Welcome to Flopcorn, where Reader writers and contributors pay tribute to our very favorite bad movies. In this installment, social media editor Brianna Wellen tries to find the appeal in her father’s favorite series. Just before the holidays I woke up to see that my dad had left me a voicemail at six in the morning. It’s the kind of thing that would make most people freak out and assume someone was dead, but I know my father well enough to know that this means he had to tell me about something he had seen on TV....

Brian Jackson/Sun-Times Cook County clerk David Orr should consider running in the 49th Ward. My obit for the lakefront liberal was barely out before I got one of those calls for clarification from a man I’ll call Michael Gaylord James—as that’s his name. James wanted me to know that, yes, liberalism may be dead as a doornail in Lincoln Park, where 43rd Ward voters gave Mayor Rahm more than 80 percent of the vote....

There may be no better musical representation of the adage that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts than instrumental postrock group Tortoise. Nearly 30 years after its inception, the Chicago-born quintet continue to synergize the disparate influences of its members, combining groove-filled, indie-leaning Krautrock with electronic flourishes, jazz sensibilities, global influences, and minimalist beauty. Though a few members still reside in Chicago, the rest are now spread throughout the country, making it even more rare for the band to record or perform—and this is a group that took seven years to complete its most recent album, 2016’s The Catastrophist (Thrill Jockey)....

Marin Alsop is stepping into the newly created position of chief conductor and curator at the Ravinia Festival, beginning with the 2020 season. Kauffman himself will be stepping down at the end of the 2020 season (he made that announcement in October). Ravinia Board of Trustees Chairman Don Civgin said in today’s announcement that Kauffman advocated for the creation of this double role for Alsop “to maintain consistency, through this transitional period, of the festival’s high artistic standards and creativity in booking....

One summer night during the mid-1980s, Mayor Harold Washington visited the Taste Entertainment Center in the heart of Englewood. He walked into the kitchen, put on an apron, and offered some culinary advice to the staff. Even more remarkable is that Taste has survived the ups and downs that hit Englewood for four decades. On Saturday, May 5, a Taste reunion featuring house music legend Farley “Jackmaster” Funk and former staff could serve as an introduction to some and a reminder for the old heads....

Michael Gebert Erik Anderson and friend at Intro It hasn’t broken through to citywide consciousness yet the way Next did a few years ago, but for me the most interesting moveable feast in town is the rotating-chef restaurant in the former L2O space, Intro. At least that’s my conclusion after dining there last week for its second seasonal menu, this one by Erik Anderson, a former Chicagoan (his father worked at the Drake Hotel and his parents ran a diner in Aurora) who became a Food & Wine best new chef along with cochef Josh Habiger at Nashville’s the Catbird Seat in 2012....

The line on the the current UK jazz scene is that its top exponents—Nubya Garcia, Shabaka Hutchings, Theon Cross—merge the American-bred genre contemporary dance music, strains of UK hip-hop, and sounds of the African diaspora. Keyboardist Henry Wu, aka Kamaal Williams, brings a background in broken beat to the proceedings, and in his latest trio he leans a bit more heavily than his peers on Herbie Hancock’s spaciest explorations. Following the dissolution of his previous group, Yussef Kamaal, which released only one album, Wu splayed his meticulously crafted soul-jazz and sprightly funk across the ten tracks of last year’s The Return (Black Focus)....

Almost three years ago, this wolf went gaga for the hushed, elegiac drones on Weird Times, the solo debut from Implodes guitarist Matt Jencik, who’s also recently toured in Slint and Circuit des Yeux. On Friday, December 13, French/UK label Hands in the Dark drops Jencik’s follow-up, Dream Character, and it’s similarly excellent—an evocative, nocturnal journey that’s simultaneously connected to daily life and to the obscure illogic of dreams. “I had a few experiences with lucid dreaming in the morning that would spill into my waking hours,” Jencik says of the album’s gestation....

