Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I realized only after this week’s issue went to press that I’d employed near-identical phraseology in my long review of Wong Kar-wai’s The Grandmaster, which opens today in wide release, and my capsule review of David Lowery’s Ain’t Them Bodies Saints, which is opening at the Music Box. In both reviews, I describe the movie’s lush stylization as a smoke screen for lack of meaningful ideas....

What a story: small-time Hollywood screenwriter Randy Moore (who hails from Lake Bluff) inherited a six-figure sum from his grandparents and decided to blow it on making a guerrilla film at Disneyland and Disney World, with actors and crew all posing as park guests. Disney is notoriously controlling of its intellectual property, so the shoot was conducted with the utmost secrecy and foresight. Moore shot with small, consumer-grade digital cameras, the kind people bring into the parks all the time, and the actors wore digital recorders taped to their bodies....

Nobody has ever whipped up such satisfying blurts and rumbles of demented, filthy noise as Coughs using so few notes and so many soup pots—and I’m not just saying that because they named themselves in joking homage to my old band Lozenge. (Lozenge, Coughs, get it?) They broke up in 2006, but they’ve turned out to be the gift that keeps on giving—the members of Coughs have started more than a dozen wildly varied groups since....

Who doesn’t like Jesse White? There are probably a few people, but they can’t beat him at the polls. White hasn’t had a serious challenge since being elected secretary of state in 1998; in his most recent reelection bid, in 2010, he received more than 2.5 million votes, the most of any candidate for any office in Illinois. White’s fascinating biography doesn’t hurt his cause: he had a stint in the Cubs’ minor-league system; he served as a paratrooper in the U....

The Reader’s Choice: Sun Wah Bar-B-Que Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » With a few hours’ advance notice, four people can eat like emperors for less than ten bucks apiece at family-run Sun Wah Bar-B-Que, which offers a multicourse Beijing (aka Peking) duck dinner for $30. Tart, lightly sweet house-pickled daikon radish kicks off the extravaganza, and then the duck, bronzed and glistening, rolls out of the kitchen, to be carved tableside and served with warm steamed buns, shredded scallion, and hoisin sauce....

Surely no words ever written by any theater critic stirred more local buzz than Michael Billington’s 2004 observation in London’s Guardian that “Chicago . . . [is] the current theatre capital of America.” It came like manna from heaven to the denizens of this no longer even second city, and they seized upon it. At last the flyover on the prairie—home to more bustling, inventive, hardscrabble theater than anyplace on earth—was getting its due....

British art-rock bands usually get more populist with each record, and sure enough, both this Liverpool quartet’s 2002 breakout album, Walking With Thee, and 2004’s Winchester Cathedral were more accessible than its debut. But Clinic’s fourth full-length, Visitations (Domino), diverges from that trajectory, moving away from experimental pop and toward darker, rawer soundscapes that recall the distorted drone-and-dirge of White Light/White Heat and Unknown Pleasures. The album hollows out a bleak, cavernous space with tracks like “Animal/Human” and “Family,” which builds from a snaky guitar line and an apocalyptic tribal rhythm to a dramatic denouement that sounds like a bass drum full of gasoline being detonated....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Bordwell thinks it’d be hard to pull off. “I might swipe a finished film’s negative from the lab and then make new credit sequences that replace the director’s name with mine. But I could hardly expect to get away with it, since nearly everybody involved would notice. Perhaps I could find an old forgotten film and then stick my name in there somewhere....

Cortland Pinnick was six years old when he saw his mother’s head turned almost all the way around on her neck. They were heading south in a rented car on I-65 near Crown Point, Indiana, on their way back to Atlanta after a family visit to Joliet. Cortland’s mother, Melissa, was sitting in the front seat next to the driver, her cousin Constance McNair. Cortland and his 21-month-old sister, Manna, shared the backseat with McNair’s two children....

