Five years after directing his hit documentary about spelling bees, Spellbound (2002), Jeffrey Blitz returns with a high school comedy that builds on that film’s winning combination of academic stress and offbeat individuals. A put-upon student with a stuttering problem (Reece Thompson) is dragooned by a ferociously competitive schoolmate (Anna Kendrick) to be her partner on the debate squad, and their assigned topic–teaching abstinence in public schools–proves ironic given his deep desire to get his hands on her....

Scott Herren is best known for the adventurous hip-hop-influenced records he’s made under the name Prefuse 73, but early in his career he also released a run-of-the-mill electronica album under the name Savath & Savalas. With its melancholy synth melodies, glitchy textures, and fractured programmed beats, Folk Songs for Trains, Trees and Honey (Hefty, 2000) sounded like dozens of other instrumental electronic albums of the time. Then Herren moved to Barcelona and began working with Spanish singer Eva Puyuelo Muns....

The only thing about Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 3 that didn’t leave me feeling ripped off were the out-of-left-field cameos by Agnostic Front and Murphy’s Law playing to a mosh pit of Masonic punks. Barney stripped and chopped the songs, separating out each instrumental track–a thudding bass line, a snare hit, a guitar feeding back–and leaping from one to another every few frames, roughly sketching the NYHC aesthetic in just a second or two....

Not on the Lips With Sabine Azema, Isabelle Nanty, Audrey Tautou, Pierre Arditi, Jalil Lespert, Daniel Prevost, Lambert Wilson, and Darry Cowl In another eccentric move, Resnais has multiplied the asides delivered to the audience in the original operetta so that the characters address the camera in practically every scene. Ernst Lubitsch had Maurice Chevalier do this in the 1932 One Hour With You, but his hero was sharing a few of his private thoughts with the viewer....

I’ve read about a lot of different methods to increase the number of lucid dreams you have. Most of them require serious commitment, though, and before I take one up I want to know if it actually works. Is there a method that really helps you have lucid dreams? –Derek Murphy, via e-mail Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » No, dolt. Lucid dreaming is a paradoxical state in which the window of consciousness is seemingly closed to the outside world but open to an inner one....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this month I headed up to Blanchardville, WI, for a grave and momentous occasion. Our old friends Mark Kessenich and Linda Derrickson decided it was time to haul their mulefoots Cong and Cherry to a small, organically certified slaughterhouse some 35 miles north. A large part of this decision was economically motivated–they simply couldn’t afford to carry the pigs through the winter (where have I heard that before?...

friday17 cbert jansch, steve mackay & the radon ensemble It’s tempting to think of BERT JANSCH’s new disc, The Black Swan (Drag City), as a comeback, but the veteran British folkie never retired from playing live or making albums–he’s just recording for a hipper, more high-profile label (which also happens to be the first in the U.S. to sign him). Jansch’s 60s and 70s work–as a solo artist, with the influential folk-rock-jazz group Pentangle, or in duets with fellow Pentangle guitarist John Renbourn–has become a touchstone for younger musicians, and on the new album he’s practically annexed by the freak-folk crowd: he’s joined by Beth Orton, Devendra Banhart, David Roback, and others, and coproducer Noah Georgeson has worked with Banhart and Joanna Newsom....

BEAT THE JESTER, at Chicago Dramatists. Beverly-bred playwright Gary Slezak brings local color to this tale of aldermanic succession, and he also knows his family-drama archetypes. Paterfamilias and ward boss Slap Lucek has shuffled off this mortal coil but beams on mirthlessly from the barroom wall. Disappointing son Danny–who’s cut a deal with daddy’s rival Scully–mismanages the fiefdom, triggering the inevitable double cross, while bitter firstborn Jane bides her time, grim as a gangster’s moll....

A Little Night Music Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » And this carefully reconsidered version is by far the best of the half dozen productions I’ve seen, including Prince’s original Broadway staging with Glynis Johns and the Goodman’s 1994 revival, starring Paula Scrofano under the direction of Michael Maggio. Director Gary Griffin and musical director Thomas Murray have specialized, over the past couple of years, in stripping traditionally lavish shows to their essence–their music and characters....

Son of Clifton Chenier, the late great king of zydeco, Clayton Joseph Chenier joined his dad’s Red Hot Louisiana Band in 1978 as a sax player but took over as bandleader and accordionist after he died in 1987. Some say C.J. isn’t quite the squeeze-box star his Grammy-winning pop was, but the burly roots-music Renaissance man has succeeded on his own terms, blending the music his father made famous with elements of funk, R & B, rock, and jazz and playing the resulting gumbo at breakneck tempos....

