THE MAN IN THE MOON With Reese Witherspoon, Emily Warfield, Sam Waterston, Tess Harper, and Jason London. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Love’s dual nature is given full play in The Man in the Moon, the story of Dani Trant, a 14-year-old girl from Natchitoches County in rural Louisiana whose life is shaped equally by the hard livelihood her family wrests from the land and the ballads of Elvis Presley....

Activists Threaten AIDS Benefit What was to have been a glitzy event to help raise $1 million for the fight against AIDS could turn into a nightmare for its organizers. The Chicago branch of ACT UP, the activist AIDS organization, appears intent on disrupting the bash, an April 18 cocktail party and dinner at the Four Seasons Hotel to kick off the Chicago component of the national “ART Against AIDS” fund-raising effort....

One hundred and two cane toads were brought into Queensland, Australia, in 1935 with the hope that they would get rid of sugar-cane grubs. The toads quickly overran the countryside, eating everything except cane grubs. In this documentary featurette, filmmaker Mark Lewis extracts as much grim humor as possible from this problem–which persists–with all its grotesque ramifications. (The strange mating habits of cane toads are described in detail; their poison has not only caused ecological disaster in the area, but also has served as an illegal hallucinogenic drug; many children treat the toads as pets; and so on....

To the editors: Cecil Adams’s May 12, 1989 column discussing possible deterioration of compact discs reflects inadequate research and helps to perpetuate a new, high technology myth–the disintegrating disc. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » This whole business began when a Nimbus spokesman stated, about a year ago, that some CDs had shown fatal deterioration because of contamination by ink applied as part of the labeling process....

Guitarist Jimmy Johnson is one of those local blues treasures we sometimes take for granted. His smooth professionalism, polished musicianship, and versatility all combine to make him among the most perennially satisfying blues artists in Chicago. Johnson’s expansive repertoire allows him to mostly avoid the war-horses and cliches that so many others use to fill in the spaces between their hits. He delights in bluesy arrangements of such diverse material as “Take Five,” “Tobacco Road,” and “Serves Me Right to Suffer” (a reworking of Percy Mayfield’s classic “Memory Pain”), as well as his own witty, deceptively hard-hitting blues originals....

Supreme Court justice Anthony M. Kennedy had stayed up until 4:45 AM the night before he spoke at John Marshall Law School, grappling with a capital-punishment case. He explained to his audience of students, faculty, and judges that the American people like the idea of having capital punishment, but they don’t like the actual killing. His voice was tight and you could hear him exhale, as if he was forcing his words out....

LIKE LIFE The common element in Terry Breen’s The Extraordinary Mr. Ordinary and Tom Wawzenek’s Grandma’s Funeral is a man trying to make order, if not sense, out of life, and in the process making life hellish for everyone else. Breen’s Mr. Ordinary and Wawzenek’s Frankie Biezychudek are average Joes trying to keep their worlds functioning. Mr. Ordinary does so by staying home; he’s literally an armchair philosopher who sits and dictates his thoughts into a tape recorder....

Jazz’s answer to the Old Philosopher is back in town and–as evidenced by My Backyard, his Blue Note album of earlier this year–Mose Allison’s dry wit and slightly, delightfully jaundiced eye continue to find new and worthy targets. Mose’s voice drips the drawl of his native Mississippi Delta. But he puts it to the service of plenty besides the traditional down-and-out blues: clever put-downs (“Your Mind Is on Vacation but Your Mouth Is Working Overtime”), wry observations (“Tai Chi Life,” “You Call It Joggin’ but I Call It Runnin’ Around”), and, these days, unexpectedly tender progress reports from late middle age, such as a recent tune called “Was....

PLAYING WITH FIRE: AFTER FRANKENSTEIN That was some idea Lord Byron had back in 1816 when he challenged himself and a few of his friends to a literary contest. “We will each write a ghost story,” Byron said, according to Mary Shelley–who with her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and their mutual friend John Polidori agreed to Byron’s proposal. Out of that group project came Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, based in part on discussions she and the others had had concerning the animation of inanimate matter by electric stimulation....

NOTHING SACRED Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Because Nothing Sacred, George F. Walker’s play based on Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, is about a man who claims to hate illusions. His name’s Bazarov, and he lives the nihilist ideal (if that’s the word for it) of negation: attacking every accepted structure and received notion, from class privilege and the existence of God to fashionable dress and established mealtimes....

