The Homesman is such a deeply pessimistic work that I’ll be surprised if it becomes a popular success. American spectators rarely go for movies about failure (which might explain why the Coen brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis, despite being one of the best-reviewed movies of last year, never caught on with the mainstream), and The Homesman confronts that subject in virtually every scene. The film opens with a despairing portrait of American frontier life in the 1850s, introducing us to a small farming settlement that’s been ravaged by disease and crop failure....

Vegetation figures prominently in Yanira Castro’s 2011 Paradis, which is performed both inside and outside the Garfield Park Conservatory. But she’s no environmentalist; though plants make a gorgeous set, Castro homes in on the human, bringing artists and audiences into the same close space. Paradis seems to follow the arc of its inspiration, Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique (2004), traveling from hell to heaven. When Paradis debuted at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Castro devoted the first third of the hour-long piece to a male soloist whose slow, stiff clockwork motions (in an indoor desert) suggested a well-aged Beckett character....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » More than one Republican senator blocking the nomination of Richard Cordray for director of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency has claimed that the real problem is not Cordray, a respected former attorney general of Ohio, but the sweeping powers granted to him under the Dodd-Frank law that established the agency. The Republicans want the directorship replaced with a five-person committee and the agency’s budget directly controlled by Congress....

Dale Watson (second from left) with his Lonestars Back in December a cable channel called Great American Country aired a documentary on current Nashville darling and king-size jamoke Blake Shelton—one of those eloquent supporters of armed guards in American schools—which belatedly generated some controversy when the website Saving Country Music highlighted one of the beefcake singer’s more insulting comments in the program. “If I am ‘Male Vocalist of the Year’ that must mean that I’m one of those people now that gets to decide if it moves forward and if it moves on,” Shelton said....

This goofy disco-pop act seems likely to follow Under Byen as the next outre Scandi-rock band to make a splash in the States. Touted at home by their friend and avid fan Annie, the Norwegian duo of Fredrik Saroea and Ket-Ill debuted with one of my favorite albums of 2005, the wacky, catchy, and dancey Datarock Datarock (released on their own Young Aspiring Professionals imprint, it’ll be reissued by Nettwerk in June)....

Phillip Foss of the Meatyballs Mobile food truck challenged David Posey, chef de cuisine at Blackbird, to come up with a recipe using bull’s balls for this installment of our weekly feature. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » He’d never worked with bull’s balls before, though he says they’re a little like sweetbreads, which are regularly on the menu at Blackbird. “I looked online and in a lot of my books and couldn’t find anything,” he said....

Taken at face value, Takeshi Kitano’s Outrage is a perfectly satisfying crime movie. The storytelling is terse and efficient, presenting one exciting standoff after another, and there are enough weird jokes and character turns to keep it from getting monotonous. The story itself, about warring yakuza clans familiar from hundreds of other films, is intentionally slim. Yet Kitano approaches the material like an ace jazz musician riffing on an old standard, constructing entire scenes around a funky camera setup, a deadpan punch line, or an ingenious sound cue....

SEPTEMBER Confessionsofa Ex-Doofus ItchyFooted Mutha Veteran filmmaker Melvin Van Peebles (Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song) directed and stars in this semi-autobiographical story about a hoary ex-adventurer whose travels have taken him from Harlem to the high seas and back. Facets Cinematheque, 1517 W. Fullerton, 773-281-9095. UCLA Film & Television Archive’s 14th Festival of Preservation The giant UCLA archive presents a month-long program of newly preserved films in pristine 35-millimeter prints. Among the titles screening are John Sayles’s The Brother From Another Planet (9/4-9/5) and Return of the Secaucus 7 (9/5-9/6), Joseph Losey’s The Prowler (9/20 & 9/23), Edgar G....

Tom Krell reads his Wikipedia page I have pretty mixed feelings about the first episode of Hashtags, a new Red Bull Music Academy documentary series covering music trends that’ve popped up online in the past few years. The debut clip takes a look at some of the musicians creating subversive R&B songs, but unfortunately the video is hamstrung by the focus of its hashtag-stamped title: “Don’t Call It #AltR&B.”...

