Jarhead With Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Jamie Foxx, Lucas Black, Chris Cooper, and Skyler Stone Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like most of the good things in Jarhead–a somewhat muddled adaptation by writer William Broyles Jr. (Cast Away) and director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) of Anthony Swofford’s best-selling 2003 memoir–the reference to Apocalypse Now comes from the book, which alludes to movies in its first paragraph....

In January 1999 author Barry Singer published an appreciative essay about composer Vernon Duke in the New York Times. Duke, a Russian emigre who lived in Paris in the 1920s and New York after that, was a classical composer who also wrote some of America’s most unforgettable popular music–pieces like “April in Paris” and “Autumn in New York.” He collaborated with lyricists like Ira Gershwin and Ogden Nash, hung out with Prokofiev, and published “serious” music under his Russian name, Vladimir Dukelsky, but he “never caught on as a brand-name composer” of either classical or popular music....

Moonlight and Magnolias Selznick’s great accomplishment was to transcend the novel while staying true to it. Sometimes dismissed as pro-Dixie melodrama, the novel and film are knowing critiques of the regional, racial, sexual, and class conflicts that continue to divide us. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Selznick had the vision to buy the movie rights before the book was published, believing that Depression-era audiences would love Scarlett’s ruthless moral compromises and defiance of convention....

Set at a Florida retirement community and focusing on a local “bereavement club,” this funny, nervy, and pointedly unrated geriatric sex comedy is both enhanced and occasionally limited by being targeted at baby boomers. The sound track abounds with golden oldies (“Love and Marriage,” “Papa Loves Mambo”), the story culminates in a sock hop, and sometimes the ensemble portrait even recalls teen flicks of the 50s and 60s. So part of the kick–along with seeing Dyan Cannon, Joseph Bologna, Brenda Vaccaro, and Sally Kellerman thrive in this special context–is generational nostalgia....

Square is the word for singer Michael Whelan’s big-band revue of old favorites by Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hart, Jerome Kern, and others. Dorky costumes, cheesy lighting, and unsurprising “surprises” don’t help. The real issue, however, is Whelan’s stolid if technically expert singing: his powerful sustained notes homogenize the music, especially a horribly unquirky rendition of “My Funny Valentine.” Singer Roberta Duchak is more sensitive rhythmically yet awfully bright and unsupple on the high notes....

“Estrogen Fest 2005: Changing the Rules!” runs through 6/5 at the Storefront Theater in Gallery 37 Center for the Arts, 66 E. Randolph. Presented by the Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs in conjunction with Prop Thtr, this annual showcase of women’s performance features artists in the fields of theater, spoken word, poetry, dance, and music. The festival consists of two alternating programs of short works. Program A, “History, Fantasy, and Myth,” runs through 6/4: Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 5 PM....

The Park District’s after-school program in Lincoln Park is so popular that parents wait in line overnight to reserve spots for their children. Yet in August the Park District cut the number of kids it would take by a third. “Where are our tax dollars going if they can’t keep an after-school program open?” asks Gaylon Topps Alcaraz, whose 11-year-old daughter is now on the waiting list for the program. “What are working parents supposed to do?...

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein Bud and Lou as two delivery men with an oblong package for Frankenstein’s castle. As burlesque and later radio comics, Abbott and Costello found their metier in bizarre patter routines; they never got the hang of the kiddie slapstick Universal assigned to them, and their physical comedy is low, heavy, and graceless. This 1948 effort is probably the last of their watchable films, though it’s a long way from their best....

James Van Osdol has been a fixture on local airwaves for more than a decade, but his job just got more high-profile. Since July 17 he has been the morning-drive DJ at one of his old haunts, Q101, replacing the recently departed Erich “Mancow” Muller. The gig’s only temporary–the station is working on a new morning show that will debut in the fall–but Van Osdol’s not complaining. “I’ve held down a lot of temp jobs over the years,” he says....

Just Like Jim Crow And Then They Took Over the Media Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » About a month before FDR signed the 1942 order that allowed Japanese-Americans to be corralled, Walter Lippmann alerted America to the danger they posed. The fact that since war had broken out there’d “been no important sabotage on the Pacific Coast” was all the proof the great pundit needed: “This is not, as some have liked to think, a sign that there is nothing to be feared....

