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Independent filmmaker Lizzie Borden puts her demystifying feminist sensibility to work in this quasi-clinical dissection of a middle-class house of prostitution. The polemical restraint is a pleasant surprise (especially after Borden’s angry Born in Flames debut), though sorority considerations still define the ins from the outs (the brothel proprietor is an ultrafemme cartoon: she’s not one of the working elect) and the johns are all treated with gently bemused contempt. Still, Borden avoids most of the ideological traps and concentrates instead on demolishing role-playing fantasies (her flat, deadpan style works wonderfully well at this) and revealing, like an anthropologist on a meticulous structural binge, the social dynamics of the trade....

On stage are two old desk chairs tied together, chairs on which Ted Kopout and Professor Phineas T. Out There will sit while Kopout interviews the professor on his network show, The Media Are Not Your Friends. The professor has been called in to help retrieve Chester Chicken Licken from Mars, where he has been taken by a couple of martians who fell from the sky. Not all the gags in Fast Food are visual jokes....

Clint Eastwood’s ambitious and long-awaited biopic about the great Charlie Parker (Forest Whitaker), running 161 minutes, is the most serious, conscientious, and accomplished jazz biopic ever made, and almost certainly Eastwood’s best picture as well. The script (which accounts for much of the movie’s distinction) is by Joel Oliansky, and the costars include Diane Venora as Chan Parker, Michael Zelniker as Red Rodney, and Samuel E. Wright as Dizzy Gillespie. Alto player Lennie Niehaus is in charge of the music score, which has electronically isolated Parker’s solos from his original recordings and substituted contemporary sidemen (including Monty Alexander, Ray Brown, Walter Davis Jr....

We all know what political correctness is–though the nuances of the term may vary depending on whether you’re inside or outside academia and whether or not you regard it as exclusively the preserve of the left. (Personally, I consider Rush Limbaugh and Andrea Dworkin both charter members of the club.) Commercial correctness in movie ideology, however, has yet to be defined, even though it currently engulfs both the entertainment industry and the audience....

DANCE & MORE FOR $1.98 Tea in the Sahara, by recent Columbia College graduate Katja Brown, began the evening with a rather simple tale convincingly danced by Brown, Nancy Baumgarten, and Elizabeth Spatz. As El Bakkar’s reedy, nasal, Egyptian-flavored music begins to wind about, the three women, in long white skirts and high-necked white blouses, step gingerly onstage. Their prim looks are in uncomfortable contrast to the exotic music and its feeling of heat and mystery, but they seem enthralled by the scenery (invisible to us)....

Further Crumbling at Wisdom Bridge Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » During the early 1980s, under the artistic leadership. of Robert Falls, Wisdom Bridge was one of the local theater community’s crown jewels. But things have changed. In anticipation of a tough year, Wisdom Bridge’s operating budget for the season has been trimmed to a lean $900,000, down from around $1.3 million in recent years....

George and Ira Gershwin’s “Nice Work if You Can Get It” seems an appropriate song for this alumnus of Northwestern University’s Waa-Mu revues who went on to star in the Broadway hit City of Angels. Edelman’s skill at blending musical comedy’s theatricality and jazz’s rhythmic precision, evident in City’s original-cast recording, bodes well for his appearance at his alma mater’s “The Gershwin Years,” a concert of vocal and instrumental music by the brothers whose collaborations (Of Thee I Sing, Porgy and Bess, et al) set the standards for quality and ambitiousness in their fusion of jazz, classical, and pop styles....

HEART & SOUL Like many eccentrics, our musical free spirits sometimes create in furious bursts. This can pose problems in the recording studio. In a live performance pulsing with the moment’s heat, even occasional flashes of brilliance may be enough to carry the evening. Recorded music, though, stands alone–in a vacuum, as it were–and we tend to get impatient when the performer spends too much time noodling around, thinking about what to say next....

Gene Suuppi walked into the Art Institute about 7:35 PM a week ago last Tuesday. First he visited arms and armor from the George F. Harding Collection. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » At 7:46 PM, with 14 minutes to go, he was the very last of nearly 450,000 people from all over the world to view “Monet in the 90s: The Series Paintings,” the second best attended show in the lifetime of the Art Institute....

Intentionally or not, Hoffman Estates-based ticket broker Barry Fox is helping to shed a little light on the shadowy business of ticket brokering. Brokers rarely discuss their trade, but last month Fox in essence decided to talk by filing suit against Time Out Entertainment Ltd., a Deerfield-based ticket-packaging concern that’s a relative newcomer to the business. Fox’s suit alleges that Time Out–headed by Charles Williams and Anders Nyberg, two former Chicago-based executives with the defunct Ticketron company–reneged on an agreement to sell him more than 1,200 choice seats to producer Cameron Mackintosh’s hit musical Miss Saigon at the Auditorium Theatre....

