The opening images flashing across the screen look like they’re from a high school video project. The shot of the Chicago skyline, filmed from a car on Lake Shore Drive, is slightly tilted, and rain splatters the camera. Cut to sheep running through a field being chased by a shepherd. Cut to people dancing on a cruise ship in what seems to be the middle of Lake Michigan, followed by a shot of a red flower, an exterior shot of a restaurant, and a clip of people stomping grapes....

The Doom Generation Kicking and Screaming Chet: Here’s a joke. How do you make As luck would have it, I had my second looks at The Doom Generation and Kicking and Screaming, two radically different youth movies about defeat and paralysis, back-to-back. Both seemed better the second time around, though for very different reasons. Noah Baumbach’s first feature, Kicking and Screaming, which I’d originally seen and liked at Cannes last May, seems to have been tightened up in the editing and given more focus....

In 1992 Bay Area filmmaker Lynne Sachs joined her journalist sister Dana in Saigon, and together they trekked north to Hanoi, recording the sights and sounds along the way. Some of the folk aphorisms and reminiscences they collected from villagers and war survivors are part of the narration of this short documentary, interspersed with sometimes piously liberal commentaries by the Sachses on their impressions of both the Vietnam they experienced and the one they recall from the TV coverage more than two decades ago, during their childhood....

BASH at the Playwrights’ Center Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As the two Boston College socialites, Mark Rector and Elyse Mirto play an excellent game of dueling monologues, replaying the same story from different vantage points. Both smile broadly as they recall their anticipation of a “great” night and a time when they were head-over-heels romantic. But as their juxtaposed lines reveal, “romantic” doesn’t necessarily mean deep love or kinship....

Frankenstein Monster stories are most effective not when they expose us to unknown and unexpected frights but when they reveal our own worst sides. The most monstrous creations of literature are invariably driven by self-loathing: the misshapen Richard III, the pathetic hunchback of Notre Dame, the disfigured phantom of the opera, the sadly misunderstood King Kong. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Traditional modern theater has had little luck in dramatizing horror stories....

BILLBOARDS “Sometimes It Snows in April” by Laura Dean is a peculiarly cool and silken introduction to the steamy ballet. In the first section, set to an atypically spare and lyrical song, the dance’s vocabulary is austerely classical, and its central images are simple geometric forms in space: straight lines, diagonals. The movement is unembellished–no multiple pirouettes, no jumps with multiple beats–just long, smooth sequences of turns, balances, leaps, and steps that devour space....

BUCKETS O’ BECKETT Splinter Group Into that evening, however, are packed five of Beckett’s shorter plays directed by Splinter Group artistic director Matt O’Brien and Neo-Futurist Greg Allen. Of these the most satisfying–if I can use a word like satisfying to describe Beckett–are those directed by Allen. This despite the fact that the plays he directs (Come and Go, Act Without Words II, and What Where) are much colder and more forbidding, formal, and abstract than the two O’Brien is responsible for (Footfalls and Embers)....

BURNS SISTERS BAND Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Throughout the 70s the five Burns Sisters gathered a following as lesser-known pop divas, their spiffy, ethereal act garnering a handful of hit singles as well as appearances in Louis Malle’s Atlantic City and Woody Allen’s Radio Days. But they disbanded in the early 80s and moved to Ithaca, New York, to join more of their siblings (there were 12 in all)....

CHRISTY DORAN & THE HENDRIX PROJECT Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The music of Jimi Hendrix has an intangible quality that almost guarantees artistic suicide when musicians cover his tunes. But that hasn’t stopped plenty of musicians from trying. This group led by Swiss guitarist Christy Doran is the latest in a long line of people doing jazz-related Hendrix projects, from Gil Evans, who’d planned to record with the guitarist before he OD’d, to flautist Robert Dick....

Albany, New York, isn’t usually thought of as a major blues center, but it’s been home to bassist Ernie Williams for more than 30 years. He had a solid reputation in the clubs of Albany’s old African American South End until the twin demons of urban renewal and social deterioration killed off the scene. Slowly Williams has expanded his horizons, and now, as he approaches his 70th birthday, he’s basking in the light of his “newfound” popularity outside the old neighborhood....

