David Mamet reportedly took 15 years to finish this excruciating semiautobiographical play, which depicts the relentless, irreversible abandonment of a ten-year-old, John, by his errant father and traumatized mother. In the demanding central role, 14-year-old Jack Donahue delivers a meticulous, stone-faced performance that builds with such measured intensity it becomes almost too painful to watch. The adult actors in this Journeymen production–Shannon O’Neill as John’s beleaguered mother and Daniel E. Brennan as her morally bankrupt childhood friend, Del–need the better part of a half hour in the play’s tricky first scene to reach Donahue’s level of intensity....

The masterpiece among the six 60s films on this program is Ron Rice’s Chumlum (1964), a playful orgy of swinging fabric and hammocks and multiple superimpositions of androgynous figures that seem to rub up against the cloth as often as each other. This overheated utopian dream has a bit of the cluttered, faintly fetishistic aesthetic of Jack Smith, one of the performers, but it’s even lusher than Smith’s 1963 Flaming Creatures....

Helen Mirren’s flinty performance as Elizabeth II is getting all the attention, but equally impressive is Peter Morgan’s insightful script for this UK drama, which quietly teases out the social, political, and historical implications of the 1997 death of Diana, Princess of Wales. Shortly after the shocking news reaches Britain, Prime Minister Tony Blair (Michael Sheen) scores a PR coup by memorializing Diana as the “people’s princess,” while the royal family’s obstinate silence angers their grieving subjects....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A few major stars are featured in the Moro no Brasil, including a pre-fame Seu Jorge, Bahian singer Margareth Menezes, embolada heroes Caju and Castanha, and Recife meta-musician Silverio Pessoa. But the bulk of Kaurismaki’s subjects are largely unknown to Western audiences, and even Brazilian ones. He devotes a good chunk of the film to traditional folk forms, and while that might suggest a kind of fetishism in certain cultures, in Brazil those old styles aren’t just wildly popular among ordinary citizens, they’re the foundation for nearly all of the country’s vibrant contemporary pop music scene....

As they wandered the hallways of Country Music Television’s Nashville headquarters, the Hoyle Brothers couldn’t help but think of that scene in Spinal Tap, the one where the band gets lost on its way to the stage. When they did eventually find a receptionist, they had to wait for her to finish a lengthy personal call on her cell phone. After she hung up, front man Jacque Judy stated the name of the band and explained they were there for the video shoot....

Few things hold the attention more effortlessly than a baby, and Barrie Cole’s dimpled ten-month-old is no exception. So it’s a testament to the charm, intrigue, and joie de vivre of Cole’s and Julie Caffey’s hour-plus performance that I spent most of it oblivious to the child even though she was attached to Cole’s left nipple. In this first installment of Alphabet Soup, the pair’s initial “quarterly report” on a yearlong project that involves writing about one letter of the alphabet each day, they mostly free-associate words beginning with a particular letter until one triggers a memory from childhood or early adulthood....

Though it may not equal the sublimity of his three last features, Luis Bunuel’s masterpiece Belle de Jour (1967, 100 min.) remains a seminal work that clarifies his relationship with Hitchcock. Like Hitchcock, Bunuel was a prude with a strong religious background and a highly developed sense of the kinky and transgressive; what he does here with Catherine Deneuve parallels Hitchcock’s encounters with Tippi Hedren. Adapting a novel by Joseph Kessel, Bunuel and Jean-Claude Carriere recount the story of Severine, a frigid but devoted upper-class housewife (Deneuve) who secretly works at a high-class brothel to satisfy her masochistic impulses....

Most of the key elements in this Portland sextet’s spazzy approach–Grateful Dead-style Americana, Elephant 6 pep pop, sharp harmonies–were present on their last album, 2004’s Field Rexx. But on the irresistible new Wild Mountain Nation (LidKerCow) they turn what was merely an ambitious hodgepodge of sound into something coherent yet explosive, delivered with schizoid glee. The album opens at full strength with “Devil’s A-Go-Go”: splintered beats lurch in and out of sync and screaming guitar licks accelerate and brake without warning, but a hooky melody stitches the chaos into one of the wiggiest tunes I’ve heard this year....

For years crusaders who want to make Chicago’s public spaces smoke free have had the backing of doctors, medical researchers, people who’ve beaten cancer, and the survivors of those who haven’t. That hasn’t swayed the City Council. “We haven’t had the votes in the past, but we’ll be looking for them again,” says 28th Ward alderman Ed Smith, who’s trying to round up the 26 votes he’ll need to pass an ordinance....

