There aren’t many peppy musicals charting a gay composer’s brain tumor diagnosis and mysterious recovery. A revival of this sometimes glib 1998 offering by songwriter William Finn and playwright James Lapine continues Porchlight Music Theatre Chicagos “Finn Festival.” Partly autobiographical, the work artfully omits one fact: Finn was misdiagnosed with a tumor. If he’d been honest about his situation, these 90 minutes might have been more about anger than relief. Unflaggingly delivered by L....

Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 thriller about the French resistance, finally receiving its first U.S. release, is a great film but also one of the most upsetting films I know. Melville based his story on a novel by Joseph Kessel (Belle de Jour) that was published during the occupation and is reportedly far more optimistic; in the movie a resistance leader (Lino Ventura) gradually discovers that he and his comrades must betray their own humanity for the sake of their struggle, though in the end their efforts are mainly futile....

Rap metal didn’t have to suck. Hip-hop and heavy metal are equally capable of being both visceral and cerebral, so theoretically they should work together just fine. Unfortunately, Limp Bizkit and their ilk spent the 90s begging for a new version of a dictum Lou Reed made about fusion in the 70s: “If you can’t play good rock ‘n’ roll and you can’t play good jazz, put them together and you get a real piece of shit....

JULY Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Part soft-core porn provider and part online community for punk, goth, and emo kids, the three-year-old SuicideGirls.com is one of the few postbubble Internet success stories, claiming 500,000 visitors a week. Earlier this year a half dozen of the site’s pierced and tattooed models hit the road with the Suicide Girls Live Burlesque Show (which came through Chicago in February) and now they’ve spun off into even older media with SuicideGirls, a coffee-table book of color pinup photos and diary entries by the girls....

This benefit screening for Lebanese war relief pairs two remarkable experimental shorts; both are painfully relevant and uncommonly beautiful, though formally and conceptually they’re worlds apart. Jayce Salloum, a multimedia artist who spent 22 years in the U.S. before settling in Vancouver, made Untitled Part 3b: (As if) Beauty Never Ends (2003, 12 min.), whose dazzling and painterly use of color and texture provides a counterpoint to glimpses of Palestinian refugee camps....

The disability “rights” group Not Dead Yet, the National Spinal Cord Injury Association, and like-minded groups are upset by the movie Million Dollar Baby [Hot Type, January 28]. They say it perpetuates the view that the lives of people with disabilities are not worth living. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I’m sure that will be the message some people will take from this movie....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The movie is no masterpiece, but its commercial demise is a shame. As screenwriter of Training Day and the sadly overlooked Dark Blue, Ayer has tried to nudge the renegade cop formula into more troubling territory, aiming his loose cannons straight into the body politic. Dark Blue featured a seriously unglued performance from Kurt Russell as a racist LAPD cop in the days leading up to the 1992 riots, and in Harsh Times, Bale’s smart and discerning vet returns from overseas so full of war that he becomes a threat to his friends and himself–but a promising candidate for the Office of Homeland Security, which wants to send him down to Colombia to kick ass in the drug war....

Especially in spring, baseball is as full of promise as America’s lost wilderness must have been. Maybe the Cubs will win this year. Maybe the Yankees will tank. Baseball represents hope. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Being gay doesn’t really matter to Darren, partly because for him it’s just about sex. He doesn’t love men or a particular man–he loves baseball. As he tells his best friend, the earnest team intellectual Kippy (Kyle Hall in a beautifully modulated performance), “If I’m gonna have sex–and I am, because I’m young and rich and famous and talented and handsome, so it’s a law–I’d rather do it with a guy, but when all is said and done, Kippy?...

The 1900s have only been playing live shows since September, and their debut EP, Plume Delivery, doesn’t come out until May 30. But they’ve led a charmed existence so far. They landed a deal with Parasol Records shortly after their first gig, the EP’s enjoying positive advance notices on indie-rock tip sheets and MP3 blogs, and they sold out a recent headlining gig at the Hideout. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Diplo and Switch, the two DJ-producers that always seem to get mentioned in any discussion of the British/Sri Lankan rapper M.I.A., both spin at Metro tonight. In an amazing Pitchfork interview this past August, Maya Arulpragasam excoriated tastemakers and the press for consistently short-selling her involvement in her own music while praising her collaborators: Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After spending a few hours revisiting Diplo’s stuff, including The Boogie Down Bottle Nose Dolphins, a new set of his characteristic mashups as Hollertronix (with partner Low Budget), and some remixes and a mix CD by Switch (Dave Taylor)–who’s much more involved than Diplo with M....

