Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » What I’d like to focus on here is how these films wind up getting misrepresented due to the circulation of incomplete data. For instance, everyone who’s seen any stills from the two films and hasn’t seen the films probably concludes that they’re both in black and white. They’re wrong; the problem is that the only photos available from the films on the Internet and in film magazines are in black and white, undoubtedly because color stills would cost too much money to process....

Unfortunately, sound bites don’t prevent crime, and the story is more complicated than either side wanted to admit. Chicago police, like their counterparts in New York and every other big city, have their own procedures for stopping certain people in certain communities and looking for guns, drugs, gang ties, or any other signs of criminality. The policies in Chicago may be less visibly flawed than New York’s, but they cause the same tensions between public safety and personal liberty....

When Killdozer reunited in 2006 for Touch and Go’s 25th-anniversary celebration at the Hideout, the crowd shouted for an encore, chanting “Kill-do-zer! Fuck the other bands! Kill-do-zer! Fuck the other bands!” Such is the devotion inspired by this rigorously strange trio. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After a three-year hiatus in the early 90s and a series of lineup changes that left Gerald as the only founding member, Killdozer made the rounds one last time in 1996, on a tour they called “Fuck You, We Quit!...

The Loop will be bustling with activity from 6 PM Friday till 6 AM Saturday as the city stages its inaugural Looptopia multidisciplinary arts festival. Modeled on dusk-to-dawn cultural extravaganzas staged annually in Paris, Rome, and Madrid, the completely free event comprises roughly 75 offerings, including live music, theater and dance performances, film screenings, art exhibits, workshops, and more. Bobby Conn, the Ponys, and the Mucca Pazza marching band have the prime-time music slots at Daley Plaza (Washington and Dearborn) at 8, 8:45, and 9:45 PM, while at One South Dearborn Redmoon stages one of its family-friendly spectacles from 8 to 11 PM....

We don’t know if the Rev. Mr. King reads anything except his own fulminations, but it might improve his understanding if he took a look at a recent report by Assistant Secretary of Commerce Andrew Brimmer. . . . Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » We should think that Mr. Brimmer’s statement might suggest some useful works to occupy the Rev. Mr. King’s energies. He should to to work to promote family stability among those of his race....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » La Jaula de Oro17. See You Next TuesdayAfter The Act of Killing, these were the most impressive debut features I saw this year. See You Next Tuesday, which closed the Chicago Underground Film Festival in March, provokes audience discomfort with its in-your-face portrait of a mentally ill young woman, her abrasive sister, and their recovering addict mother. Writer-director Drew Tobia has exquisite taste in inappropriate humor, but he isn’t just interested in shock value—like Ulrich Seidl, he wants to shock viewers into confronting their prejudices and the limits of their empathy....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In case you didn’t get enough nostalgia the first night of Pitchfork, Naked Raygun fans with tales from the 80s and 90s (and beyond—the band’s still a little bit undead well into the 00s) are invited to the Cobra Lounge this Friday, June 20, at 8 PM for a chance to be interviewed on camera. It’s sort of a warm-up party for the forthcoming Raygun documentary, not to mention a lazy way to gather talking-head footage....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve been trying to express very briefly why his work is good and important, at least w/r/t myself and, if I am lucky, by extension its significance to others. And all I could come up with was this: so much of his work was terribly honest about the complexity of everything and the need to gloss that complexity to function as a human being....

AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite Antonin Scalia Antonin Scalia has been catching it for the blithe inconsistency of the reasoning he exhibited last week in two high-profile Supreme Court rulings. Dissenting from the court’s 5-4 decision to strike down the federal Defense of Marriage Act, Scalia accused the majority of “legalistic argle-bargle,” which Eric Zorn would explain is a kissing cousin to “crinkie-winkie,” and which I bet Scalia used for the satisfaction of knowing Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote the majority opinion, would have to look it up to find out how insulted he should feel....

trekandshoot/Photos.com Grit. Tenacity. Sticktoitiveness. By any name, it’s a dandy virtue, the one that explains why a handful of great men and women wind up in history books while so many others equally strong and wise vanish unnoticed. Tears come to my eyes whenever I think back on the Immortal Game, game six of the 2011 World Series. My gritty Cardinals twice fought back from the brink of defeat, and when Lance Berkman lashed a two-out, two-strike single in the bottom of the tenth inning to tie a game the Cardinals would win in the 11th inning, to tie a series they would win 24 hours later, announcer Joe Buck delivered what is to my mind the ultimate tribute:...

