Facets Multimedia Center, in collaboration with the French embassy of Chicago, presents a program of contemporary French films, running Friday through Thursday, December 5 through 11, at Facets Multimedia Center, 1517 W. Fullerton. Tickets for all programs are $7; filmmaker Jean-Francois Richet will attend the festival Friday through Sunday. For more information call 773-281-4114. Full Speed Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A feature by Diane Bertrand (1996) interweaving two stories–one about an unhappy wife, the other about a man obsessed with a murder in his family’s past....

RUDRESH MAHANTHAPPA Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Starting with Yusef Lateef and John Coltrane in the 50s and 60s, a fair number of American jazz musicians have investigated the music of the Indian subcontinent, lured by its spiritualism and its heavy use of improvisation. Indian-American alto saxist Rudresh Mahanthappa has followed the same trade route, but in the other direction: he grew up listening to his parents’ recordings of Indian music and then discovered jazz....

Andy Bey Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » After barely appearing on record for the last quarter century, the simmering, throaty baritone of Andy Bey has suddenly become the toast of several towns–notably New York, where he lives and where his 1996 album Ballads, Blues & Bey (Evidence) has attracted the most attention. On it, Bey sings songs by Ellington, Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Cole Porter, accompanied only by his own minimal piano playing and mostly at speeds so slow they would have a snail tapping its foot....

Almost exactly 33 years ago, in October 1964, the critical reception of Jean-Luc Godard’s widest American release of his career and his most expensive picture to date was overwhelmingly negative. But now that Contempt, showing this week at the Music Box, is being rereleased as an art film–in a brand-new print that’s three minutes longer–the critical responses have been almost as overwhelmingly positive. It’s tempting to say in explanation that we’re more sophisticated in 1997 than we were in 1964–that we’ve absorbed or at least caught up with some of Godard’s innovations–but I don’t think this adequately or even correctly accounts for the difference in critical response....

ESQUISITE CORPS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This Sunday at the Art Institute three Chicago composers and three performers will demonstrate their version of Exquisite Corpse, a parlor game favored by Parisian surrealists in which various artists would sketch parts of the human body on the same folded sheet of paper without knowing what the others had drawn. Each composer–Northwestern University’s cyber composer Amnon Wolman and two of his doctoral students, Frederick Gifford and Peter Edwards–chose an instrument and wrote music for the first section of the piece....

I’ve seen Ross McElwee’s documentary Six o’Clock News (1996) twice, on video about eight months apart, and each time there was a moment roughly halfway through when I felt that he was finally about to turn a corner as a filmmaker. This Boston-based North Carolinian is known as an independent autobiographer, yet what I’ve come to appreciate most in his work are those moments when autobiography leads him away from himself to other people....

I’m driving west on Golf Road, straight into the setting sun, in search of the Schaumburg Baseball Stadium. I left home nearly an hour before game time but won’t make the opening pitch: there’s an endless line of red lights hanging like pop-ups between here and my goal–the field they’re promoting as Little Wrigley. I can get to the real Wrigley faster than this. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

HOLMES BROTHERS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Holmes Brothers burst onto the national scene in 1989 with In the Spirit (Rounder), a fiery fusion of churchy ecstasy and sensual R & B, but their professional music career extends much further back than that. Guitarist Wendell and bassist Sherman worked the R & B circuit for the better part of 25 years, appearing with such notables as Jimmy Jones and Inez Foxx....

MUFFS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Kim Shattuck plays guitar like Johnny Ramone and yowls like there’s coarse twine wrapped round her larynx. But over the course of four albums by her band the Muffs, her songwriting contributions have sounded increasingly more inspired by AM radio than by her LA punk roots (she played bass in the all-female garage-punk combo the Pandoras). Alert Today Alive Tomorrow, released in June, is the Muffs’ first indie album–finished with Warner Brothers, they’re now on the San Francisco label Honest Don’s....

If it was payback, and it was, what exactly was it payback for? Like many feuds, the rivalry between King and Westinghouse in boys basketball seems to go back beyond anyone’s clear memory. When King defeated previously unbeaten Westinghouse for the Public League title two Sundays ago at the Pavilion, was it revenge for the Jaguars’ overtime loss to the Warriors earlier in the season–or a long-overdue answer to 1992, the year a Kiwane Garris Westinghouse team upset a heavily favored Rashard Griffith King squad?...