Fresh off a pair of triumphant concerts at Ravinia, Kevin Cole unveils a new program of American pop classics, What Can You Say in a Love Song (That Hasn’t Been Said Before). Cole has carved a reputation as perhaps America’s finest Gershwin pianist–at Ravinia he played the Concerto in F as well as the solo-piano version of Rhapsody in Blue, which is the highlight of his superb new Cole Plays Gershwin CD....

This year marks the Legendary Pink Dots’ silver anniversary, but Edward Ka-Spel and his merry band won’t be celebrating it with a breakthrough album or retrospective tour. The idiosyncratic path they’ve followed over the years might’ve swung them perilously close to having a goth-club hit on rare occasions, but the group has never traversed very far from the same semipopular space as space-rock lifers like Gong and decade-spanning cultsy clusterfucks like Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV....

Finnish producer Sasu Ripatti made his name in the late 90s with a series of noisy ambient dubscapes–and though several of them were credited to Conoco and Sistol, that name was Vladislav Delay, the entity to which production was ultimately attributed. Then, in September 2000, he released Vocalcity on Forcetracks–a subdivision of Frankfurt’s conceptual techno label Force Inc. devoted to clubbier house–under the alias Luomo. The album, which fused his usual frosty, cerebral approach with the supercharged emotionalism and sonic warmth of diva-led house, came as something of a shock to fans of his earlier work....

My inner handwringer says I shouldn’t encourage Macabre–think of the children, she says, especially the ones who can’t tell the difference between worshipping serial killers and satirizing people who worship serial killers. Even if the band’s kidding–and there’s no way to be sure they are!–some kid with an underdeveloped sense of humor might take them seriously and end up murdering somebody himself, and then on top of all the bloodshed we’d have to endure a bunch of self-righteous lawyering even more fucked-up than the suit that one poor dead guy’s parents filed against Ozzy for “Suicide Solution....

Over the last decade Stones Throw has become one of hip-hop’s most reliable imprints, achieving success without resorting to distasteful mainstream maneuvers and gradually expanding its scope to include weird, old-school-influenced soul and funk. That sensibility comes from label founder peanut butter wolf, a producer and DJ too busy digging deep into his voluminous record collection to bother with flashy turntable tricks. He’s celebrating the label’s ten-year anniversary with the release of Chrome Children, a new 18-track compilation (coproduced with the Adult Swim network) that features no less than six contributions from producer and sometime-MC Madlib, Stones Throw’s other driving force....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Police officer Troy Brungs, 35, of Circleville, Ohio, was reassigned to a desk job in January pending a hearing on a DUI charge; in the previous five years Brungs had received three suspensions and seven written reprimands and crashed his patrol car three times. And two convicted killers nearly managed to escape from death row at a prison in Mansfield, Ohio, in February, even though an official was tipped off about the plan twice in the two weeks before the attempt and told the prison’s security chief both times....

ONEIDA have always been (and continue to be) essentially abstract hard rockers, but I can’t think of many other groups that’ve made such a virtue of self-reinvention. I’m tempted to call the new The Wedding (Jagjaguwar) their best, but that wouldn’t be responsible–each new phase of this Brooklyn band’s career has provoked superlatives from me, and their previous record, the Krautrock opus Secret Wars, is just as good on its own terms....

Steve Nash Harold Henderson: Most of your objects have tracking numbers. Are there a lot that still don’t? Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » HH: I know it’s more fun to go out in the field than to stay home and organize last year’s finds, but why did he leave that work undone? SN: He almost always wrote up his fieldwork within a year. But he only cataloged those items that he wrote about and, for whatever reason, he didn’t publish all the sites he excavated....

Chicago’s best hope for Olympic glory in Athens this month could be a 36-year-old Serbian guy who lives in a two-bedroom apartment in Ravenswood. Ilija Lupulesku is rarely recognized in Chicago, but from time to time he’s reminded that he used to be a superstar, a legend known by a single name. Asked if he has a table at home, the top-ranked table tennis player in the U.S. snorts, “No, I don’t have a table in my basement....

Stages of Memory: The War in Vietnam Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Internationally recognized artist Dinh Q. Le–born in Vietnam, raised in the United States, and now living in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon)–brilliantly addresses these questions in his series “Persistence of Memory,” which examines the way pop-culture images of Vietnam helped form his identity. The title comes from a Salvador Dali painting of the same name that combines representational images in surreal ways to reflect on the creative process....