Tony Malaby should call his next album “Malleable”–no word better conveys the tenor saxophonist’s ability to adapt his sound according to the predilections of his many collaborators. On bassist George Schuller’s Hellbent (Playscape, 2002) Malaby and altoist Tim Berne perform a rigorous dance over the convoluted contours of the songs, exchanging searingly high harmonic cries. As the lone horn on Verbs of Will (Radio Legs), the most recent album by bassist Mark Helias’s trio Open Loose, Malaby adopts a rangier improvisational style, imbuing his long lines with deep blues feeling and sometimes altering his tone to sound like an alto or even a flute....

The Ladykillers With Tom Hanks, Irma B. Hall, Marlon Wayans, J.K. Simmons, Tzi Ma, Ryan Hurst, Diane Delano, and George Wallace. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The will to survive shown by the English during World War II, the blitz in particular, and all the archetypal character traits still associated with that determination–the stiff upper lip, the business-as-usual attitude, the stubborn focus on the minutiae of everyday life–are epitomized in this black comedy’s central character, the imperturbable Mrs....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » James Carroll Bayley, 44, pleaded guilty in May to the murder of his brother Robert last year in Raleigh, North Carolina, and received a sentence of not less than seven years, ten months. Recounting the incident, Bayley said that his brother, whose autopsy revealed a blood alcohol level of .15, tried to force his way into his house, ostensibly to retrieve a loaned power drill....

Lead Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Earlier this month WCAX TV in Burlington, Vermont, reported on Steven Buelow, who was paroled ten years ago after serving time for a rape and murder he committed as a 15-year-old; following incarceration for subsequent minor offenses, he was being held at the state prison at Newport until he could find a residence on the outside. According to officials, Buelow picked at least 15 women out of the Burlington-Middlebury phone book and in July sent them letters introducing himself, describing his appearance and situation, and explaining that he needed a place to stay....

Back when I was living on my own for the first time, I convinced one of my high school buddies to move out of his parents’ house in the suburbs and into my Wicker Park apartment. We moved his stuff in on a Friday afternoon and went out that night to celebrate, hitting a bunch of bars starting here, then checking out the other bars around North, Milwaukee, and Damen. We got kicked out of the last one around four and were headed home when we decided to play football in the street....

Southwest-Side Story Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like Mucci-Beauchamp, who’s part Puerto Rican and grew up in Back of the Yards, Goldberg was a Latina with an unhappy sister. Goldberg and her siblings were raised in the same Mexican home in Pilsen and Little Village headed by a mostly single mother, but while Rosie graduated from college, got a good job as a pharmaceutical rep, and married a doctor, one of her sisters struggled....

In David Mamet and Alaric Jans’s 1977 kids’ play, a Waukegan 12-year-old and his pals Bob (a sheep) and Viv (a girl) journey to the planet Crestview (so named to increase its real estate value). When Crestview’s ruler and his panda patrolmen try to turn Bob into a letter sweater, the earthlings must evade capture and return home in time for lunch. The script and songs balance childlike silliness and wry adult wit, and director Steve Scott’s slick production features especially good performances by Eric Slater as Bob and Kevin Theis as a ham actor who comes to the heroes’ rescue....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kurt Eichenwald may be the most baffling figure in American journalism. While an award-winning business reporter for the New York Times, he paid at least $2,000 to a teenage Internet porn purveyor he eventually wrote about at length in the Times in 2005. Eichenwald says he was trying to lead the boy out of the life and gave him money to help earn his trust, but the payment violated Times policy and Eichenwald didn’t mention it to his editors....

Two new releases are defined by an inability to fathom another culture—Reel Paradise, a U.S. documentary about an American spending a year in the South Pacific with his family, and Dear Wendy, a Danish feature with English dialogue that was shot in rural Denmark and Germany but is set in a poor mining town in the American southeast. Both demonstrate a middle-class complacency that fosters this inadequacy. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Drumdance to the Motherland was recorded live in October of that year in a subterranean coffeehouse in west Philadelphia, on the campus of University of Pennsylvania. It was issued some time later in an edition of 300 copies on Lancaster’s Dogtown label—it wasn’t supposed to be a fetish item, but at the time 300 copies was all he could afford....