Hype Dreams Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sundance annually attracts around 500 film executives from major studios and distributors. All of them are searching for low-budget features with box office appeal as well as fresh talent capable of turning out Hollywood hits. The festival annually screens 26 new independent feature films out of a pool of around 600 submitted for consideration. Almost half of the movies are nominated for awards each year, while the other half, usuallybyfirst-time directors, are screened out of the competition....

Somewhere on the 5400 block of South Woodlawn, there’s a first-floor apartment that may retain a message from 30 years ago. A young photographer concealed his signature on top of a door for posterity, and if it hasn’t been painted over, you might still read the line: “Danny Lyon made ‘The Bikeriders’ here.” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » A New Yorker by birth, Lyon moved to Hyde Park in 1959 to attend the University of Chicago....

Dick Tracy was the 61st cartoon-strip idea Chester Gould submitted to the Chicago Tribune. The other 60 had been rejected, but–ye gods!–Gould handled rejection the way Tracy handled bullets. He had come to Chicago at the age of 21 with a mail-order cartooning course under his belt and the Tribune as his goal, and nothing was going to stop him. For ten years he lobbed ideas at Tribune syndicate head Joseph Medill Patterson and collected thanks-but-no-thanks letters....

If we imagine an Asian-American teeter-totter with “Asian” riding one end and “American” the other, this festival would be stuck to the ground on the “American” side. The Navy Pier performances are emceed by TV and movie stars (George Takei, Lauren Tom), and the acts include a hip-hop turntablist (DJ Shortkut) and a band that blends country and western and Filipino music (Anna Fermin’s Trigger Gospel). Also on the bill are performers of Western classical music (Li-Kuo Chang, Jennifer Cheung, and John Bruce Yeh) and the modern-dance group H....

Lead Stories In May, William Pittman, an official at the Hazelden Foundation near Minneapolis and an authority on alcoholism and anger management, pleaded guilty to harassing his ex-wife, including sending anonymous notes suggesting she kill herself. In September anesthesiologist Thomas J. Valente, 41, pleaded guilty in Apple Valley, Minnesota, to punching a 69-year-old woman in the face in a road-rage incident. And in August, Debra A. Doherty, 38, was charged in Minneapolis with nearly fatally beating her 39-year-old roommate, who suffers from muscular dystrophy, with a broomstick and a crutch....

Lead Stories In July Bennie Casson filed a $100,000 lawsuit in Belleville, Illinois, against PT’s Show Club in nearby Sauget for its negligence in allowing Latest Religious Messages Virgin Mary world tour: Apparitions of Mary were reported in the plate-glass window of a finance company in Clearwater, Florida, and on a wall of a home in Lewis, Kansas, in December 1996; in April of this year on a roadside sign in Sunnyside, Washington; and in June she was spotted in a cluster of trees in Gradina, Croatia, as well as on the floor of a subway station in Mexico City....

Jesus Christ Superstar Jesus Christ Superstar wasn’t always such a harmless bit of all-ages fun: MCA, which put it out as an album first, premiered the stage show warily in 1971, at Saint Peter’s Lutheran Church in New York, with slide projections of religious art and a boozeless reception afterward. That didn’t appease Billy Graham, who declared that it “borders on blasphemy and sacrilege,” or the folks who picketed it on Broadway shouting “Read the book!...

REEMERGENCE, Black Sphota Cocoon, at Holy Covenant United Methodist Church. In its debut production, this performance collective of African-American women demonstrates an austere, imagistic style all its own. Performing in a bare church with hardly a prop, they strive for a kind of visual purity that’s richly resonant, representing the thrill and terror of pregnancy, for example, by rolling a red balloon slowly along a thick rope in midair. They’re also unafraid to challenge some of the sacrosanct familial institutions of African-American culture....

Jacques Rivette’s 20th feature (1997) is perhaps the most classically constructed of all his films, in terms of mise en scene as well as plot. Sandrine Bonnaire stars as a research chemist whose kid brother (Gregoire Colin from The Dream Life of Angels) discovers that their father’s accidental death from falling off a train a few years earlier may have been a murder committed by his business partner (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who’s subsequently taken over the business....

