Uncle Nino Because of Winn-Dixie An uninvited guest joins an already stressed household, causing pandemonium and upsetting the neighbors as well. The preoccupied, absentminded father assumes this obstreperous if good-natured invader is visiting only temporarily, but on and on he stays, irritating almost everyone apart from the young daughter. Eventually the interloper wins everyone over and brings them all together. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » That’s the familiar plot of not one but two current commercial releases, both wholesome family pictures....

The best Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis movie (1955) is also Frank Tashlin’s best feature at Paramount, a satire about the comic book craze with explosive uses of color and VistaVision, better-than-average songs, and much-better-than-average costars, especially Dorothy Malone and Shirley MacLaine (the latter giving Lewis a run for his money in terms of goofy mugging). Martin and Malone are comic book artists, MacLaine is a model for the Bat Lady, and Lewis is a deranged fan whose dreams wind up inspiring (or is it duplicating?...

Nonsense is especially funny when it’s grounded in a command of the conventions it violates. In this hour-long sketch show writer-performers Beau Golwitzer and Thom Vacca don’t establish that command, so their strange antics seem forced and irredeemably ridiculous. Mediocre acting doesn’t help, but the show’s greatest defect is the writing. Poor timing exacerbates languid, uninspired dialogue; arhythmic bits just stop rather than conclude; corporate-speak, men touching men, and bullied nerds are assumed to be inherently humorous; and at times the action is simply distasteful, as in a scene involving grown men, a little boy, and pornography....

I’ve written before at much greater length about why I find Daniel Smith and his family act so fascinating: his expressions of Christian spiritual revelation are so startling, playful, and consistently, inventively weird that it’s easier to believe in their sincerity than that of more conventional testimonials, which just sound overly Sunday-schooled. Really, if God whispers in your ear, is there any reason to think he’d sound anything like Michael W....

First the Office, Then the Paper? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The office closing will trim PerformInk’s staff by one: office manager Jon Sevigny will hit the street. Everyone else is working from home anyway, says Kaufman, whose schedule changed with the birth of twin daughters two years ago. “It’s gone from me being in the office twice a week and working from home the rest of the time to me being in the office once a week, to me being in the office once every two weeks....

About 40 tropical birds, some uncaged, live in Hunt Slonem’s New York studio, so the bird paintings in his show at Jean Albano may be more realistic than they seem. In Habitat Hyacinths red, green, yellow, and blue parrots face all directions, and rough black brushstrokes represent perches. But everything is covered with a rough grid of lines that implies a cage–Slonem says he means to show that his birds are bred in captivity and that he’s not taking rare species from the wild....

While some people try to provide a broader context/perspective for the imminent changes at WLUW [“Picking Up Its Marbles” by Deanna Isaacs, July 27], and I can appreciate the “wait and see” attitude, the truth is that Kois and Campbell facilitated huge improvements in the management and programming of WLUW, in the past 15 and particularly past 10 years. These improvements continued and even thrived under the partnership with WBEZ. Perhaps the need to be financially self-sustainable was a catalyst to increase the community building that the station already had been doing....

Shirley Mordine says that last year, when the world faced a series of natural and man-made disasters, she couldn’t stop thinking about Portuguese novelist Jose Saramago’s The Stone Raft, which she read a decade ago. In the book a geological chasm opens up between the Iberian Peninsula and the rest of Europe, and Spain and Portugal drift off. Mordine’s interpretation of that surreal event, Quest, isn’t literal. Instead she aims to capture the story’s spirit and its aura of magic realism....

Decades after Ned Broderick fought in Vietnam the war still influences his work, as evidenced in his paintings, sculptures, photographs, and collages at 4Art. Many are fragmented or twisted oddly in space, and most reverse expectations in one way or another–suggesting an unstable world where aggression can surface at any moment. The plaster torso in This Is Me has most of a face, scored and scarred, perched at an angle on a thin neck....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The release of the Mitchell report was typical senatorial bunkum, a lot of hard talk and rhetoric to gloss over what is really a boilerplate rehash of things already known. Gary Matthews Jr. and Bobby Estalella used steroids? You don’t say. Barry Bonds, too? I’m shocked, shocked. The only real earthshaker was trainer Brian McNamee’s claim that he injected pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte with steroids or human growth hormone while they were with the Yankees....