The 11th annual Chicago Underground Film Festival continues Friday through Tuesday, August 20 through 24, at the 3 Penny. Tickets are $5 for matinees, $7 for screenings after 7:00. Festival passes are $75, and a $35 pass admits you to ten films. To purchase advance tickets call 866-468-3401; for more information call 773-525-3449. Films marked with an asterisk (*) are highly recommended. Brave New York This 16-millimeter documentary takes its title from the Japanese silent by Yasujiro Ozu, which offered a child’s limited perspective on adulthood, but director Roddy Bogawa inverts that dynamic, delivering a middle-aged look at youth....

Fado, Portugal’s most famous musical style, has long been the object of a turf war between purists and those who would infuse it with outside influences. Singer Cristina Branco’s in the second camp, and her latest album, last year’s Ulisses (Decca), is her most radical manipulation yet of fado’s essential sound–intense but elegant expressions of sadness interlaced with piquant guitar figures. The music is traditionally played on acoustic guitar, bass, and the trebly 12-string Portuguese guitar, but every song on the album features piano as well, and a few get viola and classical guitar....

MAROONED: THE NEXT GENERATION OF DESERT ISLAND DISCS EDITED BY PHIL FREEMAN (DA CAPO PRESS) That’s why I was looking forward for so long to Marooned, this month’s belated sequel to Stranded. The MO is the same–20 critics, 20 desert-island discs–but this time the writers are all post-boomers like me. Finally it’s our chance to push back, to begin to extend the musical canon beyond 1979 and redefine it for the years before....

Dumbstruck Columnists were unusually mute–for lack of anything adequate to say, I suppose, as aside from God, there was no one to wag a finger at. (According to Eric Zorn in the Tribune, European and Australian columnists went ahead and wagged that finger.) Four days went by, and then the Tribune’s Steve Chapman wrote a column that left God out of it. “Moments like these mock the notion that human beings should live in harmony with nature,” he said....

Eleanor Balson plays music, teaches yoga, and runs her own children’s entertainment company, making balloon animals, painting faces, and occasionally dressing as the Sugar Plum Fairy. She’s about to move to San Francisco; her final performance as the techno-noise act Soft Serve is January 28 at Heaven Gallery, and her final appearance with Lovely Little Girls, a performance-art band she drums in, is January 30 at Schubas (see the Treatment in Section 3)....

Tanoshii Ham’s known for his improvisational skills. Devotees will tell you to disregard your menu and let the master do the choosing. Trudy Delfosse, a consultant and Web designer who lives in West Rogers Park, was one of Ham’s first customers at San Soo Gab San. “For the first few visits, we’d order our favorite things off the menu,” she says. “Finally, on maybe our fourth visit, Mike looked exasperated and said, ‘Whatever you do, just don’t order....

Jennifer Stevenson’s 2004 debut, Trash Sex Magic (Small Beer Press), is in fact most trashy, sexy, and magical, and even a little creepy–but inventive and engaging from start to finish. Set in fictional Berne, Illinois, on the Fox River, the book stars a pair of trailer-dwelling heroines, mother and daughter Gelia and Raedawn Somershoe. Still a hottie at 60, Gelia has an irresistible sexual allure, as does Raedawn. They also have a supernatural connection with their surroundings–including a 60-foot tree that happens to be one of Raedawn’s lovers....

Jim Gaffigan follows just about every joke with a whispered self-criticism: “That guy’s a dick.” “He lost me with that one.” Parodying listeners’ potential reactions renders the whole process transparent–he challenges audiences to consider not only what his jokes mean about him but what their resistance to his libidinal humor says about them, vocalizing the battle between id and superego. As efficient as Seinfeld and as fixated on the mundane as Larry David, Gaffigan (who was born in Barrington and grew up in Indiana) looks decidedly nonmanic....

Springtime in a Small Town With Hu Jingfan, Wu Jun, Xin Baiqing, Ye Xiaokeng, and Lu Sisi. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A highly charged erotic chamber drama about unfulfilled adulterous passion, Spring in a Small City–made just a year before the communist victory in mainland China–is set in 1946, shortly after the retreat of the defeated Japanese. The film takes place in and around the ruins of a mansion in southern China....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “Written in exile, while Europe burned, The Road to Serfdom’s simple but powerful thesis was that the encroachment of the state into economic affairs inevitably leads to an encroachment in all spheres. For Hayek and his intellectual descendants — from Friedman (Milton) to Friedman (Thomas) — political freedom and economic freedom were inseparable and mutually reinforcing. And over the last 30 years, the adherents of the Friedman/Hayek School have pointed to two coincidental trends in global political economy to back this grand claim: First, the fall of command-and-control economies and the dismantling of welfare states....