Chicagoan Femi Adigun, aka Femdot, raps like he’s spent his entire waking life studying language and figuring out the best way to use words to suit his craft. He cleanly lays down bars with a confidence that makes it seem easy, and the work he’s put in to get there is obvious. Femdot treats hip-hop with reverence, as though the art form provides him spiritual fulfillment—at least that’s the feeling I get anytime he drops something new....

Fri 6/11, 7 PM: Congo Square Theatre Company hosts an online watch party and discussion for part two of Hit ‘Em on the Blackside. Register and learn more here. Sat 6/12, 3:30 PM-late: Epiphany Center for the Arts hosts an afternoon and evening of Chicago house music DJs in celebration of “Chicago: Home of House,” an exhibition on view until July 17. Timed tickets and more information is available at the center’s website....

Since 2004 Plastic Crimewave (aka Steve Krakow) has used the Secret History of Chicago Music to shine a light on worthy artists with Chicago ties who’ve been forgotten, underrated, or never noticed in the first place.

Portland guitarist Marisa Anderson makes music rooted in tradition and distinguished by a scuffed-up intimacy. She’s internalized multiple strains of rustic American sounds, including Delta blues and old-timey country, and remakes them with a decidedly handcrafted feel. In recent years she’s opened up her music to new influences, which is in part a result of heavy touring, sharing the stage, and recording with Saharan guitarists like Mdou Moctar and Kildjate Moussa Albadé, whose modal, trance-inducing work sounds like a lost relative of southern blues....

Sarah Snook and Ethan Hawke in Predestination Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which opens Friday in Chicago, continues a run of ambitious recent films—Michel Gondry’s Mood Indigo, Alex Ross Perry’s Listen Up, Philip—that try to convey in distinctly cinematic fashion what it’s like to read a distinctly literary author. All three films honor their source material by acknowledging that books and movies do different things. Rather than minimize the most idiosyncratic (really, the most novelistic) qualities of Thomas Pynchon, Boris Vian, and Philip Roth, these movies develop novel formal devices (pun intended) in an effort to preserve those qualities....

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Sigmund Freud describes the first phase of a child’s psychosexual development as “cannibalistic pregenital sexual organization,” popularly known as the “oral stage.” During this period, which is said to occur between birth and the age of two, the child focuses on receiving pleasure via the mouth. According to Freud, children overindulged or neglected during this stage may develop neurotic oral fixations that manifest as talking, eating, drinking, and smoking too much....

In the winter of 1951-’52, in the early days of commercial air travel, there was a series of plane crashes in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which was directly on the flight path for takeoffs and landings at nearby Newark Metropolitan Airport. Two of the emergency landings were in residential neighborhoods and killed people on the ground as well as passengers. The residents of Elizabeth, quite understandably, freaked out. There were protests and calls to shut down the airport and wild theories, including Communist sabotage, alien invasions, and a plot against the town’s children....

Welcome to the Reader‘s weekday news briefing. Judge bans Dennis Hastert from unsupervised contact with minors, porn Former U.S. House speaker Dennis Hastert can no longer use sex chat lines, possess pornorgraphy, or have “any contact with minors except in the presence of an adult who is aware of his sexual abuse of boys decades ago,” according to the Tribune. U.S. district judge Thomas Durkin imposed the new restrictions on Hastert, who has been undergoing sex offender evaluation, after a probation report was turned in Monday....

At first glance, Non-Fiction (which opens this weekend at the Music Box) might appear to be a minor effort from French writer-director Olivier Assayas. The film is dialogue-driven, as opposed to advancing a remarkable visual aesthetic, and the conversations seem to spell out the ideas Assayas wants to communicate. Practically every scene contains some exchange about the nature of mass media in the 21st century, and while these exchanges are eloquent, even provocative, some viewers might find them a little too clear-cut....

Lyric Opera’s 2012 production of Elektra, Richard Strauss’s one-act powerhouse of misery, set a high bar for follow-ups. The current revival with a new cast lost its dress rehearsal to the polar vortex and greeted its opening-night audience with an announcement that celebrated Swedish soprano Nina Stemme, making her Lyric debut in the title role, had injured her knee and would have to curtail her movement on stage. There are plenty of operas in which a more-or-less immobile lead would be business as usual, but not this one....