operations CPO, a couple who met on the train are set to have their wedding on the train in a few months. For more information on chartering a train click here.

Spike Lee is about to become real familiar with Chicago. Later this month he will be in town for this year's CIMMfest hosting "An Evening of Music, Film & Wine with Spike Lee." Not long after, he will begin to shoot his next feature film titled Chiraq. As the title suggests, the film will deal with the ongoing problem of violence in the city. Lee is rumored to be wooing three people intimately familiar with the Chicago area to star in the film: Common, Jeremy Piven and Kanye West. Frequent collaborator Samuel L. Jackson is also a part of that conversation.  This is the first Chicago based film for Lee whose films are often set in Brooklyn, where he grew up, or the South, where he went to college.  Lee has signed on to do the film for Amazon Studios. This means that the film will be released exclusively on Amazon Instant Video. While Amazon Studios has made headway in the world of "television" (most notably Transparent, which won big at the Golden Globes earlier this year) this is a another big step for their film division. No date has been set for the start of filming, but look out for Spike and company around town this summer.

Chicago-area native Vince Vaughn has been busy as of late. Last weekend, he participated in the Chicago Polar Plunge. This week, he's gearing up for the Friday release of his new movie, Unfinished Business. He carved out some time, however, to pose for some sleek stock photos along with co-stars Tom Wilkinson and the luckiest man on earth Dave Franco. Unfinished Business distributor Twentieth Century Fox paired up with Getty Image's iStock to create these clever promotional pictures.  They're releasing four stills a week for the next three weeks. The first four can be downloaded here. The photos are for "editorial use only," of course.  The pictures poke fun at the inherently cheesy nature of stock photos that are used for anything from brochures to business websites. The business-centric nature ties in with the plot of the movie in which Vaughn plays a small business owner who travels to Europe to close a very important business deal. I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that everything does not go as planned.