CHICAGO UNDERGROUND TRIO 9/19, LOUNGE AX The Chicago Underground Duo is a skinny cousin to cornetist Rob Mazurek’s Chicago Underground Orchestra, which mixes funky bop and soulful free jazz on a larger scale; on the duo’s forthcoming debut, 12° of Freedom (Thrill Jockey), Mazurek and drummer Chad Taylor use vibes, piano, and bamboo flute along with their primary instruments to construct subtle, spartan soundscapes that occasionally burst into flurries of notes and beats or fill out into mesmerizing grooves....

THE BELMONT AVENUE SOCIAL CLUB, Pyewacket, at Center Theater Ensemble. Bruce Graham’s two-act drama about backroom political deals tries very hard to matter. In an unnamed east-coast town, shadowy deal maker Fran Barelli–leader of the Belmont Avenue Social Club–must appoint a successor to corrupt councilman Petey, who’s just died. Barelli brushes aside overzealous young social worker Doug Reardon, whom he’s trained in politics since childhood, in favor of aging lapdog Tommy Krueger; Reardon then takes it upon himself to unearth Krueger’s dirty past, “for his own good....

This first feature by Erick Zonca is more typical than exceptional as an example of French cinema’s recent trend toward realistically depicting regional life, and its sex scenes have been trimmed to satisfy the puritanical, studio-run Motion Picture Association of America (which wouldn’t dream of interfering with the genocidal mayhem of the blockbusters). But this story of the wavering friendship between two young working-class women who meet at a clothing factory in Lille (Elodie Bouchez and Natacha Regnier) is well worth a look, above all for its nuanced performances....

By Michael Miner Unlike many other of sport’s hallowed prizes, the BAT–which every schoolboy can tell you stands for Baseball Acumen Test–was established as a hostile act. The point being made 18 years ago was that the mavens of the press box who are paid to prognosticate in print each spring have no more idea than the squirrels in the attic how teams will actually do. But the BAT is now a mature award dripping with prestige, and tentative conclusions can be drawn....

A CHRISTMAS CAROL, Goodman Theatre, and JACOB MARLEY’S CHRISTMAS CAROL, Goodman Theatre Studio. Determined to give Scrooge’s dead partner his due, Tom Mula makes him the hero of Jacob Marley’s Christmas Carol. True to the spirit of Dickens’s 1843 Christmas classic, Mula’s vibrant, 140-minute one-man show–spiritedly staged by Steve Scott and based on Mula’s best-selling 1995 novella–teems with “backstage” revelations that alternately subvert and support its famous source. Best of Chicago voting is live now....

My husband, whose name is, in reality, Bob, was paging through the Sunday paper, the New York Times Book Review, to be exact. He read aloud a particularly pungent description of a fictional cad: “He needs his soon-to-be-ex lover to buy his plane ticket home.” This slimy scenario sounded mighty familiar. In fact, the same maneuver was once perpetrated upon me by a guy named David Eddie. It only took me a moment to’ think to snatch the book review from Bob and locate the name of the author in question: David Eddie....

You’ll have to forgive Shari Fields if she sounds a bit jaded. But after three years of working as a professional belly dancer, she’s just being practical. “A belly dancer’s career is very limited,” says Fields, who’s 32. “Once you start to age, there’s always younger belly dancers that’ll dance for less–that’ll undercut your prices. It’s just a fact.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Raised in northeast Iowa–where her father was a civil engineer, then a minister (“I didn’t grow up as a minister’s daughter, but I graduated from high school as one”)–she first saw a belly dancer at a U2 concert in 1992....

Silicon Alley? It’s in the works, according to Vanessa Hughes, writing in Chicago Software Newspaper: “A software company business incubator district [is] slated to spring up in the South Loop….The plan is to designate an area of the city for IT [information technology] companies to set up shop in older underutilized buildings. The city is looking at the upper stories of B and C buildings–which are those built around 1900-1920 and some that were built in the 60s....

Shhh–don’t tell the left hand! According to Robert Dreyfuss, the Chicago-based AMA–through its political action committee–gave $10,000 apiece to three loyal congressional supporters of the National Rifle Association, “even as it endorsed gun control in the name of public health” (New Republic, June 22). Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Where can we find the elite, business-oriented architects who will say this now? Gerald Danzer of the University of Illinois at Chicago quotes Daniel Burnham’s Chicago Plan in the new book Envisioning the City: “The Lake front by right belongs to the people....

CROSSING BOUNDARIES IV: LEAP OF FAITH, Strawdog Theatre Company. In its fourth year, Crossing Boundaries takes as its theme “religion”–only slightly less nebulous a subject than last year’s “the life of the mind.” I suppose in a country as spiritually bankrupt as ours the project sounded promising. But whose idea was it to present nine untried plays lasting nearly three hours in the middle of July in a theater that runs its air-conditioning only during intermission?...