This weekend I had the unhappy experience of catching up with Les Miserables, which suffers from more problems than I can detail here but notably—and fatally for a period picture—lacks much sense of place. The digital long shots of 19th-century Paris look phony, and because director Tom Hooper (The King’s Speech) likes to close in on his warbling actors, the inky interiors seldom register. I may be particularly sensitive to this flaw because I’ve also just watched Neighboring Sounds, a Brazilian drama with a powerful and enveloping sense of place that begins a weeklong run on Friday at Gene Siskel Film Center....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Attending Lollapalooza requires some planning; with an estimated 100,000 attendees descending upon Grant Park each day, merely maneuvering through the masses with friends presents a challenge. Some folks carried markers to help friends locate them from a distance—a flag from, say, Ireland or Brazil would pop up in the middle of the crowd, as did the blown-up cut-out face of Honey Boo Boo or Nicolas Cage (circa Vampire’s Kiss)....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because the piece was in the New York Times‘s Great Homes and Destinations section, it was less a profile of Mediabistro founder Laurel Touby than it was a profile of Touby’s loft in Gramercy Park. It is an extremely nice loft, and extremely expensive—purchased for $3.9 million in 2009 and since renovated for another $2 million. The loft features what is surely the world’s first “hand-woven leather, chain-mail and fur indoor swing” not expressely designed for BDSM play; a “sprawling sectional sofa” that set Touby and her husband, Jon Fine, back more than $30,000; and a $3,500 coffee table, which is described in the Times as among Touby and Fine’s “relative bargains....

penguin.com What your choice of travel reading says about you! Guess what, guys? A single female traveler’s choice of airport reading material can indicate whether she’s interested in hooking up with you! It turns out The Great Gatsby is as clear an indicator of sexual availability as a female baboon’s red ass. And just as easy to spot—that cover is so iconic! (Assuming, of course, that the reader is a full-grown woman and not a high school student who has to plow through it for sophomore English....

For nearly three quarters of a century Jeppson’s Malort, Chicago’s native wormwood-based spirit, has been both reviled and celebrated for its powerful, sustained bitterness. Malort—the name is Swedish for wormwood—descends from a family of bitter schnapps said to be good for digestion. But in the late 30s, after Chicago attorney George Brode purchased the formula from Swedish immigrant Carl Jeppson (essentially the dried botanical macerated in grain-neutral alcohol), he began marketing it on the basis of its aggressive unpalatability....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You can have your WALL-E, as calculated and corporate a product as the object of its own anemic eco-satire (which pulls so many punches that even Bush and Cheney could probably support the message: yo, we’re for less garbage and that kinda shit … and let’s get rid of those fat people too—yeee-haw!). Me, I’m more into Doug Sweetland’s Presto, the five-minute Pixar short that comes on before the sentimental google-eyed robot gets down to its sanitized, softball business....

Every once in a while a musician produces a song that’s a perfect distillation of the American zeitgeist. Neil Young’s “Ohio” captured the outrage inspired by the Kent State shootings. Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” bottled post-9/11 America’s anger and sudden insatiable desire to kick Arab ass. And now Tim Heidecker from Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! has done the same for a nation in mourning over Wild Hogs 2....

Rom clarinetist Selim Sesler grew up in Kesan, a Thracian village in the northwest corner of Turkey, where Greece and Bulgaria meet, and the confluence of all those cultures is a big part of what makes his music so dazzling. Sesler’s 2000 album The Road to Kesan, a strictly folkloric affair, is still raucous as hell; his latest, Anatolian Wedding (Doublemoon), is a more accomplished work of alchemy, simultaneously vibrant and sorrowful....

In a March 2008 post titled “Words Will Tell” on the New York Times‘s Measure for Measure songwriting blog, Andrew Bird delved into his own process, specifically his inspiration for the song “Oh No,” which opens his new album, Noble Beast (Fat Possum). On a flight from New York to Chicago, he explained, he’d been seated behind a terrified three-year-old who screamed, “Oh no!” over and over again. Struck by the mournfulness of the little boy’s wail, he finally found it more moving than annoying....

Q I am a girl and I am stuck. My boyfriend and I have been dating for nine months, and I only recently told him I can squirt. When we would have sex before, I would tell him to stop before I came because I didn’t want to squirt. Now that he knows, he thinks it’s really hot that I can and wants me to do it. But I can’t seem to get to that point anymore....

