Writer-director Adam McKay’s passel of broad comedies and more recent sociopolitical satires have three interesting attributes in common. The first is a focus on wayward American men, fictional and actual, and a hankering to dissect them and flesh out their trajectories. The second is iconoclasm, evident in the zeal with which McKay’s films explode popular institutions and ideologies, ranging from NASCAR to the nuclear family to trickle-down economics. The third is provocation, by which the viewer is poked enough to feel considered, challenged, and perhaps even culpable for the on-screen action....

Jamie Squire/Getty Images Andrew Wiggins: Not-quite-ready-for-prime-time player Waiting for a savior? Nothing wrong with that, so long as you’re not an NBA team. But Duke and Kansas are traditional college powers, their lineups full of superior players. If Parker and Wiggins couldn’t turn those teammates into champions why does anyone expect them to be able to do it with their new teammates in the NBA—say the ones in Philadelphia who have lost their last 22 games?...

There was an ad that ran during the 90s that really creeped me out. It was from AT&T or some other remnant of the Bell Telephone monopoly, and it proclaimed that WE’RE ALL CONNECTED. I’ve rarely felt connected to individual people, much less all people, so the mental image the ad produced—millions of cables and signals tethering and binding us to each other—was alarming. I paid little mind to the Internet....

I know that Öxxö Xööx are an experimental metal band from Dieppe, France, and that their second full-length, Nämïdäë, came out in late May (it gets a vinyl release this month). But I’ve deliberately refrained from digging any further. Rather than learn the sort of mundane biographical details that might humanize these otherworldly musicians—what other groups they’ve played in, what they do at their day jobs—I’ve chosen to preserve, as best I can, the feeling of baffled wonderment I had when I first discovered them a few months ago....

NICK GERBER North Coast Music Festival Looking for something to do today? Agenda‘s got you covered. For more on these events and others, check out the Reader‘s daily Agenda page.

The lineup for the Latinx-oriented Ruido Fest came out Wednesday afternoon. Headliners include 90s norteño icons Intocable, reggae-rockers Cultura Profética, Mexico City rap-metal group Molotov, and singer Julieta Venegas. Further down the lineup you’ll find Bomba Estéreo‘s electro-inflected cumbia, Alex Anwandter’s agitpop Chilean house, Lucybell’s shoegazy alt-rock, and the agitated techno-punk of Titán. Ruido Fest spans generations, including artists already on revival tours and others just getting off the ground—it’s a compelling reminder of the oft-underserved scope and depth of Latinx music....

American literature’s most annoying classic was inspired by real-life events. Herman Melville based his epically digressive Moby-Dick on an 1820 incident in which a monster whale turned on a Nantucket whaling ship, the Essex, and rammed it—twice!—causing it to sink into the Pacific Ocean. We meet Captain George Pollard and first mate Owen Chase; young “greenhands” Owen Coffin, Charles Ramsdell, and Thomas Nickerson; as well as an array of others, from boatswain and purser to carpenter and boat steerer (a job that, interestingly enough, did not entail steering the boat)....

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

Street View is a fashion series in which Isa Giallorenzo spotlights some of the coolest styles seen in Chicago.

On “Only Songs,” the opening track from their new album The World We Built (Dualtone), the three bright-voiced singers of Wild Reeds proclaim that “the only thing that saves me are the songs I sing,” a sentiment their ebullient, richly harmonized delivery confirms. Kinsey Lee, Sharon Silva, and Mackenzie Howe perform with a gusto that feels downright therapeutic, but while the trio’s spirit is infectious and they’re lovely to hear, the songs themselves don’t quite measure up—they often push a shinier, bigger sound that glosses the group’s rustic roots with a generic, indie-pop polish....

Gossip Wolf is sad to say farewell to Wrekmeister Harmonies main man J.R. Robinson, who’s moving to Astoria, Oregon, this week. Robinson says that after 20 years of brutal cold, it’s time to move on. “I think I feel like Saul Bellow probably felt,” he explains. “This is an amazing, truly American city, but one where ‘No realistic, sane person goes around without protection.’” He picked Astoria not just because it’s where Goonies was filmed but “because it’s an incredibly beautiful area of the country....

