Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This week brings Chicago’s first chance to see Summer Hours, an incredibly rich drama about a trio of grown children (Juliette Binoche, Charles Berling, Jeremie Renier) trying to decide what to do with their late mother’s country home and its valuable furniture and art—her inheritance from a beloved uncle who made an international name for himself as a painter....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » These Protestants “once spoke with horror and judgment against divorce and the divorced,” but are now “blithely settling for possible presidential candidates who have divorced repeatedly.” Of course, they also used to speak strongly in favor of Sunday closing laws and Prohibition. On much thinner scriptural warrant, many of them now speak strongly against gay sex. I haven’t read any of these scholars, life being short, but I’d be happy to hear from those who have....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The candidates have shown great intellect and courage throughout the campaign, and tonight should be no exception. The main issue has boiled down to which candidate is the farthest right. Most of the candidates concede that their opponents are really, really conservative, but they all claim to be the only true triple-really conservative. Mitt Romney asserted last week that he was a “severely conservative” governor in Massachusetts, and Ron Paul just released a commercial calling Rick Santorum a “fake” conservative....

I was happy to be at the Goodman’s Owen Theatre for the premiere of Million Dollar Quartet–until the music started. A commercial production by Dee Gee Theatricals, MDQ focuses on the day in 1956 when Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis jammed together at Sun Records founder Sam Phillips’s Memphis Recording Service. The show’s got a cast of wonderful musicians, and a piano-chewing turn by Levi Kreis as the irrepressible Lewis....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few weeks ago a council member on the Health Committee told me that when Joe Moore’s initial foie gras ban was before the council, aldermen were besieged by calls from activists–not necessarily Chicago residents–urging them to pass it. This weekend Moore mustered his troops, sending out the e-mail below urging his followers to call the mayor and Burke in protest....

The fifth annual Chicago African Diaspora Film Festival runs Friday through Thursday, June 22 through 28, at Facets Cinematheque. Unless otherwise noted, tickets are $9, $7 for students and seniors; for more information call 773-281-9075 or visit www.facets.org. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Cathedral Set in the island nation of Mauritius, this 2006 feature is narrated by the spirit of a massive cathedral that watches over the capital city of Port Louis, in particular a virginal lass (Ingrid Blackburn) whose hypochondriac mother resents her....

Ever since the National Radio Hall of Fame announced the list of nominees for its 2008 induction, chairman Bruce DuMont has been on the hot seat. The 16 candidates for four spots were revealed in April and there was plenty of indignation about who’d been left out and which current nominees should have been recognized long ago. The Reader‘s Michael Miner, for example, wondered how Studs Terkel could have been overlooked....

Believe it or not—I have a hard time imagining it myself—most towns used to maintain their own time based on the position of the sun, with “high noon” being the only hour that was anywhere close to precise, even though it wasn’t anywhere close to precise. This proved to be problematic for scheduling anything, and scientists in Britain and the United States proposed the idea of a standard time system in the early 19th century....

High school suspensions always have a “Think about what you’ve done” subtext, even if nobody says it out loud. Slapped with a ten-day suspension, high school senior Chancelor Bennett, aka Chance the Rapper, took the opportunity to reflect upon more than his rebellious impulses—his education, his love of weed, his compassionate mother—and then channel those thoughts into rhymes. Bennett wound up with a concept album inspired by and named after his period in exile: #10Day....

Ryan Reynolds, Mary Louise Parker, and Jeff Bridges in R.I.P.D. Last week the comic book adaptation R.I.P.D. opened to general disinterest and mostly negative reviews. It failed to enter the top five on the U.S. box office chart, which must hold significance for people who like to talk about money rather than movies. Personally, I think it’s loads of fun. Director Robert Schwentke conveys a sincere love of animated cartoons in the movie’s streamlined movement and detail-packed frames, and Jeff Bridges and Mary-Louise Parker are a hoot....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It looks like Christmas has come early for the city’s film exhibitors. First it comes to light that the Patio Theater will not have to close its doors (sorry, again, for failing to get the facts straight yesterday). Now the folks at Chicago Filmmakers have announced that they’ve been chosen by the city’s Department of Housing and Economic Development to redevelop and occupy a vacant firehouse in Edgewater, at 5720 North Ridge Avenue....

