Two teenage girls (Kirsten Dunst and Michelle Williams) touring the White House in the mid-70s stumble upon some secrets of Richard Nixon (Dan Hedaya) without realizing what they are, and when things snowball they wind up as Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s “Deep Throat” informant. This is silly and shameless stuff that made me laugh quite a lot, in part because it provides the perfect antidote to the neo-Stalinist pomposity of Oliver Stone’s Nixon and the glib self-importance of Alan J....

Lead Stories “I know I’m not perfect”: drunk driver Donald Branch, sentenced in June in Memphis to 49 years in prison for killing a pregnant woman and her daughter. “I’m not perfect”: Steven Carmichael, 39, in Portland, Maine, in July. He has been convicted of burglary, theft, drug trafficking, and two rapes. “I’m not perfect”: convicted murderer Raymond O. Nichols, in a singles ad he placed from his Massachusetts prison cell in May....

OUMOU SANGARE Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Like the American protest singers of the 60s, when Oumou Sangare began to challenge the mores of her native Mali in the late 80s, she couched her harsh words in pretty sounds. Over the course of three hypnotic albums Sangare has openly criticized the oppressive traditions of Malian male hegemony, from polygamy to arranged marriage. I’m not sure how nuanced the English translations of her lyrics are, but according to them the title track of her most recent album, Woroton (World Circuit/Nonesuch), warns brides-to-be that “Marriage is a test of endurance because / The bride-price of a mere ten kola nuts turns the bride into a slave....

See How They Ran Political Atrocities of 1998 As the general election got under way, she brushed aside the advice of her horrified staff and launched into a tirade against a critical column by George Will. “I think because he could not say ‘nigger,’ he said the word ‘corrupt,’” she charged. In fact, Will hadn’t used the C word, much less the N word. She soon issued an apology. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

This elegantly mounted 1998 film is a delightful, gently comic tweaking of the British class system. Based on a true case from the 1870s, the story begins a decade after aristocrat Roger Tichborne has vanished at sea, when his family sends its black servant, Bogle (John Kani), to Australia to search for him. Feeling ill-treated after his decades of service, Bogle chooses a likely pretender, a loutish and alcoholic butcher named Arthur Orton (Robert Pugh), and the pair conspire to pass him off as Roger and split his inheritance....

The impressive directorial debut of actress Joan Chen, who’s appeared in everything from Twin Peaks to The Last Emperor to Heaven and Earth. Adapted from the novella “Tian Yu” by Yan Geling, who collaborated with Chen on the screenplay, and filmed in Tibet, this feature has enraged mainland Chinese government officials–not only because it was shot without an official permit but apparently also because its tragic plot gives such a dark portrait of the effects of the Cultural Revolution....

Their press release was full of the kind of womyn-goddess-sister-spirit rhetoric that usually makes eyes roll–the Women’s Action Coalition and the Lesbian Avengers have decided to “Girlcott” this year’s Lesbian & Gay Pride Parade over allegations of past sexual harassment. While both groups will participate in Saturday’s “Dyke March,” they’ll stand on the sidelines during Sunday’s Pride Parade, passing out leaflets and armbands instead of joining in. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

Yarima Ariza has been getting unwanted attention for her unruly tresses since she was a teenager in Bogota. Her school was a strict French institution, and girls weren’t allowed to wear makeup or jewelry. “In 1986 the perm came to Colombia and girls started wearing them,” says Ariza. “The director of the school started calling them bad names like ‘fatal woman’ because they were doing something artificial to their bodies. He didn’t know if I was wearing one or not, but he would punish me anyway....

Next year will mark the 100th anniversary of the publication of a series of scientific papers under the general title “The Ecological Relations of the Vegetation on the Sand Dunes of Lake Michigan.” Written by Dr. Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago, the papers were a major contribution to the young science of ecology, a major shaper of what we now think of as the commonsense view of the structure and functioning of natural communities....

Bobby Rush’s enemies smell blood. “We’re living in fantastic economic times,” says Trotter, who wants to use the skills he perfected as a Springfield wheeler-dealer to snare money for the district. “Bobby, what have you brought back to our community?” From Rush’s personal pain has come political action. As an urban congressman, he’s always advocated gun control–he’s cosponsored 31 bills, including the Brady Bill and the assault weapons ban. But after Huey died, he went on a media tour to condemn the “glorification” of guns....

