This annual offering from Teatro Bastardo–an improvised “movie” in the style of fictional 30s horror director Brunst–has some things going for it. The talented actors, like their droll little program bios, display more than passing familiarity with the oeuvre they’re sending up, and the evening’s deadpan torch-song overture and melodramatic piano accompaniment set the perfect dark and stormy tone. But on the night I attended, it proved a problem even to whip up a plot on the order of an old two-reeler....

A crumbling house is often used as a metaphor for a family that’s falling apart. But playwright Sheila Callaghan takes the concept a step further in this dark comedy: here an apartment is a character in the play, dressed in rags but full of memories of a grand past. And it’s not just in disrepair–it’s actively trying to murder what remains of a violently dysfunctional family, a disturbed little girl and her panicky mother, after the death of the father....

It’s official: the 90s are history. In his new memoir, Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time (Algonquin), David Goodwillie waxes bittersweet on a decade spent drifting through dot-com-crazy NYC. It’s a familiar story–young, privileged writer full of idealism and promise succumbs to the lure of easy money and even easier drugs–that drops a lot of familiar names. But Goodwillie’s tale is refreshingly free of moralizing–the worst effect of a staggering coke habit appears to have been an embarrassing nosebleed at the Four Seasons–and of the rhetorical excesses that mark more gonzo contributions to the genre (cf....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “I don’t support the death penalty, but if I did, Kenny Boy would have been first in line,” she writes. “Ken Lay did far more harm than the average murderer, or even the average terrorist. He left thousands of people destitute, including workers whose pensions evaporated and students whose college savings disappeared. How many people will die in poverty because of Lay?...

Nostalgia is highly selective, abridging the past and adjusting it to fit the terms of the present—and often becoming an ideological con job in the process. Those who wax nostalgic about the radicalism of their youth usually imply that the values that made it so attractive back then also make it impossible to hold on to today. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Gilbert Adair wrote the script, adapting his 1988 novel The Holy Innocents: A Romance, which is, unlike the movie, extremely literary....

The eighth annual European Union Film Festival, with entries from all 25 member states, continues Friday through Thursday, March 18 through 24, at the Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800. Tickets are $9, $7 for students, and $5 for Film Center members. The Friend Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Alexander Voulgaris, the 23-year-old son of Greek director Pantelis Voulgaris, directed this romantic comedy about a randy young accountant....

It’s hard to go wrong with Munro Leaf and Robert Lawson’s children’s classic about a young bull who’d rather smell the flowers than fight, and this musical adaptation for young audiences gets most of the notes just right even when Debbie Wicks La Puma’s score doesn’t offer much excitement (though flamenco guitarist Mehran is a welcome presence). Playwright-lyricist Karen Zacarias adds a story that runs parallel to the original, creating a young bullfighter who’d rather be a dancer, much to the chagrin of his father (a charismatic Gustavo Mellado)....

As a piece of musical vaporware it never rivaled Smile or Chinese Democracy, but during the long wait for its release, Jon Auer’s first solo album acquired a mythic status among power-pop fans. Auer began working on the brand-new Songs From the Year of Our Demise (Pattern 25) in 1999, just after the breakup of his band the Posies, though in the past seven years he’s kept busy with other projects, including the recording of a Posies reunion album, last year’s Every Kind of Light, and a slot in the re-formed Big Star....

He’s been here for years, but ageists take note: LL Cool J doesn’t turn 40 till 2008. Granted, he’s still a little long in the tooth to still be compulsively sweet-talking dissatisfied honeys, and you’ll know if you’re still game for his game from the opening couplet of his new album, Todd Smith (Def Jam): “My 12th album launch / Now everything is carte blanche” provokes either a cringe or a warm laugh....

Making the Piper Pay On September 21 a police officer gave him a warning. “He was a nice fellow,” says Currie. “He said, ‘Commander [William] O’Donnell is pretty upset, and he wants me to write you a ticket.’ I asked, for what? He said, ‘Disturbing the peace.’ I was thinking, whose peace am I disturbing? He said, ‘I don’t want to, but if I get one more complaint I’ll have to write you a ticket....

