Cloverfield (2008) revitalized the giant-monster genre with its mock-camcorder account of space aliens tearing up Manhattan, but the folks who produced this knockoff for Columbia Pictures have completely missed the point, recycling the earlier movie’s cardboard plot but discarding its jerky stylistics in favor of the usual elephantine FX sequences. The premise is nearly identical: hip young people party in a high-rise penthouse overlooking downtown LA, and the next morning they awaken to discover alien spacecraft hovering above the city....

Mad Men The sixth season of Mad Men is almost here, and I wish I couldn’t wait. Two unfortunate things have happened to Don Draper, about whom the drama turns: He remarried successfully enough that you hope the marriage works, but if it works the bottom falls out of the show (last season’s problem). And the actor playing Don Draper revealed himself as a light comedian. In the early seasons Don Draper was a man of mystery played by someone who might as well have been Don Draper, for all anyone knew about him otherwise....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I like that metaphor. And to bring us up to date on EveryBlock. Shut down by NBC News because “it wasn’t a strategic fit with our growth strategy,” it’s being given a new lease on life by Comcast, which owns NBC News, which owns MSNBC, which acquired EveryBlock in 2009, two years after it was launched by Adrian Holovaty....

Between Boutique Cafe & Lounge Between opened in 2007 offering creative Indian fusion small plates by Radhika Desai, who went on to make a splash on Top Chef. Since last year, though, the restaurant’s been focusing on a different but equally creative fusion: Peruvian-Asian dishes dreamed up by chef Jose Victorio. On one visit tilapia ceviche got a traditional Peruvian preparation: the fish, lightly “cooked” in a citrusy marinade, was topped with kernels of Andean corn and served alongside slices of sweet potato....

When Justin Sconza and Colin Yarck started Walter Meego about five years ago, they were playing decent but unspectacular electro-tinged indie rock. Since then, though, they’ve made a series of quantum leaps that have ratcheted up the attention level both inside and outside Chicago. Their biggest breakthrough up till now was probably the EP Romantic, released last year on the local Brilliante label, but this week they dropped Voyager, their full-length debut, and it’s poised to ride that mounting wave of interest to heights they’ve only fantasized about—it’s so buzzy it almost vibrates out of your hands....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We know that a large number of very fine, well written, deeply researched and important works are being published in this country to the sound of deafening silence. We know that most of the vast non-specialist audience of university graduates in the United States hasn’t a clue about what is going on in history, political science, sociology, economics, philosophy, literary criticism, art history, the natural sciences, and a host of other smaller academic disciplines....

Outside Chicago, only the most up-to-speed hipster club kids know about Hollywood Holt, but he talks like he just finished a photo shoot for XXL—the last time I got this much attitude on tape was when I interviewed Billy Corgan. He fills maybe 40 minutes of our hour-long conversation with shit talking and boasting, swinging from standard-issue swagger (he’s a really good skateboarder) to breathtaking cockiness (celebrities feel really comfortable hanging out with him)....

Known for its better-than-average street-festival fare—the West Loop restaurants serving food this year include De Cero, Market, Veerasway, and One SixtyBlue—the Taste of Randolph Street also presents music on two stages at 900 W. Randolph, Fri-Sun 6/18-6/20. The festival’s west stage (at Randolph and May) features mostly indie rock, including local and national acts like Lucero, One Eskimo, and Mucca Pazza on Saturday and Superchunk, Califone, and Headlights on Sunday. The bookings on the east stage (at Peoria) are more eclectic, with an emphasis on world-music fusion, and include locals Bandoleros, Funkadesi, and Lubriphonic, as well as a Saturday DJ set from Cheb i Sabbah....

OUT 1 ssss PRICE $30 RIVETTE: Because we didn’t succeed in finding a title. It’s without meaning. It’s only a label. –from a 1974 interview Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In most other ways, however, these four films couldn’t be more different. L’Amour Fou is a love story and psychodrama and Celine and Julie an eccentric fantasy-comedy. Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre are philosophical parables about solitude and community in and around Paris during the spring of 1970; they share the same source material, but Spectre’s tone is quite different–closer to nightmare than comedy, a poetic evocation of a frightening void rather than a void filled with people....