Lead Stories House of Lords Babylon Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In September the tenth Lord Hardwicke, Joseph Phillip Sebastian Yorke, was suspended by Britain’s House of Lords after it was reported that he tried to sell cocaine to a journalist. Several days before that, Lord Dunleath reported in a speech to the house that he had discovered that photos of naked young men had been posted on the lords’ Web site....

POLISH-AMERICAN SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In 1995 Polish conductor Wojciech Niewrzol Victor, a new transplant to Chicago’s western suburbs, founded the Naperville Chamber Orchestra and began to recruit top graduates from local conservatories. Now the NCO serves as the nucleus of the Polish-American Symphony Orchestra, which convenes whenever a score calls for something bigger than a chamber group. The epic centerpiece of the orchestra’s concerts this weekend, Polish pianist and composer Ignacy Jan Paderewski’s Symphony in B Minor (Polonia), premiered in 1909; it winds through the history of his people and climaxes with a depiction of the ill-fated uprising against czarist Russian rule in 1863....

By Ted Kleine Today the “independent movement” is Shiller voting “no” when Mayor Daley’s budget passes 49-1. Her detractors say she’s an anachronism, no matter how hard she tries to adjust to the upwardly-mobile character of her ward. “She hasn’t been the same since the Berlin Wall collapsed,” one joked. Longtime residents say the Newcomers can’t appreciate what “Helen” (nobody calls her Alderman Shiller) has done for Uptown, how she’s repaved the streets and repaired the backed-up sewers....

Just Say No Both aspects of his personality are on display in Just Say No, a scabrous satire of the era when Ronald Reagan ran the country and Ed Koch ran New York (into the ground, some might say). Zak optimistically calls this off-Broadway failure “a play ahead of its time,” but today it seems more in need of resuscitation than rediscovery. To Kramer, the Reagan-Koch years seem the epitome of political corruption and moral hypocrisy, a time when AIDS ran rampant while the dictators of public policy did nothing to stop it, fearful of offending religious right-wingers and of revealing the homosexuality of highly placed persons....

BIS 9/17, METRO At least part of the reason these Scottish kids get such glowing press is that no critic wants to be the evil Gargamel who harshes on the Smurfs’ sugar buzz. After career boosts from Beastie Boy Mike D (who signed them to Grand Royal in 1997) and some high-profile opening gigs, with their new Social Dancing (produced by Andy Gill, of all people), they seem poised to take to the airwaves–and that’s the point at which their guitar-spiked synth-pop ditties (and the spunky yapping of Amanda “Manda Rin” Mackinnon, who looks and sounds like a Japanese cartoon character) will become truly oppressive....

Orland Park’s MPI Home Video first attracted attention in 1986, when it released the Chicago Bears rap video “The Superbowl Shuffle.” Later it drew even more notice with the video Faces of Death, featuring gory footage of corpses and violent ends. The ensuing controversy put MPI’s owners, brothers Waleed and Malik Ali, on the talk-show circuit, and soon their company produced the slasher movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, filmed in Chicago....

Coffee With David Hauptschein and Joseph Fosco By Justin Hayford Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Hauptschein is perhaps best known for his “found text” performances, in which he invites people to read letters or diary entries onstage. Earlier this year he teamed up with WBEZ’s Ira Glass to broadcast stories pulled from the Web. Now he’s teamed up with composer and performance artist Joseph Fosco to put onstage what they call a “nonvirtual chat room....

BEASTIE BOYS/A TRIBE CALLED QUEST Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Beastie Boys and A Tribe Called Quest–whose joint world tour makes a sold-out stop here this week–are probably at the peak of their popularity, but their new albums boot their groundbreaking days firmly into the past. At this point, I guess just maintaining relevance on such a large scale is enough of a feat....

The line between homage and satire can be thinner than Occam’s razor, as Anne Bogart’s tribute to the notoriously eccentric avant-garde director Robert Wilson illustrates. Using elements from Wilson’s better-known pieces (Einstein on the Beach, Civil Wars) and provocative quotations from his public pronouncements, she’s fashioned a one-man show that can be read as a tribute–or a send-up. Will Bond, who plays Wilson, plumbs the man’s depths at one moment, revealing the passion beneath the postmodernist’s cool exterior....

Shane Bugbee first became interested in serial killers when John Wayne Gacy was arrested in 1978. Ten years later Bugbee, who’s 30, started writing to Gacy and other notorious murderers like Charles Manson and David Berkowitz in an effort to “find out more about their crimes.” He even worked with Gacy on Gacy’s book, A Question of Doubt. Though he says he has a “fondness” for all his pen pals, he was “getting bored with the serial killer type of thing” until he learned about Dorothea Puente....