If he doesn’t go to prison, I can’t imagine him ever being reelected to anything; even if the case totally stinks and he’s being railroaded, I doubt the sympathy would cancel out the fact that no one thought he was good at his job even before he was accused of being illegally, sociopathically corrupt. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The state legislature. The downside is that they’ve let Blagojevich go ahead and appoint a Senator....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This year the Old Town School’s Folk & Roots Festival, which happens Saturday and Sunday in Welles Park, lost its primary sponsor, LaSalle Bank–and the effect on the lineup is crystal clear. On Sunday night the main-stage headliner is New York’s Karsh Kale, a prominent talent in the Asian Underground scene who unfortunately makes terribly boring music. On Saturday night it’s Black Joe Lewis & the Honeybears (pictured) from Austin, Texas, who aren’t even as well-known as Kale....

Like many calculatedly offbeat playwrights emerging from the Humana Festival over the last three decades, Elizabeth Egloff expended so much effort on making her 1989 play quirky and provocative that she overlooked basic coherence. When a swan crashes through the window of a rural Nebraska shack owned by thrice-divorced, terminally lonely Dora, she puts it in a basket in her living room and goes off to work as usual. The bird turns into a man who learns to play checkers, drink beer, compliment her legs, and recite poetry....

Athanasius Kircher/Wikimedia Commons A vintage drawing of a magic lantern, precursor to the film projector Tomorrow night at 7 PM, the Logan Center for the Arts at University of Chicago will host the first of a fascinating two-part program called Visions of Scale. The event begins with a multimedia presentation by Artemis Willis called Performing the Night Sky, which re-creates a popular entertainment from the 19th century. As the press notes describe it: “A century before Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage Dans La Lune, the night sky was ‘performed’ by colorful moving images, voice, music, and projection....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “What would Lina Wertmüller think?” a friend of mine wondered on reports that Tom Cruise‘s latest project, Valkyrie, about the German generals’ assassination plot against Hitler in 1944, had run into some Teutonic heavy weather. Germany Bans Cruise’s Hitler Film the day-one headlines read—a prohibition stemming, one might expect, from the producer/star’s notorious Church of Scientology connections—though as David Hudson pointed out at GreenCine Daily (June 25), this wasn’t exactly what went down [all links in quote from GreenCine posting]....

On Monday moody New Jersey producer Clams Casino (aka Mike Volpe) and local rapper Vic Mensa teamed up to make a track in two days. Collaborative tracks are beyond commonplace in hip-hop, but this particular endeavor was framed in an uncommon light; it was streamed live on YouTube and presented by HP, which provided Volpe with the Split x2 detachable laptop he used to make the beats. Volpe and Mensa worked in a pristine white room (probably the very same space HP used to film Volpe working on a track in the above promo for the event) as a team of folks buzzed all around them, helping pull off a tightly choreographed event—or rather, an experience that was as precisely executed as a live stream of a multiday studio session can reasonably be....

From Krzysztof Zanussi’s The Structure of Crystals (1969) At the heart of Jurassic Park, currently playing in Chicago in a new 3-D version, is a modest Chekhovian comedy about a longtime bachelor learning to accept the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. The bachelor, Dr. Alan Grant (Sam Neill), is a paleontologist who thinks he has it all: a dream job, a beautiful young girlfriend (Laura Dern), and, most importantly, his liberty....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Readers might remember Reichardt’s previous feature, Old Joy, which premiered in Chicago at the Gene Siskel Film Center in September 2006 and played for a week at the Music Box two months later. Part landscape film, part muted drama, it followed two old friends (Daniel London and Will Oldham) as they try to rekindle their relationship with a road trip to a natural spring out in the wilderness....

Amid the uproar over Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s plan to close dozens of elementary schools, we shouldn’t forget that it’s been almost a year since the mayor closed six of the city’s 12 mental health clinics. If I were a betting man, I’d say the odds are against them. The harsh fact remains that the clinics serve a particularly vulnerable constituency that doesn’t typically have access to the mayor: poor people with mental health issues....

Nate Parker and Gugu Mbatha-Raw in Beyond the Lights There was a great crowd at the preview screening of Beyond the Lights that I attended earlier this month. (Not since July—when the the Music Box Theatre presented It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in its 70-millimeter road show version—had I seen an audience respond so enthusiastically to a nonviolent movie.) For many releases, movie studios forgo traditional press screenings and preview the films for audiences made up of critics as well as noncritics, with the latter group usually outnumbering the former by a wide margin....