“You look at these figures and you see the millstone around Chicago’s neck is not Lawndale but Commonwealth Edison,” says Lew Kreinberg, public-issues coordinator for the Center for Neighborhood Technology on West North Avenue. The Chicago Public Schools, he says, spend twice as much on energy as on textbooks. Some of the worst culprits are electricity-dependent schools built by the Public Building Commission in the early 1970s, such as Curie Metropolitan High School and Clemente Community Academy....

“Soon after I started liking it here, …I began adopting the habits of a native Chicagoan,” writes native Philadelphian Dennis Rodkin in New City (August 1), “such as spitting in the empty el seat next to me so I could get some privacy…. Once I’d begun to feel that Chicago really was my home, I engaged in various local rituals, including the joyous Festival of New York/LA Horror Stories and the Daily Gathering to Ridicule Bob Greene....

The 24th Chicago International Film Festival, now into its top-heavy second week, is offering 60-odd programs this week, reviews and descriptions of which can be found below. It’s particularly pleasing that the festival has managed to squeeze in filmmakers as important as Jean-Luc Godard and Raul Ruiz this week (although the latter is represented only by a half-hour sketch, which follows an hour of dull travelogue by two other filmmakers–one of them, alas, the great Jean Rouch–in Ice Breaker)....

PARADE Jacques Tati’s last feature, Parade (1973), is about as unpretentious as a film can get. One of the first films to have been shot mostly in video (on a shoestring budget for Swedish TV), it’s a music-hall and circus show featuring juggling, music, gags, pantomime, minor acrobatics, and various forms of audience participation. Though it might seem a natural for TV–and in fact has been shown on TV, as well as theatrically, in Europe–it has never been broadcast in this country....

ANNIE SPRINKLE at Club Lower Links October 20 Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Sprinkle’s work is not meant to disturb–just the opposite. She isn’t trying to shock or to be vulgar. She wants to entertain, and she’s successful at this, making her audience comfortable as she talks about and shows us things that would normally make most of us pointedly uncomfortable. She simply wants to talk about sex, in a nonconfrontational, relaxed, and good-humored way....

For many years, Claudio Abbado was Solti and CSO management’s first choice for a Solti successor. The rest, as they say, is history. What’s done is done; Daniel Barenboim is off to an excellent start with the CSO. Abbado, on the other hand, was offered the other plum of the music world subsequent to his having been overlooked by the CSO: the music directorship of the Berlin Philharmonic, succeeding the late Herbert von Karajan at the helm of what in places other than Chicago is generally considered the world’s greatest orchestra....

DIESEL MOON Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » His dying father, a disillusioned right-wing vet, fumes that the America he’s leaving isn’t the one he fought for. Cap’s dead buddy Harrow Conroy, whose apparent murder in 1968 was for Cap the final disillusionment in a bad year, shows up early and often. A character who seems based on the wily trickster of Indian lore, Harrow tries to lure Cap into an act of violence against soulless American consumers, Harrow’s posthumous prey....

An extra dollop of disclosure and Chicago’s first couple of cuisine might have escaped the sticking they just got from Newsweek. It used to be the Kelsons guarded the gates of culinary quality at the city magazine. Allen Kelson, come to think of it, did a lot more than that. He was editor in chief, then publisher, always chief food critic (nom de plate Archy), and he and Carla pasted up the magazine at home....

PINK CADILLAC With Clint Eastwood, Bernadette Peters, and Geoffrey Lewis. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » In his latest film, Pink Cadillac, Eastwood plays Sacramento-based Tommy Nowak, a bounty hunter who specializes in scouring the dusty back roads of inland California and Nevada, tracking down bail jumpers for the bondsmen who posted bail. His latest target is Lou Ann McGuinn (Bernadette Peters), the wife of a low-class grifter whose incompetence has gotten her arrested for possession of his counterfeit loot....

A concert staging of a classic musical not only provides a second chance to hear a favorite show, it tests the show’s power to entertain by reducing it to its core–the words and music or, to get even more basic, two boards and a passion. In a good show that reduction can only enlarge. Last year Marshall Productions staged a highly successful concert performance, in a one-night stand, of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music....