Re: David Futrelle, “Marx on the Skids” [September 15] Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Thanks for the stunning insight that Marx wrote Capital because he didn’t want to get a job. If you had actually read the book whilst you were posing, you would have noted that earlier concepts of “revolutionary proletariat” and “alienation” had all but disappeared in the mature work; you also would have noted that Marx envisioned socialism as a postcapitalist social form, that is, one that could occur only in a society that already had the means of production to make a transition to collective ownership tenable–not some fucking banana republic or feudal monarchy (like Czarist Russia); he had England in mind....

Dear editors, Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his startling negative review of Elvis Costello’s recent Rosemont appearance, critic Rick Mosher tries to come off as the authority on the talented performer [August 23]. However, by concentrating on giving us a blow-by-blow rundown of Costello’s career, Mosher fails to capture the real spirit of the show. Mr. Mosher, people were not sitting on the edge of their seats when Costello played his first two numbers, they were standing and cheering with intense euphoria....

It’s been a long time since I got groped. Long enough that I almost forgot about it. Suddenly, happily, the memory is with me again. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Let’s get back to getting groped. That’s what I want to remember, those days when I was a sower of wild oats, mostly the fermented kind. From bar to bar, my companions and I would wander....

The Tender Land Ravinia Festival, June 24 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Copland and Thomson were a part of the same between-the-wars regionalist movement that propelled the painting careers of Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton. Indeed, the scores for Appalachian Spring or Billy the Kid could make appropriate background music for an exhibit of Benton’s work. But the regionalist movement ran out of gas with our involvement in World War II, and a new internationalist fashion took over....

DANIEL LEPKOFF Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sometimes dance is almost a language in which certain movements mean certain things–as in Balinese dance, where a hand gesture might communicate that “the man crossed the river” or “he met a tiger.” Modern dancers tend to use a movement to indicate a specific emotion, such as a soaring leap to represent sexual passion, and the viewer must know or be able to intuit its language....

Taking its name from the Tower Building at the intersection of North, Damen, and Milwaukee, which once housed the Coyote Gallery, this annual Wicker Park event includes a sizable theater and performance component–and this year’s is bigger than ever, boasts coordinator Jonathan Pitts. Running September 7 through 10, the sixth annual Around the Coyote features 37 different theater and performance-art productions–that’s more than 125 performances in four days, at various locations both indoors and out....

Emerging last year as a guest rapper on Nas’s “Life’s a Bitch,” AZ has quickly scorched the R & B charts with his debut single, “Sugar Hill,” a vivid and desperate plea to escape Brooklyn’s ghetto. The tune’s blunt delivery plays off a thick, almost sultry groove and a swirl of laid-back female vocals without falling into west-coast gangsta traps. The remainder of his debut album, Doe or Die (EMI), produced by Pete Rock and L....

A fresh, character-driven, often funny, and unfashionably upbeat (as well as offbeat) first feature by Wes Anderson, this film–written by one of the lead actors (Owen C. Wilson) in collaboration with Anderson–focuses on three young and immature male friends and aspiring thieves in Texas. Two of Wilson’s brothers, Luke and Andrew, also act in the film, the former playing another of the leads; the third friend is played by Robert Musgrave, and Like Water for Chocolate’s Lumi Cavazos and Hollywood veteran James Caan also play significant roles....

APRIL Saturday 29 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You might not have known that today is Geoffrey Fushi Day in Chicago, nor even who the heck Geoffrey Fushi is. Turns out he’s a partner in the world’s largest violin firm, Bein & Fushi Rare Violins, and a cofounder of the Stradivari Society, a group dedicated to getting good violins into the hands of talented young artists....

KATHARINE BOYD This incident, and others (another neighbor demanded to have a sundial in my mother’s backyard, saying it really belonged to them because it had been part of their property at the turn of the century–at least 70 years before either of them had bought), helped remind me of the malignant acquisitiveness, pettiness, and stupidity rampant throughout our culture but perhaps underlined in suburbia, where such issues as property lines, landscaping, septic systems, and cars all seem to be fodder for endless discussion, analysis, speculation, and confrontation....