One perennial gripe about the Chicago theater scene is that when nonprofit companies get lucky enough to hatch a box-office hit, they almost always have to shut it down while folks are still lining up to buy tickets. Locked into their season schedules, small and midsize nonprofits have to move on to the next show, no matter how much demand might remain for the one that everybody decided to love....

QI am a married 54-year-old post-menopausal woman. My libido has diminished significantly, and it takes me much longer to climax. My husband gets tired sooner and is unable to maintain an erection as long as he used to; this makes it even more difficult for me to climax. I have taken up an activity I did in my 20s when I was single: giving myself enemas. The enema-induced orgasms are fantastic....

On June 4, Mayor Daley will be recognized by the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., as one of their “Visionaries in Sustainability” for his “long dedication to a sustainable urban environment.” Yet within a month, if his administration has its way, bulldozers could be moving in to demolish and discard at least 28 of the 29 buildings on the former campus of Michael Reese Hospital. Last week the city opened the bidding process for the job....

A first-person account from off the beaten track, as told to Anne Ford. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “My favorite chicken’s name was Blackie. My great-uncle had given me a whole bunch of eggs; the hen had gotten off the nest and decided to just give up on motherhood. I put the eggs in the incubator, and one by one they stopped peeping, which meant they were going to die....

Delicioso y Sabroso Delicioso y Sabroso is two, two, two restaurants in one: Delicioso is a white-tablecloth space, Sabroso, a more casual cantina. They have different menus but they share the same kitchen, and the rooms are separated by an aisle lined with agave plants. At Delicioso the focus is on the seven moles of Oaxaca; at Sabroso the lineup is more about tacos and gorditas, though the menu includes tlacoyos and garnachas (small boats or rounds of masa filled with beans or meat)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Brendan at the wonderful Where blog writes: “Listening to the roar of the jets flying overhead, I feel a bit on edge…I have to wonder if an event like this has some sort of subtle psychological effect on people.” I used to feel this way, particularly when we were closer to 9/11, when anything terrible seemed possible, and I worked in a large-windowed building along the Ike, but here in the Web editor bunker I can neither hear nor see anything of the city....

Last week, I appeared at a Savage Love Live event at Radford University in Radford, Virginia. Questions are submitted on index cards at SLL events, which allows questioners to remain anonymous and forces them to be succinct. The crowd at Radford was large and inquisitive. The students submitted more questions than I could possibly hope to answer in two hours—and Radford students also managed to stump me. Twice. I promised the crowd that I would get answers for the two stumpers and answer as many of their other questions as I could in this week’s column....

Earlier this year, the British Film Institute completed the largest restoration project in its history, creating pristine new prints of Alfred Hitchcock’s nine surviving silent movies, which had fallen into terrible shape over the past eight decades. The current restorations—screening at the Music Box from Friday through Tuesday—are reportedly the best these films have looked in generations. Casual Hitchcock fans may be surprised to learn that most of them aren’t thrillers....

Eleventh Dream Day (circa 1991) After releasing two excellent albums for Atlantic Records, Beet (1989) and Lived to Tell (1990), Chicago’s Eleventh Dream Day were elated to be freed from their contract in 1991. Their label debut was a critical favorite, but Atlantic did little to support the group, especially after its second album came out, largely because the people that brought them to the company, including future Thrill Jockey Records owner Bettina Richards, all ditched, leaving poor EDD on a sinking ship....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “We’ve been fighting to shut them down for a long time, but the mayor hasn’t shut them down,” said Kimberly Wasserman Nieto, an organizer for the Little Village Environmental Justice Organization, which was behind the event. “So we figured that if he won’t do it for the residents, maybe he’ll do it for all the Olympic visitors.” In other words, they’re trying to use the Olympics as leverage....

The Reader’s Choice: Old Fashioned Donuts Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Roseland shop gives the magical Dat Donut a run for its dough, with artisanal classics sold in an atmosphere more amenable to the appreciation of fine fried cake. Here the bulletproof barriers are almost an afterthought—you can reach over and shake hands with the baker, who will alert you to a new batch of fresh, shiny glazeds about to be unspooled in the display case....