Month: May 2003

Great artists often reach an apotheosis in their careers beyond which they can do what ever they want. Radiohead managed that with OK Computer back in 2000, then followed up with Kid A, which was a low-rent, high-profile slumming in Aphex Twin territory, indulging in noise more than music. Which is fine—we’re as amenable to “sound experiments” as the next guy. But we couldn’t help feeling like Thom Yorke and company were ignoring their core competency in writing soaring and intellectual pop as hummable as it was thinkable. This new one represents a truce between experimentalism and the irrepressible urge to just write a singalong. Recommended for its longevity in your sub-collection of albums to which you actually listen.

This third installment in the BBC’s amazingly lifelike recreations of the ancient world doesn’t live up to the high standard set by its predecessors, Walking With Dinosaurs and Walking With Prehistoric Beasts, which combined cutting-edge paleontology and computer graphics to stunning effect. Which is a pity, because the story it has to tell is uniquely compelling—how a bunch of scrawny, hairy chimp-like creatures could have grown up into the planet-dominating sophisticates we are today, with our SUVs and televised sitcoms and Miracle Whip. We begin with Lucy the Australopithecus, anthropology’s most famous find and part of the group that first walked upright, showing that the first step in being human is learning to stand up for yourself. Cavemen is choppier than earlier installments and lurches confusingly through time, trying to structure the narrative around the evolution of each human trait rather than a simpler chronological progression of species. On the plus side, the makeup and acting is terrific; each species of protohuman has its own unique character, and it’s surprising to discover from the supplementary video that the same dozen-odd actors have been playing all the roles.

These things become familiar, of course, but how shocking a really moral film like this was, in 1985. Stephen Frears’ snapshot of the 80s was out of tune with its time, but slowly built as an art-house video cult in the 90s. Which is to say, by the time conversations about “identity politics” and “victim culture” had lost enough heat to be handled thoughtfully and seriously. My Beautiful Laundrette isn’t much of a story beyond its intricate web of relationships—including a wonderfully complex romance between Daniel Day-Lewis and Gordon Warnecke. As such, its success rests solely in its spectacular script—one of those movies you’re sure is based on a great novel, though it’s not.

Sergio Leone, who reinvented the gunslinger genre in spaghetti westerns like The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, only directed one film in the fifteen years before his death. That would be this Prohibition-era drama, but in many ways the perfect capstone to his career, blending the spirits of Goodfellas and Great Expectations with one of his own vengeance-laden Western morality tales. Robert De Niro and James Woods star as two childhood friends who rise together in the world of New York’s Jewish street gangs; De Niro’s acting is particularly strong, maintaining a sad dignity for most of the film in spite of his character being stuck with the name “Noodles.” America does have some glaring flaws, including a plot twist that erases any goodwill De Niro might have earned, and a final act that’s soap-opera nonsense. But it’s still a worthy film, and this DVD is especially welcome for being the uncut four-hour director’s cut—once upon a time, the only Once Upon a Time in America in America was a version more than 90 minutes shorter and nearly incomprehensible.

Are there three sweeter words than “Peter Sellers retrospective”? Hmmm… “you’ve got mail”—no. “Here’s fifty bucks”—well, maybe. We haven’t seen about half the titles here (yet), but we can tell you with absolutely authority that there are four can’t-lose offerings from the mid-century’s great comedic chameleon: his two Stanley Kubrick collaborations, Dr. Strangelove and Lolita; the best of his Inspector Clouseau series, A Shot in the Dark; and Being There, his transcendent satire of the TV-created mind he fought to make for ten years. Meanwhile, Jackie Chan buffs, reserve your Mondays for a month of classics by Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, the masters of silent-era, let’s-do-the-stunts-ourselves physical comedy. Top on the list is Lloyd’s Safety Last—that’s the one where he accidentally climbs the outside of a department store all the way up to the clock tower—and note that not only is Lloyd himself really climbing, but that he was missing two fingers and a thumb on his right hand! Oak Street, 309 Oak St. S.E., (612) 331-3134, oakstreetcinema.org

Who wouldn’t want to soar through the air on the wings of a bird? Well, not us, because heights scare the living bejeezus out of us. But otherwise, sure, everybody would. And barring a medically iffy, possibly uninsurable operation to transplant your brain into a duck, Winged Migration is your best option. The product of four years’ filming by hundreds of people on all seven continents, its amazing cinematography will make you feel like part of the flock. Producer Jacques Perrin’s previous Microcosmos managed the tricky feat of making the insect world transcendently beautiful, even winning over your humble Rake editors, who scream like a little girl when a centipede crosses our path. And though Migration might be light on explaining the science behind bird flight, it’s an excellent way to get down with the geese. Uptown, 2906 Hennepin Ave., (612) 825-6006, landmarktheatres.com

If you combined the directorial styles of Quentin Tarantino, John Waters, and the bloody Grand Guignol of early Peter Jackson in one guy, you might have something like Japan’s Takashi Miike. Except maybe that he makes more films than they do—an astonishing four dozen in the last decade, usually horror and yakuza gangster movies. But he doesn’t do anything simply, and girds his stories with plenty of surrealism, black comedy, and shockingly frank sex and violence—these might be too intense for the Greek Wedding set. The Walker screens four of his recent films, the most accessible of which might be The Happiness of the Kakaturis, a musical comedy about an eccentric family in a zombie-plagued hotel that’s like a weird cross of Charles Addams, Baz Luhrmann, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Walker, 725 Vineland Place, (612) 375-7622, walkerart.org

Even in the age of Xbox, kids of a certain age can still be utterly transfixed by a good old-fashioned circus. Maybe the older and more jaded can be brought back into the tent with this supercool exhibit about the science behind acrobatics, high-wire walking, the trapeze, and all manner of circus daredevilry. The attraction is, of course, that the kids get to try some of this stuff themselves—with plenty of coaching and safety equipment, to be sure. Science Museum, 120 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 221-9444, www.smm.org

Eustace Conway is self-sufficient in ways most of us wouldn’t want to be even if we knew how, in the way almost no American has been since the days of Daniel Boone. The star of Gilbert’s marvelous nonfiction The Last American Man lives on a thousand-acre patch of woods in Appalachia, literally living off the land and making his clothes out of deerskin. He’s a man born 200 years out of time whose soul belongs to the forest. And yet for all his supreme competency as a woodsman, his life is also a holding action against encroaching modernity—developers slowly encircle his land, and the bureaucratic vultures of taxation and insurance do too. Gilbert’s anecdotes are so colorful that they sometimes strain disbelief, and yet it would be a tremendous shame if they weren’t true. For instance: Once while climbing a mountain, Conway slipped and fell, rocketing helplessly down an icy slope toward certain death over a 2,000-foot cliff. He was saved at the last moment when his body slammed into the frozen carcass of a mule that had died within arm’s length of the cliff’s edge. Now that’s just too cool.

When Kurt Cobain killed himself in 1994, Paul McComas was as shocked as anyone that the man voted most likely to be the voice of his generation would choose eternal silence instead. Unlike the rest of us, McComas actually did something about it. Himself a lifetime victim of depression, the Chicago writer devoted himself to suicide prevention both in his fiction and in a program called Rock Against Depression. His first novel, Unplugged, imagines a Cobain-like musician gets an unexpected second chance to change her mind. As a prose stylist, McComas is no Shakespeare, but his writing is intensely emotional, and in this case there’s something to be said for having your heart in the right place. Plus, we hear he’s a dynamic speaker, so his Ruminator gig might be well worth your time.