Month: January 2004

After 2002’s phenomenal Come Away With Me, one might expect Norah Jones to be weighed down by the challenge of following up such a debut…especially with that load of Grammys! But Jones claims that was never a concern of hers, and she describes the new album rather as a “snapshot” of where she is in life now and how she has developed musically. Feels Like Home, then, feels like the logical next step. Accompanied by her core group and backed again by the award-winning talent of “Don’t Know Why” songwriter Jessie Harris, Norah stays true to her roots while rocking out—at least, as much as a Norah Jones can rock out—on a few more uptempo tunes. She duets with Dolly Parton on “Creepin’ In” and covers tracks by idols Tom Waits and Duke Ellington, for whose instrumental “Melancholia” she wrote original lyrics and retitled “Don’t Miss You At All.” You can bet Jones will be making headlines again this year and garnering accolades from those in high places. But don’t hold your breath for any kind of reunion with her dad, sitar master Ravi Shankar. Norah’s still rising on her own star.

It’s hard to know why these things happen, but this superhip French duo is more a living museum of genteel new wave than the bleeding edge of ambient electronica. Their chic debut of a few years ago, the moogy Moon Safari, rode the crest of a kitsch wave at about the same time we started seeing those late-night infomercials for the Dean Martin Celebrity Roast video library. Still, if you have a special place in your heart for Switched-On Bach and Vangelis, know that there is someone out there still consciously tending that garden, even if they’re French. Smooth, light—you’ll be hearing this one at salons, art galleries, and gay bars all over town.

We’ve been saying for years now that the future of pop music is the Flaming Lips, but that may have been only because Stereolab appeared to be on extended hiatus. True, they’re Eurotrash, whereas the Lips are all-American Okies. But like so many great rock bands from abroad, Stereolab had a special ear for traditional recording methods and instruments, obsolete forms of pop, and an obsession with melody. If you can tolerate the heavy dose of intensely self-conscious “artiness,” you’ve got a keeper. We were worried that the tragic death of singer Mary Hansen in 2002 would shelf the band literally or figuratively—so we’re pleased to see this new disc.

The sixties were tumultuous enough here in America, but it was nothing compared to the institutionalized insanity of China’s Cultural Revolution. One survivor, interviewed in this compelling and chilling documentary, calls it “an age ruled by the poet and the executioner. The poet scattered roses everywhere, while the executioner cast a long shadow of terror.” Gangs of Beijing’s young people organized, took to the streets, and bloodily revolted against those they thought were disloyal to the ideals of the 1949 revolution—a bizarre national mania somewhere between Beatlemania, Stalinist purges, and the Spanish Inquisition, whipped up by Mao himself to solidify his grip on power by advertising himself as a kind of demigod. In a weird irony, the antiestablishment youth were fiercely loyal to the head of state. That frenzied drive to maintain the image of Chinese Communism as heaven on earth was all the more frenzied, it seems, because China’s leaders were trying to cover up the recent millions of deaths resulting from the catastrophic agricultural debacle that was the Great Leap Forward. Morning Sun would have been improved with a less stiff and monotonous narrator, but it’s a minor problem in a film whose subject is anything but dry.
U Film, 10 Church St. S.E., Minneapolis, (612) 627-4430, www.ufilm.org

Before he directed low-budget B-movies, Sam Fuller was both a hard-nosed newspaper reporter and a World War Two combat infantryman. So it’s no wonder that his noir films were especially gritty and no-nonsense examples of the form. Pickup on South Street is one of his finest, a grim and multilayered tale of Red Scare politics smashing into the criminal underground. Richard Widmark gives the movie its cynical core as Skip, a pickpocket who steals a purse that, unknown to him, contains secret microfilm that both Communist spies and federal agents desperately want. Grifter that he is, Skip smells money and doesn’t much care whether he sells out to the Russkies or the government. Since this movie was made in 1953, it shouldn’t surprise you that the Commies are so sneaky and dishonorable that even garden-variety American lowlifes wind up detesting them. But Fuller was too sharp and sensitive to let his screenplay go the way of a meatheaded Spillane pulp story. Thelma Ritter is especially noteworthy as Skip’s stoolpigeon pal Moe, who justifies her life of crime in classic hardboiled style by complaining that she needs to earn enough to buy her place in the cemetery.