From Mestizo Last year the African Diaspora Film Festival presented two important rediscoveries, Lionel Rogosin’s quasi-documentary Come Back, Africa (1959) and the Dutch-Surinamese coproduction One People (1976). This year the major rediscovery of the fest is the Venezuelan feature Mestizo, which screens tomorrow at Facets at 6:30 PM. The movie was made in 1988, but it feels like a lost film of the 1960s. Director Mario Handler employs a playful, exploratory style to consider complex political ideas, a strategy reminiscent of the late-60s films of Jean-Luc Godard (La Chinoise) and Glauber Rocha (Terra em Transe); as in near-contemporaneous films by Dusan Makavejev (W....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Open House is rich with the sincere, the communal, and the bizarre. I have found myself jamming out to “This Land Is Your Land” with musicians who are all younger than eight. I have joined a song circle where I crooned inaccurate harmonies to “Hey Jude,” a song surprisingly conducive to banjo. During the December Open House, I actually performed a pretty nice ad-lib to “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At any rate, Joe Flint of the Paley Center for Media has written a funny piece imagining a Lou Grant updated for our age (h/t Romenesko); on this show there’d be no need to cast the roles of a managing editor (Charlie Hume) and an assistant city editor (Art Donovan), since these days “we all need to do more with less” and Lou Grant would be doing their jobs too....

You don’t need to nose around in the Fat Possum trough to find jumpy, fierce, dirty blues rock that sounds like somebody put too much turpentine in the barbecue sauce: two of Chicago’s most underrated party bands are combining forces for a 500-copy split 12-inch on Original Sound Recordings and a release party that ought to lift the roof off the joint (which at the Hideout admittedly doesn’t take much). VELCRO LEWIS & HIS 100 PROOF BAND have evolved over the years from a simple and solid PBR rock band into a rattling, trippy, fuzz-toned R & B six-piece where instruments get passed around like bottles....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kyle McHugh‘s River North liquor store Drinks Over Dearborn, which finally got its liquor license a few weeks ago after a long struggle, officially opens this week with a slew of free events (it opened “soft” on October 13). Monday 10/27, 6-7 PM: Bridget Albert of Southern Wine & Spirits demonstrates and discusses fall recipes from her new Market Fresh Mixology book....

Since he proposed his budget for 2010, Mayor Daley has been busy with reporters’ questions and increasingly louder calls for reform of the city’s tax increment financing program. The TIF program is complicated—but no one is going to understand it any better by listening to Daley talk about it. In his comments after a tree-planting event on the southwest side this weekend and during a wide-ranging interview with Chicago Public Radio that aired November 1, the mayor played fast and loose with the facts when he wasn’t ducking the question altogether....

Ali’s life has been recounted so many times that you’d think no one could come up with a fresh angle on it; documentary maker Bill Siegel (The Weather Underground) succeeds, primarily by delving into the religious story, largely downplayed by the mainstream, that’s been sitting there in plain sight for 50 years. Siegel mostly dispenses with the fighter’s comic pronouncements, his verbal jousting with Howard Cosell, in fact his entire athletic career, choosing instead to explore his great political awakening in the Nation of Islam....

The opening panel discussion at this year’s Art Chicago is titled “What If: To Dream, Desire and Acquire,” and that pretty much sums up the annual fair that brings together collectors, curators, artists, gallerists, scholars, and kibbitzers for four days of looking, talking, and dealing. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Your Thursday-evening preview options depend on how much you want to spend and how late you want to stay up....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few weeks ago Mark Perro of Brooklyn’s premiere post-everything hardcore band, the Men, appeared in the Reader‘s Artist on Artist feature. For the past year it’s been nearly impossible to avoid seeing some kind of coverage on the Men, resulting in packed warehouse gigs across the country and a spot on this summer’s Pitchfork lineup. Late last year, Ben Greenberg joined the group as their new bass player....

MUSIC Readers’ Choice: The Days Readers’ Choice: Cool Kids a lupefiasco.com a flosstradamus.com Best Folk, Country, or Americana Group Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Maybe this pick is a reach when so many local traditional acts do their genres such honor (Devil in a Woodpile, Tangleweed, the Hoyle Brothers, and the many faces of Kelly Hogan, for starters). But this all-female freak-folk band is something different under the sun....