Long before he founded Court Theatre, Nicholas Rudall was a superb actor, embodying gravitas even when playing a comic loser like Butley or describing “stately, plump Buck Mulligan” during a Bloomsday reading. Performing here as the martyred Thomas a Becket in T.S. Eliot’s verse drama, Rudall will appear in a different church on five consecutive nights in these Poetry Foundation concert readings directed by Bernard Sahlins. True to its roots in morality plays and Greek drama, Murder in the Cathedral is less a play than a series of soliloquies–a debate on morality by Becket, his tempters, his murderers, and the common people....

La Luna Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » For the past 15 years Zygmunt Dyrkacz has been presenting international experimental theater at the scrappy Chopin Theatre, including performances by Poland’s astonishing Teatr Cogitatur. Despite more than two decades of international acclaim, the troupe had never appeared in this country until Dyrkacz brought it here to present Aztec Hotel in 2003. Its most recent nearly wordless show, La Luna, will likely draw large Polish-speaking crowds, as have its past productions....

It started out as a pretty normal evening. A couple weeks ago I was staking out a Gold Coast mansion for a celebrity-gossip rag, waiting to see if a certain fatheaded actor and his newly divorced companion, rumored to be holed up there, would emerge all aglow, their hair tousled, faint, satisfied smiles dancing on their lips. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I rolled up and Sandra waved, smiled, opened the passenger door–much to my alarm–and got in the backseat....

The 43rd annual Chicago International Film Festival certainly covers lots of bases, what with 160 films from 37 countries and loads of special events. But while wanting to be all-inclusive by showing anything and everything has a curatorial purpose and value of its own, it’s doubtful any film festival can realize this. For better and for worse, the programming at Berlin, Cannes, Rotterdam, Toronto, Venice, and many other festivals reflects particular visions of what cinema should be....

We have friends who insist they won’t eat microwave-cooked items and refuse to own a microwave oven, claiming it has deleterious effects on the nutritional value of food. I chuckle over their sensitivity–seems most restaurants today serve many items that are cooked rapidly using microwaves, so I’ll bet our friends eat some of these foods unknowingly. My wife, however, is becoming alarmed over their queer beliefs. Please give her peace of mind....

I was making fun of a colleague at work who has recently returned to smoking cancer sticks. His retort was, “Yeah, well, tall people die younger.” Since I’m about 6-7, this hit me right in the heart–which I suspect is the organ at fault. Is his claim true? –Tom Slattery, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » You actually acknowledge the possibility this shrimp may be right?...

Friday 9 Saturday 10 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » BOTTLE ROCKETS On the Bottle Rockets’ new album, Zoysia (Bloodshot), front man Brian Henneman continues to play the working-class bard, bringing a rare poignancy to even the most run-of-the-mill situations. On “Happy Anniversary” he attends an ex’s party in “my melancholy trousers and my masochistic shirt,” while on “Middle Man” he bemoans his own personal run-of-the-millness, singing “If I could be a little bit younger, if I could be a little bit older / If I could be a little bit friendlier, if I could be a little bit colder....

For this late-night offering, Hell in a Handbag Productions camps up a few classic Twilight Zone and Night Gallery episodes, an idea much funnier in conception than in execution. Part of the problem seems to be that entering the Twilight Zone usually requires the company to abandon its preferred era, the late 70s. The best sketch of the lot has nothing to do with Rod Serling: it’s an original piece by David Cerda, Come and Knock at My Door, featuring the deliriously funny Ed Jones as a homicidal yet oddly credible Suzanne Somers, fixated on killing off disloyal former fans....

An Unobstructed View Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part of the problem is that some tales are simply more interesting or better told than others. This is as true on the stage as it is on the page: the two adaptations of Terkel’s Race I’ve seen here both failed because of the respondents’ banal, repetitive, or disingenuous observations on a complicated and difficult subject....

EXTRA! EXTRA! Female journalist, girlfriend to a hip-hop performer, bashes the entire Warped Tour, except for the hip-hop performers [“Punk Is Dead! Long Live Punk!” August 20]! Dedicating only one sentence to great causes like PunkVoter.com, PETA, and the Syrentha Savio Endowment (breast cancer awareness), and not even mentioning the female-empowering Girlz Garage; the fact that due to punk bands protesting their presence, the armed forces recruiters pulled out of the tour; the consistent politics being discussed in front of tens of thousands of people by bands like Anti-Flag, Bad Religion, NOFX, Rise Against, (International) Noise Conspiracy....