Return with me momentarily to the apartment of Mary Richards, single successful career girl of the 70s. Our heroine is explaining the birds and the bees to her landlady’s daughter, Bess, who wants to know if loving a boy means you have to have sex with him. No, no, no, Mary shouts as she jumps out of her seat, frantically waving her spaghetti arms: sex and love are two different things....

By Michael Miner The case is still pending, the file is fat, and a hearing is scheduled for March 3. Last October the Tribune changed the policy that had guided it in January, tacitly acknowledging that Nancy Jean Marback’s death notice might have been handled better. But in its briefs the Tribune argues in effect that the First Amendment gives it the right to be wrong. It maintains that the Chicago Human Rights Ordinance doesn’t apply in this case and that any harm Marback suffered was self-imposed....

The Final Insult By Jonathan Rosenbaum Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » As I remarked of Nightjohn a couple of years ago, Burnett’s mainstream successes have only increased his anonymity in the mainstream. None of the TV Guide listings for that film or The Wedding carried his name, nor was either film scripted by him. In fact The Wedding–an Oprah Winfrey project for which Burnett was brought on as a hired gun–can’t truthfully be considered a Burnett film at all....

haywood.qxd Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The Organization of the NorthEast (ONE) was founded in the early 1970s by a coalition of churches, social service agencies, and residents of Uptown and Edgewater who were determined, despite the split into “two” communities, to retain a sense of community along the lakefront between Irving Park and Devon. ONE’s mission is to maintain and support a mixed-income, multiethnic community....

The morning of my wedding, Catherine came over to help me get ready. She started putting my makeup on. I said, “Don’t put it so heavy.” She said, “Do you think that I would make you look terrible for your wedding day?” Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The flowers came. My mother was a little woman, and she looked at her corsage and said, “I’m not wearing that....

BOREDOMS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » If the Boredoms’ early records were the musical equivalent of attention deficit disorder, their current Super æ (Birdman) could be the result of a semisuccessful course of Ritalin. While they still cherish the jump cut–the title track, for instance, cobbles together churchy organ drones, chanted vocals, a kind of ritualistic voice-and-percussion passage, a bombastic two-chord psychedelic guitar “intro,” and alternatingly thrashing and hydroplaning post-Butthole Surfers mayhem–more often than not on Super æ they develop at least one element over the long haul....

Helsinki Philharmonic I don’t know how honest used-car dealers or aluminum-siding salesmen are these days, but the old con games are alive and well in classical music. This recent release from the contemporary Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara is a textbook example of bait and switch. Everything about the packaging and promotion of this CD is designed to make you think Rautavaara is one of those ultratrendy neomedievalist composers following in the wake of current cult superstar Arvo Part, who composes droning monodies in praise of the austere glories of the Russian Orthodox Church....

Gabbeh Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Is it possible for a movie to be intoxicatingly pretty without quite attaining beauty? Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s fantasy about the nomadic Ghashghai of southern Iran, who weave colorful carpets that tell stories, is a delightful treasure chest of colors, costumes, landscapes, magical-realist details, and very simple characters–all of whom tend to have the allure of trinkets and living legends....

GREAT GUITARS Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Guitarists Charlie Byrd, Herb Ellis, and Bucky Pizzarelli don’t really need to bill themselves as “great”–their accomplishments alone make the point. They all came into their own in the 50s, soon after the electric guitar was established as a bona fide jazz voice–Byrd with Woody Herman’s band, Ellis in Oscar Peterson’s famous drummerless trio, and Pizzarelli as a member of Benny Goodman’s small bands–and they’ve all grown still better with experience....

Hemingway Centennial Celebration An Artist’s View of Hemingway Fernando Perez directed this 1990 Cuban feature from a script by Mayda Royero. In 1956 in Havana, a poor high school student (Laura de la Uz) who’s a neighbor of Ernest Hemingway’s dreams of attending college; she reads The Old Man and the Sea and finds herself identifying with its protagonist. With Marta del Rio, Jose Antonio, and Raul Paz. Oak Park Public Library, 834 Lake, Oak Park....

In the opening scene of this 1994 Hungarian feature by Ildiko Enyedi (My Twentieth Century), a necklace falls from the neck of a young mother hiding in a World War II bomb shelter. As one of the pearls drops into the sewer, the camera follows its trek through the underground pipe. When the pearl emerges at the other end, a bird swoops down and takes it; we’re now in a forest on the outskirts of present-day Budapest....