The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

My wish came true! Shutka Book of Records has been added to the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Film Festival's "Best of Fest." The replay happens tonight--and tonight only--at Oak Street Cinema at 9:30 p.m. Otherwise, I'll be offering DVD rental to close friends and relatives starting next week.

Also on the "Best of Fest" roster, disappointingly: Crossing The Bridge: The Sound of Istanbul, a documentary I thought mediocre, at best. (I gave it a 2.5 in my Strib review.) There was something funny about it, though. The narrator was this German avant-headbanger dude by the name of Alexander Hacke. He had a shaggy goatee and all. A caricature! The art-rock works! However interesting Istanbul is as a city, Crossing The Bridge relied upon interviews with some annoyingly obtuse, arty musician-types, most of which couldn't form a decipherable, concrete-sequential sentence if their lives depended upon it. The music was all right, though. And let's be clear here: a good way to sell movies, visual art, theatrical works, books, and whatever else it is they're being hawked to the masses these days, is to make it about popular music, without dwelling too much on the classical stuff. Of course, I could be wrong about the whole show. Crossing The Bridge was apparently so popular, it's getting replayed twice. That's just salt in the wounds, man!