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Cob Connection, which seeks to foster community by promoting sustainability, hosts a fund-raiser with food, music, and activities Saturday from 4 to 7 PM at the McCormick Tribune YMCA. It’ll benefit their latest project, creating a community farm and building an outdoor classroom using alternative materials like corncobs and straw bales in partnership with the YMCA. $10. Saturday at 10 AM at Kendall College (900 N....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The neighborhood, which borders the lake front from 51st to 59th Streets and extends west to Washington Park, used to be a bohemian enclave, a tourist attraction for northsiders in search of a Saturday night thrill. Fifty-fifth Street was famous for its bars, where the jazz greats of the bebop era appeared; an artists’ and writers’ colony flourished here in the mid-1950s with the Compass Players and the Second City company....

It’s great that Mike Ditka has taken up the cause of disabled NFL veterans, especially as he makes it clear he’s relatively well off and is fighting for those without his clout and monetary resources. Considering the amount of cash the NFL rakes in every year — an estimated $7 billion in annual revenues — and the average life span of an NFL player’s career, it’s shameful how poorly the league takes care of those who helped give it the license to print money it has today....

The Bento Box Chef Rick Spiros has finally landed in a place worthy of his talents. After getting burned a few years ago by the quick death of Mantou Noodle Bar and being underappreciated at the loungey Red Canary, he’s set up shop for himself in the front of the house at his Artisan Catering. The resulting pan-Asian restaurant is small (it seats just 12) but elegant, with a high ceiling, a warm color scheme—the green west wall is hung with Dali prints—a large mural of a Japanese dude with rice bowl, and Japanese accents....

One of the title characters All this month we’ll be reviewing the Oscar nominees for the best animated, live-action, and documentary short films, alternating daily between categories. Check back tomorrow for the next installment. In a recent interview, writer-director-producer Minkyu Lee cites Terence Malick and Andrei Tarkovsky as some of the influences on his first animated short. That may sound overreaching, but what’s most impressive about Adam and Dog (which you can watch here) is how it assimilates its models into a style of its own....

“I’ve lived in Logan Square for about 20 years now,” says Marc Ruvolo, cofounder of long-running Chicago indie/punk label Johann’s Face. “There’s no record stores or bookstores around here, which is a pain.” Ruvolo guesses vinyl will make up a third of the shop’s stock, and as with the books, the inventory will heavily reflect his own preferences—in this case indie rock, punk, and metal. “I’m hoping that being really specific will make it more of a destination for people,” he says....

QI am a 23-year-old male who has been in a relationship with a great woman for four years now. She is an amazing person, and we oftentimes talk about marriage. The issue is this: I have a foot fetish and she is fully aware of it. She doesn’t like the idea of me kissing her feet or indulging my fetish in any way. We have sex quite often, and I’ve always let it slide that she doesn’t want any part of my fetish....

Q I really need some help and comfort. I’m a straight 25-year-old woman, and I’ve been dating my boyfriend for four years. I’ve never been the romantic type—until I met him. At the beginning we were purely sexual. We love role-playing, and we always came up with erotic fantasies of me being fucked and used by multiple men, or some fantasy where others were involved. It was hot to me until I fell in love with him....

As a high school student in Batavia, Kevin Fitzpatrick was more comfortable hanging out with his Commodore 64 computer, “information sharing” on bulletin boards, than hanging out with kids his age. “I was very much, umm, introverted and not mingling and social,” he says. By the time he graduated in 1984, he was determined to be different. “It was like, OK, I want to change. I want to go out, I want to mingle—I’m going to socialize....

The first day of school was two months away and already the new principal looked like a bust. After a national search, in April 2006 the Waukegan school board had picked Edward Guerra to head up Waukegan High School. Guerra had been the longtime principal at Chicago’s Farragut High School, where he was credited with reducing violence and absenteeism. But in June 2006 the Chicago Tribune revealed that Guerra was the target of a grade-fixing investigation involving star athletes at Farragut....

An autumnal mixologist mash-up October 4 | 6-8:30 PM | State and Lake Chicago Tavern at theWit Hotel | $40 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sample the 20 mixologists’ best autumnal libations, decide who pulled off the most impressive drink, and enjoy complimentary wine from City Winery, cider from Virtue Cider, and bites from State and Lake Chicago Tavern. Online ticket purchases are no longer available....