Ron Lazzeretti placed the call to Michael Keaton from his hospital bed. It was December 2006 and Lazzeretti, a seasoned commercial writer and director, was putting together the biggest project of his career so far, his second feature. He’d written the script and had producing partners on board, and though he was laid up with a ruptured appendix, he was determined to get the star to sign on. So Lazzeretti and his partners decided to find another director....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The third nominee is Art of Field Recording Volume I: Fifty Years of Traditional American Music Documented by Art Rosenbaum, a typically terrific release on the Dust-to-Digital imprint that compiles recordings overseen by the record collector named in its title. (The label has just released the equally impressive second volume.) But the fourth, Polk Miller & His Old South Quartette (Tompkins Square), is probably the weirdest....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » It can take a while for big events to hit their stride (Chicago Gourmet, for example). In its first year Beer Hoptacular was less than spectacular, its beer offerings fine but generally unimpressive. The second year, the festival added a bunch of breweries to the lineup, but the Aragon Ballroom was so packed with people that it was hard to get to any of them....

The Reader’s Choice: Akira Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I used to bemoan the fact that the women’s shoes at Akira seemed to consist mainly of heels at punishing heights—great when you’re cabbing it to the club, not so wonderful when you’re hoofing it to the corner bar. But in the last several years the company’s expansion has pushed it into offering more foot-friendly styles like flats and lower heels by trend-conscious companies (e....

Marc Ruvolo, proprietor of Logan Square’s Bucket O’Blood Books and Records, seemed surprised when I found on his shelves a review copy of Hamlet’s Father, Orson Scott Card’s notoriously homophobic (and just plain terrible) 2008 retelling of Hamlet. Me, I was just surprised that anything could exist in his shop without his knowledge. Ruvolo (also the cofounder of the Johann’s Face record label) is a strict curator who’s fussy about acquisitions, and though he might be guesstimating when he says he has 6,000 volumes either on shelves or in storage, I’m pretty sure he usually knows exactly what’s in there and what isn’t....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » But last fall the Daley administration, needing votes for its package of tax and fee increases, agreed to boost the 2008 expense accounts to $73,280 apiece, at an additional cost to taxpayers of $2 million total. And now aldermen don’t want to go back to the old days of nine months ago. “That’s money you use to add more staff or help your constituents,” 25th Ward alderman Danny Solis told the Sun-Times....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guess this is the equivalent of raising my hand, since if a smart guy like Horbal can display his canonical ignorance in public, then why not somebody considerably less smart like yours truly? Plus a little embarrassment’s never killed anyone—at least not yet—and how embarrassing can it be? Just a parlor game for film fans, to find out who hasn’t seen what, who’s the great pretender and who’s really really up on his/her stuff ....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In recent years—thanks in large part to amateur music blogs—popular interest has surged in early examples of international music originally released on 78 RPM discs. For many decades, record companies in the U.S. released music from all over the world—some recorded abroad, some by immigrants living here—and marketed it to immigrant populations hungry for the sounds of home. Record companies in Europe, Asia, and Africa were doing the same, putting out everything from traditional music to various stripes of pop....

On June 1, city inspector general David Hoffman joined the chorus slamming the $1.16 billion parking meter lease agreement as a loser for taxpayers. The next day Mayor Daley struck back, holding a press conference to offer an impassioned, occasionally coherent defense of the deal. This testy exchange with reporters turned the spotlight, if only for an instant, on one element of the parking meter agreement that’s so far received very little attention: the battery of well-connected, highly paid financial and legal consultants who executed the deal on the city’s behalf—and who are immune from the regulations that govern most contractors doing business with the city....

Gamma Player When internationally known techno DJ Jeff Mills and wife Yoko Uozumi decided to open a boutique, they wanted it to blur the line between music and fashion. I’m still not sure what that means, but everything in Gamma Player’s black-painted space (the theme for its first season is “The Universe by Night”) is pretty darn cool. The couple, who together run Mills’s 15-year-old label, Axis Records, and have another home in Berlin, has stuck with small designers from Europe and South America who evince the kind of avant-garde yet wearable aesthetic they came to admire during their travels....