Created by the independent distributor ArtMattan Productions, the African Diaspora Film Festival premiered in New York in 1993 and arrived in Chicago as a touring festival ten years later, thanks mainly to the efforts of Facets Cinematheque programmer Charles Coleman. Like the social migration it’s named after, the fest has always been hard to pin down, and the 12th local edition is no different: the subject matter of the ten features and two shorts screening this week range from the U....

A couple years ago I wrote a cover story about Chicago’s intersecting hip-hop and streetwear communities; I covered plenty of independent local brands but there were some I wasn’t able to get to at the time, such as Iridium Clothing Company, which was founded in 2008 by a guy who goes by the name Platinum. Iridium opened a boutique in the Loop back in the fall, and it’s well loved by local MCs—a quick click through Iridium’s Tumblr brings up a mess of talented local rappers cloaked in its apparel, including ZMoney, Roy French, and Chris Crack....

There are plenty of shows, films, and concerts happening this weekend. Here’s some of what we recommend: Fri 8/17-Sun 8/19: Araby follows the life and jobs of an itinerant Brazilian laborer. “Araby is unmistakably contemporary in its fashions, settings, and physical behavior; the similarities to the past seem found rather than manufactured,” writes Reader critic Ben Sachs. João Dumans and Affonso Uchoa directed. In Portuguese with subtitles. 97 min. Various times, Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N....

Comstock/Photos.com Maybe reporters shouldn’t be so enthusiastic. “How is this not an ad?” “A few rivals provide the same service—Keeper from Chicago-based Keeper Security Inc. and LastPass—” Hendershot allowed, “but none does the job so attractively and intuitively as Dashlane.” He added, “Thanks to browser extensions, Dashlane can work its auto-filling magic almost anywhere on the Web.” I did. Arndt’s story ran in mid-December under the headline “Introducing the Crainiac Awards: 2013’s four weirdest iOS apps....

There were few publications that defined girlhood in the 2010s as distinctly as the online magazine Rookie. Rookie felt like the public diary of a whole generation, taking the stories and artwork of thousands of teens across the world and consolidating them into what now feels like a time capsule of an era I hadn’t quite realized had ended. In addition to serving as an important resource for many teen girls, Rookie fostered community in a way reminiscent of national riot grrrl zine culture of the 90s, but in a contemporary, internet-mediated form....

You might already know that Chicago’s premier Celtic-punk band the Tossers—our own south-side Pogues kin who predate fellow travelers like the Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly by several years—put on a rip-roaring Saint Patty’s Day show every year at Metro, and that they’ve been around nearly a quarter century now, honing their showmanship over countless live gigs. But you might not know that they just dropped Smash the Windows (Victory), their first record since 2013’s The Emerald City and only their fifth studio album overall....

Ida Now in its fourth week at the Music Box Theatre, Pawel Pawlikowski’s Ida not only takes place in early-60s Poland, but it looks like it was made then too. The jazz musician who hitches a ride with the title character and her aunt seems to have stepped out of Andrzej Wajda’s Innocent Sorcerers (which screened last weekend at the Siskel Film Center as part of the “Masterpieces of Polish Cinema” series)....

Young Thug is the latest in a long line of idiosyncratic mixtape rappers to inspire a level of obsession on the rap Internet that approaches the cultic. Like many objects of hip-hop fascination for hip-hop’s early adopters—Gucci Mane, Lil B, the godfather Lil Wayne—Thug is a weirdo who luxuriates in his weirdness. His latest mixtape, January’s Black Portland (featuring Bloody Jay), is a gloriously twitchy lo-fi jumble of southern trap, Future-style sing-rapping, noisy synth-pop, and the 50 or so different voices that Thug has in his repertoire and frequently switches between with little apparent rhyme or reason....

COURTESY A + D GALLERY I Want To Put You On, Raini, by Sean Fader Rouse your retinas with something visually appealing this weekend. Here’s what’s going down in visual arts. Saturday 1/25 Ongoing