The recent re-formation of Cleveland pop legends the Raspberries is the most unlikely concert event this side of the Pixies reunion last year–and, for those who regard power pop as a religion, a moment on par with the Second Coming. The group broke up in 1974, after a postshow fistfight between singer Eric Carmen and guitarist Wally Bryson in a Chicago parking lot; ever since, they’ve been unfairly deemed a lesser contemporary of the likes of Big Star and Badfinger....

QHow much piss can one consume without getting sick? –Sincerely Curious “All bets are off if you’re drinking the piss of someone who’s got horrendous kidneys,” Dr. W. H. says. “But people with severe, chronic kidney disease may not overlap too much with the piss-party set. The biggest danger would be drinking urine from someone with an infection that’s living downstream from the kidneys, such as gonorrhea, chlamydia, or some type of bladder infection....

A jokester, not a jester, Steven Wright may be the comedian’s comedian. No other comic (except perhaps Woody Allen) has so brilliantly crafted jokes at once nonsensical and elegantly economical. With heavy eyes and unkempt hair, Wright drools his words in monotone, but his celebrated deadpan–surpassed only by Keaton’s–is merely the canvas for his bright abstractions. He pronounces weird paradoxes (“I bought some powdered water, but I don’t know what to add to it”), recontextualizes dead metaphors (“On the other hand, you have different fingers”), aphoristically notes small injustices (“The severity of the itch is proportional to the reach”), and takes leaps in logic (“I spilled spot remover on my dog....

The two writer-performers of Around the Corner Productions say in a program note that their sketch show, focused on characters “with extreme perspectives and traits,” explores “thoughts and emotions that many of us have but don’t allow ourselves to fully experience.” Maybe that’s because these thoughts and feelings are pretty ugly. Still, these perspectives can be comical when Min-aha Beeck and Vinnie Lacey push their characterizations to absurd levels, as when a tough-love mom challenges her son to a bleeding contest....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » There was a time when a cloud of smoke meant one of two things: a passing train or a city room. But today the smokers at the great newspapers of America have been ordered to take their filthy habit to the street, and the Tribune Company has something harsher yet in store for them: Beginning January 1, smokers in its employ will have to pay an extra $100 a month for medical coverage....

Like its beautiful 2004 predecessor, Tony Fitzpatrick’s new The Wonder: Portraits of a Remembered City, Volume 2–The Dream City (La Luz de Jesus/Last Gasp) collects 30 of the artist’s distinctive collages, laden with trademark ephemera like nudie pinups and matchbooks from long-gone Chicago cocktail lounges, bursting with bright reds, bold yellows, and satiny blacks, and reproduced in shimmering detail. The works come off as both wistful and hopeful, and many include Fitzpatrick’s modest, poignant poems (“Working girl lifts heart-shaped soaps from the hotel....

Veteran independent media analyst Danny Schechter presents a comprehensive and devastating critique of the TV news networks’ complacency and complicity in the war on Iraq. The video begins with a parody of Apocalypse Now that’s as funny as anything by Michael Moore, but Schechter means business, and this quickly turns to a rigorous dissection of economic and political factors that have turned our major media outlets into conduits for Pentagon “mili-tainment....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I’ve lived in the same West Town three-flat for more than ten years and, like anyone who stands still that long in the city, I’ve seen the neighborhood change radically around me. Some of it’s been for the better, some of it for the worse, but few upheavals bummed me out more than when the crumbling cottage next door was sold to a developer and my neighbor Nance Klehm had to move....

After her stunning 1999 debut, Black Diamond (Arista), it was hard not to be a little disappointed by Angie Stone’s follow-up, Mahogany Soul (J, 2001). As a progenitor of the so-called neosoul movement, which combines classic soul tropes and instrumentation with hip-hop-style sampling and digital beats, Stone used her smoky, gospel-tinged voice to make new originals sound like lost gems from the early 70s. She still sounded good on the second album, but the songcraft was weak and the arrangements too often forsook the warmth of real instruments in favor of looped riffs....

Barbara Morgenstern is one of minimal techno’s most unconventional artists, a subtle and strange pop singer in the mold of Joe Jackson or Kate Bush. Her gorgeous 2003 release, Nicht Muss, was all meditative electro-pastorals, and heard from a distance her new The Grass Is Always Greener (Monika) could almost be mistaken for wine-bar music. It’s filled with lush major piano chords, soft beats, and Morgenstern’s sultry, wonderfully plain-and-pleasant lights-out coo, but she keeps things sweetly difficult with moments of arty frivolity and hard Teutonic rhythms and syllabic sounds....