George Cukor’s all-singing movie version of George Bernard Shaw’s much more nuanced Pygmalion was a smash success, winning eight Oscars (including 1965’s Best Picture), and one of the most commercially successful musicals ever made. It’s still a remarkable piece of entertainment, though it seems fairly dated forty years down the road. The costuming is terrific, as is Audrey Hepburn. Nobody was ever as good at playing sad lost waifs, and she’s perfect as Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flowergirl who desperately wants to escape the London slums by learning a “proper” English accent from the grumpy linguist Henry Higgins. On the downside, there’s Rex Harrison’s too-convincing performance as the petulant, sexist Higgins—and worse, the bizarre decision to change Shaw’s original father-daughter relationship between the two leads to an implied romantic one. But the make-or-break quality of a musical is the songs, and My Fair Lady rewards us with a solid set of classic Broadway showstoppers…even if to our tastes they do go on and on. (Yes, Audrey, you could have danced all night; you don’t have to sing about it all night too.)

During these contentious weeks when football and baseball fans argue over the recent picks for their sports halls of fame, it is nice to know that that there are no arguments in the blood sport called Hollywood, at least in the all-important question of “who’s the worst director ever?” Many have tried and failed spectatularly, but none have uncrowned the reigning king. That’d be Edward D. Wood Jr., war veteran, unashamed transvestite, and auteur of unselfconscious awfulness in such atomic bombs as Glen or Glenda? and Plan 9 From Outer Space, often commended as the most idiotic film in history. Wood’s abysmal stock cast of Z-grade actors included the memorably enormous Tor Johnson and a morphine-addicted Bela Lugosi, then clinging feebly to the last rung of fame’s ladder and wracked by a late-life jones so bad he made Kurt Cobain seem like Doris Day. In 1994, Tim Burton filmed the biography Ed Wood, a loving look at a man who proved that it certainly doesn’t have to be lonely at the bottom. Johnny Depp is pitch-perfect as the never-say-die Wood, who dreamed of being Orson Welles but wasn’t even Orson Bean, and Martin Landau won an Oscar for a Richard III-like portrait of the pathetic Lugosi.

Olson’s debut novel Welcome to My Planet is one of our happy memories of the year 2000, and we’re pleased to report that the local heroine hooks us again with her followup, a sequel starring Planet’s semi-fictionalized version of Olson herself. A few more years down the road, Olson is now thirtysomething and still single in a world being taken over by couples with kids, looking for love and life outside of bad blind dates, a cramped apartment furnished by an ex, and her snarky mother Flo. She takes us on a whirlwind tour of the heartbreaking (yet often hilarious) process of recycling old college boyfriends, attending group therapy, and maintaining a desperate attachment to feng shui in an effort to clear out the spiritual clutter from her apartment and life. Wry, sometimes cynical and likably written, Bowling really strikes out. In the bowling sense of the word, that is. Olson reads at the Fitzgerald March 16.

You’ve heard of China’s last emperor, the boy king toppled from the throne by the rise of Mao. Now, meet his mother, the last empress. Becoming Madame Mao and Red Azalea author Min returns with another wonderfully descriptive work, the first in an eventual trilogy about Tzu Hsi, China’s longest-reigning female ruler. Min aims to rehabilitate Tsu Hsi’s historical reputation as a power-seizing schemer, which she sees as an unjust slander based on misogyny. Instead, she gives us a sympathetic portrait of the lower-level concubine who used brains and beauty to rise to the rank of the emperor’s closest advisor and mother of his heir—and upon his death in a coup, head of the Chi’ing Dynasty for forty-six years. It’s a deft combination of historical research and storytelling skill. The best part? This particular glimpse into pre-Westernized Asia doesn’t involve Tom Cruise. Min reads at the Fitzgerald April 20.

After chronicling the life of Renaissance artist Artemisia Gentileschi in her last book, Susan Vreeland continues her welcome biographical specialty in underappreciated women artists in her new novel, Forest Lover. This time around, her subject is turn-of-the-century painter Emily Carr, who defied her strict Victorian family to live among the Indians of then-isolated Vancouver Island. Her work, which centered on scenes of nature and Indian life, would eventually draw comparisons to Georgia O’Keeffe and Frida Kahlo in the salons of Paris. In the isolation of the woodlands, she finds something that speaks to her soul. But she still needs somebody to buy her paintings, and she finds herself reluctantly becoming a champion of Indian culture to the bourgeoisie she scorns. It’s a moving portrait of a woman who couldn’t fit into the strictures of the society she was born into—deftly represented in visual metaphor in one early scene by five Douglas firs, four tall and straight and one with twisting and wild branches seeming to reach out yearningly to find unknown soil.

Barnes & Noble Galleria, 3225 W. 69th St., Edina, (952) 920-0633, www.bn.com