Month: March 2003

By far the most well-deserved Oscar of 2003, Hayao Miyazaki’s haunting anime was so far ahead of its competition in the Best Animated Feature category that it made them look like, well, cartoons. Indeed, there’s so much going on here it’s hard to absorb in one viewing. The ethereal and often weird plot follows Chihiro,…

Sam Peckinpah’s fascination with human brutality was never so blazingly controversial than this 1971 revenge thriller, starring Dustin Hoffman as a milquetoast professor who confronts his capacity for violent revenge when his wife is attacked by local hooligans. At the time, it prompted critic Pauline Kael to call him a fascist director, and it’s no…

This is the fourth showbiz-schmucks mockumentary from Christopher Guest and his Spinal Tap/Guffman/Best in Show troupe, and if we’re lucky they’ll be able to go all the way to eleven. This time around the target is folk music—lampooning the malcontents, losers, and loonies reunited decades past their prime for a Carnegie Hall memorial concert. The…

As recent events have made painfully obvious, the peoples of the world still can’t get along. It would be nice to think that this, the biggest local film event of the year, might help bridge the gap in some way. With more than 120 films from 50 countries screening at theaters all over town, there…

Just think, if this document had never been written, King George would still be pushing us around. He’d make us all drive on the wrong side of the road and wear powdered wigs, and demand that we call soccer “football” and freedom fries “chips.” That’s just the kind of tyrant he was. Luckily, the Declaration…

What a treasure the Minnesota Zoo continues to be. Hard to believe it turns 25 years old this year; it seems like only yesterday when they were talking about a state-of-the-art zoological garden out in the cornfields of Apple Valley, just about the time we were all feeling kinda creeped out by Como. Here’s a…