To the editors: “Atheist & Son” seemed to be a libelous smear, which consisted of 39 false statements embellished by 106 negative innuendos. Virtually every characterization about my objectives and my personal life were false, just as the writer intended. Perhaps I should sue the Reader for libel, but since I’ve always liked the Reader and its policy of letting the little guy place free classified advertisements, I’ll skip the lawsuit and go with this response instead....

THE MARRIAGE OF BETTE AND BOO Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The story of Bette and Boo’s marriage is told by Matt, the only one of their five children to be born alive. Matt has kept a notebook, recording the details of his unhappy childhood, and he refers to this notebook as he introduces scenes in the play. He doesn’t draw a pretty picture....

CHOREOGRAPHERS SAMPLER Tongue of Fire also comments on male-female relations–though it might be more accurate to say it literally stages the battle of the sexes. The group responsible for it, Long Bone (formerly Tarantula Moon), is made up of one woman, Shu Shubat, who plays guitar, and three men, Winston Damon, Tony Di Martino, and Olli Seay, who play percussion. They don’t so much play for the audience as at each other, boys against the girl....

CHI-TOWN JAZZ DANCE Artistic director Meribeth Kisner is no dance novice–she has been an apprentice to the Harkness Ballet in Dallas, a principal dancer and associate director of Gus Giordano Jazz Dance Chicago, and a dancer in numerous Broadway and stock productions. Now in her mid-30s, Kisner stands out among her dancers because of her willowy height and assured attitude. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » The program opened with Phrase Three by Kisner, using new-age jazz music by Pat Metheney and Michael Convertino....

Comedy-Club Glut: What’s So Funny? Chicago’s comedy-club business appears headed for a shakeout. Too many clubs, too few loyal customers, and too little drinking seem to be the key problems. Two years ago the city and suburbs saw a rapid proliferation of comedy clubs, including the Funny Firm, Catch a Rising Star, and the Chicago Improv. Sources say that since that tidal wave of openings, club managers have increasingly been forced to turn to free passes (“papering”) to fill their many seats, while counting on drink tabs to cover operating costs....

By all accounts, particularly his own, it was the stupidest act in Fifth Ward Democratic Committeeman Alan Dobry’s 30 years in politics. On March 24–just two weeks before the April 2 Fourth Ward aldermanic runoff between incumbent Tim Evans and challenger Toni Preckwinkle–Dobry pasted anti-Semitic fliers to light posts in Jewish sections of Hyde Park. More important, the incident has exposed tension between black and white ideological soul mates in the liberal precincts of the Fourth and Fifth wards....

Dr. Evans Fiakpui fits no one’s stereotype of a “New Age” enthusiast. He is an obstetrician-gynecologist at the University of Chicago Hospital, a soft-spoken, conservatively-dressed man of great seriousness who speaks in the clipped, cultured accent of his native Ghana. Recently he described his introduction, through Transcendental Meditation, to the ancient healing art of Ayurveda. More and more hardworking professionals find that they have more energy, need less sleep, and feel more alert after they have begun practicing TM and other meditation techniques....

PAT GARRETT AND BILLY THE KID ** (Worth seeing) Directed by Sam Peckinpah Written by Rudolph Wurlitzer With James Coburn, Kris Kristofferson, Bob Dylan, Jason Robards, John Beck, Barry Sullivan, Slim Pickens, Katy Jurado, Jack Elam, Harry Dean Stanton, and Chill Wills. Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites » Restoration work carried out in recent years on many of the surviving German films of F....

AND LIFE GOES ON . . . It’s fascinating to consider the ideological factors that influence how film canons are formed, especially when it comes to films that depict unfamiliar cultures. Without thinking much about it, we tend to prefer American movies that suggest either that foreigners are just like us (the liberal approach, as in Samuel Fuller’s China Gate, in which Angie Dickinson is cast as a Eurasian) or that they’re devils from another planet (consider the xenophobic and racist depiction of Vietcong soldiers in Michael Cimino’s The Deer Hunter)....

A former archaeologist and forger of relics (Barton Fink’s David Warrilow), awaiting the arrival of a former colleague (film critic Berenice Reynaud), revises the story he plans to tell her about the disappearance of a Mayan hieroglyphic tablet from an excavation in the Yucatan many years before. Writer-director Leandro Katz, an Argentinean now based in New York, has been making experimental shorts since the 70s, but this ambitious and daunting first feature represents a fresh and exciting departure....