Let’s make a sandwich out of food writing cliches. Start with a slab of decadent, a schmear of luscious, a soupcon of over-the-top. A sprinkle of artery clogging, or perhaps heart stopping. Et voila: we’ve built the Montreal, a literal sandwich on the menu at Dillman’s, Brendan Sodikoff’s new not-a-Jewish-deli. Served on rye, the Montreal is something the menu counsels you (with an exclamation point!) to share, though it doesn’t suggest with how many (the correct answer is “rugby team”)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It turns out that the Chicago History Museum has archived several hundred such menus, from as far back as the middle of the 19th century, when you could go out to eat and tuck into dishes like loin of bear, quail pie, and snipe. But, needless to say, the menus aren’t aging well. To raise money to digitize this slowly deteriorating bit of culinary history, the museum’s hosting an event entitled “Endangered Treasures” in the restored dining room at Roosevelt University, in what was once Louis Sullivan’s Auditorium Hotel, this Friday....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A. I’m glad you asked. Turn your pagers back to 2000, when – and this may seem hard to believe – Americans didn’t really understand “reality television.” So CBS decided to import Big Brother, placing a bunch of people who didn’t know each other into a bland house, remarkably like an IKEA showroom, with no contact with the outside world....

Last week Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant rocked Taste of Chicago with his Sensational Space Shifters, and Gossip Wolf hears the lightning-voiced singer also “rambled on” around town to check out a few stores and restaurants, including East Village cowboy-fashion hot spot Alcala’s, where this lobo has been known to shop for white boots. Judging by Alcala’s Facebook page, it was a bit of a “celebration day”—Plant gamely posed for pictures with employees and generally behaved like a totally swell legendary rock ‘n’ roll badass....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I don’t know about you, but I have had a lousy fucking spring—too much drama, not enough money, the usual banal tragedies. “Hearts being broken, people being used,” as the poet Jewel once wrote. But here’s a glimmer of sunshine to illumine what remains of this wretched season: the Chicago Botanic Garden’s model railroad garden opens for the season on Saturday....

Ain’t no boys in this Baltimore outfit, and no men either–just husky-voiced ringleader Lexie Mountain, aka Alexandra Macchi, and any number of female friends and accomplices. Their act, aside from the crazy costumes and stage business, is almost all vocal, and they charge headlong into the things most of us fear about public speaking: that we’ll slip up, sound less than eloquent, expose ourselves somehow. The Boys don’t so much slip up as throw themselves off a cliff–they yodel a vaguely bluesy powwow of nonsense phrases (or just nonsense syllables), their voices akimbo, swooping and rippling, rarely in tune or in sync and often startlingly ugly....

Where do we get these cliched ideas about Germans? Children are taught that racial, ethnic, and sexual (and what have you) stereotyping is a bad idea. But what they grow up to learn is that elaborate courtesies and evasions are a bad idea too—patronizing doesn’t show respect; it assumes weakness. If you’re unwilling to risk saying anything to anyone that betrays the slightest stereotypical assumption, no one’s going to want to sit next to you at dinner....

How I Met Your Mother, Two and a Half Men, Rules of Engagement | CBS Two and a Half Men is the most brutal of the bunch. It’s about two brothers whose contrasting sufferings reveal the fundamental hell of American masculinity. One brother, Charlie (Charlie Sheen), is a “typical guy”–which is to say he’s a raging horndog who spends every waking moment pursuing, bedding, and discarding a succession of gorgeous women....

Mike Sula Deep-dish soup As far as local cultural icons go, deep-dish pizza is the culinary equivalent of Al Capone. People all over the world who don’t know Chicago continue to identify it with Chicago, and when they mention it, you’re embarrassed first for yourself and then for them. With a few exceptions, there’s no good reason anyone should inflict deep-dish on the alimentary canal more than once in a lifetime....

I’ve noticed in my travels among the beer nerds that sours—especially lambics and gueuzes—are often considered the last bridge to cross in the education of one’s palate. I assume this is partly because, well, if you came up drinking Miller High Life, sour beers are just plain fucking weird in a way that, say, black IPAs and barrel-aged stouts aren’t. But I’m sure it’s also partly due to the mystique surrounding traditional sours: producers of lambics and gueuzes belong to what’s de facto an exclusive club, for all intents and purposes confined to a small area of west central Belgium where the proper microflora exist in the wild, and the antique process of making these beers is complex, arcane, and time consuming....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Before the Internet, the process of going punk, especially if you lived outside a major urban area, involved a lot of research with an extremely spotty library of resources. Those resources consisted of whatever you could get your hands on: you might have some zines if you were lucky, or get tips and mix tapes from an older punk if you were very lucky, but more likely you’d have to settle for things like making note of the band shirts that the cooler members of Guns n’ Roses wore in videos and photo shoots, or just blindly buying records that looked even vaguely “punk....