Breakbone DanceCo.’s Excavation of Remains opens with corpses lying in a morgue—strangers thrown together to form a bizarre community. One wanted to die; one thought he’d never die. One is enraged by her death while another celebrates her long life. Several are obsessed with their toe tags, which they strain to read. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A collaborative dance-theater piece created by the seven performers and directed by Breakbone artistic director Atalee Judy, Excavation of Remains is ambitious and appealingly odd, but also rambling and disjointed, with knobby excrescences like a bit naming young baseball players who dropped dead and an audience contest where you get a prize if you find a hidden toe tag....

The seventh annual Decibelle Music and Culture Festival (formerly Estrojam) has scaled back a bit from the past few years, but its music lineup is still an impressive four days of indie rock, dance, electronica, funk, and hip-hop, Thursday through Sunday at several venues. The fest’s mission is to “create spaces where women can cultivate their talents in all creative areas,” and a portion of the proceeds will benefit Women & Children First bookstore and the Chicago Michfest Fan Fund, which helps cash-strapped concertgoers attend the annual Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival....

Craig Zobel—whose crafty debut feature Great World of Sound (2007) played at the Chicago film festival but never opened here theatrically—takes on the unenviable task of dramatizing a story that defies credulity even though it’s quite true. At a crummy fast- food restaurant in Ohio, a prank phone caller posing as a police detective manages to persuade the officious but gullible manager (Ann Dowd) that her pretty 19-year-old cashier (Dreama Walker) has been witnessed stealing from a customer, and the prankster walks the supervisor through a secondhand investigation that includes a strip search and worse....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It’s true that numerous major figures in movies today seem unconcerned with narrative incident. In their own ways, Abbas Kiarostami, Hou Hsiao-hsien, Pedro Costa, Cristi Puiu, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul have employed narrative as a framework in order to capture other, ineffable things—like the physiques and behaviors of their performers or the atmospheres of particular settings. Yet it’s important to note, as Jonathan Rosenbaum did in his Reader essay on Kiarostami’s Taste of Cherry, that such trailblazing directors arrived at their innovations by purposely subtracting attributes of filmmaking to which they’d grown accustomed....

Tom Cruze/Sun-Times Dunn at the Cell on Sunday, zeroing in on a new batting record “When I’m in the box, I don’t feel like, ‘Oh, crap, here goes nothing,’” Adam Dunn told Toni Ginnetti of the Sun-Times earlier this week. He must not be in touch with his feelings. When the White Sox cleanup hitter bats, nothing is guaranteed, or nearly. Sabermetrics allows us to explore Dunn’s situational nonhitting in this season’s opening weeks....

NICKI MINAJ PINK FRIDAY (YOUNG MONEY/UNIVERSAL MOTOWN) Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I wish “I’m the Best” were an aberration. But alas, Pink Friday is filled nigh to bursting with blandness. You know those swelling, earnest, I-have-overcome bullshit tracks that even decent rappers often put at the ends of their CDs, where you can conveniently avoid them? Imagine a whole album of that, and you’ve got a general idea of what Minaj has perpetrated....

Hey, Chicago, you didn’t get your Olympics, but you can console yourself with a big-deal event that’s quieter, briefer, more centrally located, and assuredly attracts a better-dressed crowd. Billed as a return to the days when the city had a world-class art fair, Expo Chicago debuts this weekend at Navy Pier’s Festival Hall, with 120 galleries participating. Some highlights, by category: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Talented people working The exhibition space was designed by Jeanne Gang’s Studio Gang Architects, with an eye to accommodating large-scale installations and performance art—a good example being the “itinerant” exhibition “Temporary Landmarks and Moving Situations,” which features work by Theaster Gates, Jan Tichy, Jennifer West, and seven others....

Heartland Haters, Heartland Lovers May I say something in HONOR of the Heartland. First I worked at the Heartland for a long time, though I have been gone for over six years. How many places can a homeless, or any person who is HUNGRY, truly hungry, walk in and ask, and be GIVEN food for free? Gladly given, if only a bowl of red beans & rice w/ cornbread and a cup of tea....

Julie Christmas may have an innocent-sounding name, but as a front woman she’s like a high-voltage line dancing on a wet sidewalk. Last fall she put out records with Battle of Mice and Made Out of Babies, and though the former project–a short-lived collaboration with the Red Sparowes’ Josh Graham that disintegrated along with their relationship–was perhaps more innovative, Made Out of Babies is searingly brutal and freakishly elegant, in the grand tradition of the Jesus Lizard (with maybe a hint of Nausea from back in the day)....