These bands are all members of a Finnish underground that parallels the American scene including groups like Pelt, Tower Recordings, and Born Heller. They play music that feels rustic but spurn allegiances to traditional forms, drawing freely from rock, experimental, and international styles. It’s a tight-knit scene–everybody seems to play in everybody else’s bands–and the musicians share a penchant for making inexpensive home recordings that they later put out on dedicated microlabels....

Nina Fabicon, 27, said her style was a mixture of understated and very feminine, so we were surprised when she chose Agga B’s black plastic bubble skirt. Fabicon, who’s studying art history and French at UIC, admits the moldable material, which invites S and M associations, was pretty weird for her, but she loved the cut: “It had that feminine girly puffiness I’m attracted to.” She paired it with Serpico’s cream short-sleeved scoop-neck sweater with black hand-stitched details; its streamlined elegance plays off the frank sexuality of the skirt for a look you might call Blade Runner ballerina....

Visiting my home state, I went to a favorite store where folks buy porn, buy sex toys, or sit in “private” booths and watch XXX videos. It’s always crawling with gay men such as myself, looking for sex. In the parking lot I ran into my stepfather of 12 years, a man who married my mother long after I left home. (I’m 47.) I was stunned. He said he’d been in there to get a magazine for a friend....

When I talked with Shimer College president William Craig Rice earlier this summer about how the venerable little school was doing after its first year as a tenant on the IIT campus, he said he was looking forward to the fall of 2008. Last August, at Rice’s urging, Shimer made a controversial move from its cozy cluster of vintage buildings (all but one homes) in Waukegan to the stern Miesian campus on the south side....

The play being rehearsed in L. Trey Wilson’s Stage Directions requires its two actors to kiss–a task that’s no problem for gay Gary but increasingly uncomfortable for heterosexual Rod. The playwright and the show’s director also must confront their feelings about homosexuality. The topic might have been an invitation to didactic sermonizing, but Wilson–no stranger to the world of show business–is refreshingly candid and evenhanded in his exploration of the African-American community’s expectations of male behavior, lacing his treatment with satirical observations and humorous insights....

Frank and Bartels are talking past each other, or perhaps Bartels doesn’t get it [“What’s Really the Matter With Kansas,” February 10]. Frank is trying to make sense of the red state phenomenon, the fact that rural states once radical have turned conservative. Bartels is using a nationwide poll to analyze the voting behavior of a nationwide class of people. The problem with using a nationwide poll is that we vote for president and for senators by state, not by citizen, a fact well exploited by the Republicans....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Although I was a big fan of the vocal sweetness Mira Billotte brought to her sister Christina’s old band Quixotic, I didn’t immediately take to her own band, White Magic. The music was less direct and simple, more meditative and transcendent, though the group’s connection to the whole friggin’ freak-folk circus eluded me from the very beginning. It took me a while to catch on to their debut album, Dat Rosa Mel Apibus, released late last year on Drag City, but lately I haven’t been able to stop listening to it....

Three . . . Extremes Saw II Three weeks ago the Senate voted 90 to 9 to forbid the “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment of U.S. military prisoners, which has prompted Vice President Cheney to seek an exemption for the CIA. How that will all play out remains to be seen, but one thing’s for sure: torture has never been a hard sell at the box office. One case in point is the grim low-budget thriller Saw, in which a mysterious psycho uses fiendish contraptions to torture innocent people....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » “When people today read the Bible in a non-literal fashion, this is not a retreat from the advances of scientific knowledge. It is rather a return to the classic way of approaching these texts. The only people who are allowing the concerns of modern science to determine the way they read the text are, ironically, the fundamentalists, who seek absolute certain scientific explanations in a text that does not offer them....

CHICAGO, ONCE KNOWN for its filthy steel mills and meatpacking plants, has earned a reputation for cleanliness and environmentalism since Mayor Richard M. Daley vowed several years ago to turn it into the greenest city in the nation. Over the last two years alone, Daley’s won a string of environmental awards and accolades, and while the city hasn’t hit the top spot (awarded in most studies to Eugene or Portland, Oregon), he’s often called America’s greenest mayor....

The crew at Load Records spend so much time making noise under a dark cloud that they don’t seem to realize some of them actually belong in the sun. Take Christopher Forgues, aka Kites. A bunch of the tracks on his very annoyingly titled Royal Paint With the Metallic Gardener From the United States of America Helped Into an Open Field by Women and Children are blasts of home-electronic tweeting over what may be a vacuum cleaner gobbling up the corner of a rug; the rest are lo-fi folkie songs that sound like my dad’s late-60s cassette tapes after we salvaged them from a flood....