Venerable reunited Chicago pre-emo band Smoking Popes announced a new album and tour over the weekend via Twitter. This Is Only a Test, the band’s second full-length of new material since their 2005 reunion, is due March 15 via Asian Man. Staying true to emo form, it’s a concept album written from the perspective of a high-school senior. Eli Caterer tells Gossip Wolf that it was recorded a few songs at a time over 14 months with Matt Allison at Atlas Studios....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The late illustrator and painter W.H.D. Koerner, who got his start as an illustrator for the Chicago Tribune, is in the news these days as the maker of George W. Bush’s favorite painting, “A Charge to Keep.”Less well known about Koerner is that he’s the creator of what’s allegedly the first superhero comic, “Hugo Hercules,” which ran in the Trib from 1902 to 1903....

The son of a farmer, German choreographer Kurt Jooss had no tolerance for white-haired politicians deciding the fates of ordinary men and women. War is the subject of his 1932 The Green Table, whose cyclical structure emphasizes the unassailable power of policy makers oblivious to the suffering of those knee-deep in wartime horrors. Strongly affected by the expressionist strain prominent in early-20th-century German dance, it’s ritualistic and heavy-handed, with a Death figure like a cross between a skeleton and a snarling dog....

More than a thousand people showed up for a recent Savage Love Live event at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It goes without saying that the students at UW submitted more questions than I could answer in 90 minutes. As promised, Madison, here are some bonus answers to questions that I didn’t get to during our time together … QI know you lived in Madison for a while. Got any great Mad Town stories?...

The first Lilith Fair since the touring festival’s initial three-year run ended in 1999 arrives Sat 7/17 at the First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre (I-80 and Harlem, Tinley Park). Lisa Loeb, Fiona Apple, and Paula Cole aren’t aboard this time around, but the Chicago lineup is a solid mix of old-timers and newcomers that includes Mary J. Blige, La Roux, Court Yard Hounds, Heart, Kate Nash, Vedera, Meaghan Smith, Vita Chambers, and Katie Todd....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Rod Lurie, regrouping after the marginal release of his dumb political thriller Nothing But the Truth (2008), remakes the Sam Peckinpah classic about self-definition through violence. The original starred Dustin Hoffman as a meek mathematician who arrives in an English village with his sexy wife and becomes a target of local thugs; Lurie has turned the character into a Hollywood screenwriter (James Marsden) and transplanted the action to small-town Mississippi, but otherwise the story is the same....

Among many restaurants offering promotional prix fixe stimulus packages these days, Cafe des Architectes recently announced a three-course, $29 “Neighborhood Friends Menu” featuring seasonal local ingredients. Even if you aren’t a Gold Coast hood rat, the offer, available Sunday and Monday nights, is a great chance to taste the work of premier chef Martial Noguier, who promised when he started there last October to make the cafe, located in the Sofitel Hotel, more of a neighborhood restaurant than an undistinguished default for weary travelers....

Films Listed Alphabetically:A-B • C-E • F-O • P-Z • Special Events Following, in alphabetical order, are reviews of selected films screening through Thursday, October 18 (though repeat screenings after that date are also noted). For reviews of films screening Friday, October 19, through Thursday, October 25, come back next week to read the second part of our festival coverage. Benji The entire city convulsed in grief when Ben Wilson—a point guard for Simeon Vocational High School in Auburn Gresham and the top-ranked high school basketball player in the country—was shot to death on the street by a couple of punks in November 1984....

In his 2006 Kelly Creek Breakdown, Jim Lutes covers what might otherwise have been a simple, pastoral painting with a mess of color wrought in chunky, swirling brushstrokes. The title creek disappears almost completely; a fringe of mountaintops is the only clear landmark. Lutes returns to Kelly Creek for “Dumb Country,” his new show at the Valerie Carberry Gallery. But this time the abstract overlay is gone. It’s been displaced into a “boulder” of trash that sits, encased in transparent urethane, at the center of the exhibition space....

New Too La Cocina de Frida5403 N. Clark | 773-271-1907 Good schools, safe streets, public transportation, a decent Cuban sandwich shop—all essential quality-of-life issues for a happy neighborhood. Lately, in a few spots, enterprising Cubanos are starting to recognize the importance of the last, and the Perez boys—Rey, Rey Jr., Michael, Oswaldo, Armando, and cousin Miguel—have staked their claim in Lincoln Square. They’re pressing the sandwiches on D’Amato’s bread, filling them with thick slices of Virginia ham or marinated steak or roast pork, and serving up hot and sweet cafes con leche and hot shots of cafe cortado....