Month: August 2004

We’ve gotta be completely honest here and tell you that the last movie we hated so much we couldn’t finish watching it was John Waters’ Pecker, which was just plain lazy. But Hairspray aside, a Waters movie can’t be expected to be “good” in any traditional storytelling sense. He’s probably never going back to the over-the-top grossouts of his early work, but the pencil-’stached favorite son of Baltimore still revels in gleeful mockery of straight-laced suburban norms. And for Dirty Shame, he’s found a lead actress—Tracey Ullman—who not only has a simpatico mindset, but can actually act. 612-925-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com

Director Takashi Miike’s reputation rests on his bizarre visual imagery and his mindbogglingly prolific career—though Gozu only came out in Japan last year, the Japanese gonzo has already finished seven other films. So it might be too much to ask that everything that happens in this movie makes logical sense. Nominally a cross between an atmospheric horror film like The Ring and a gangster thriller, Gozu follows Minami, a hapless, low-level yakuza who’s been assigned to kill his insane mentor and manages to lose the corpse in the very weird criminal underground of the city of Nagoya. Further plot explanation would be fruitless, but we’ll tell you that it does involve a minotaur-like demon named Gozu (Japanese for “cow head”). Like the work of Eugène Ionesco, Matthew Barney, and David Lynch—like dreams, in other words—there is a strange and disturbing art here that can’t be denied even if it can’t be understood. 612-331-3134; www.mnfilmarts.org

If moviespeak shorthand abbreviates “romantic comedy” as “romcom,” then this is a “romzom”—a romantic comedy set amid the zombie plague of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead. Director Edgar Wright and star Simon Pegg, who also wrote the movie, first worked together on a British sitcom called Spaced, and it’s obvious they have great creative chemistry. They’ve created an instant cult classic in the vein (and we use that word advisedly) of Peter Jackson’s Dead/Alive, and provided the biggest laughs we’ve had in a theater all year. It’s not merely parody à la Scream, though these guys really know and love their zombie movies, but smart, character-driven humor that American audiences will find most familiar from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. If you like the genre, Shaun comes highly recommended.

In film after film, John Sayles is one of the only directors out there unafraid to take a hard look at the negative influence of money and power on American society. At times that leads to heavy-handed didacticism, as with the disappointing Sunshine State, but we’ve got a good feeling about Silver City, which reunites Sayles with Chris Cooper and Kris Kristofferson, both of whom teamed with Sayles in his best film, the terrific thinking-man’s cop thriller Lone Star. Here, Cooper plays Dicky Pilager, a deeply conservative, tumble-tongued candidate for Colorado governor, who dredges up a mess of trouble when he reels in a corpse during a routine fly-fishing photo-op. 651-649-4416; www.landmarktheaters.com

Phoenix Rising, a sculpture fashioned from roughly five thousand melted guns, now lies in two pieces in a storage facility. Hennepin County officials are reluctant to say exactly where, because its current condition “is not the presentation the artist had in mind.”

The mawkish symbolism of the mythic bird reborn from ashes certainly makes it easy to guess what the artist did have in mind. But since 1992, when Hennepin County melted the weapons from its “Drop Your Guns” buyback program, the birth of a firearms-free utopia appears to have been aborted. Instead, Hennepin County has issued just about four thousand new permits to carry guns, as a result of the Personal Protection Act. This has led some to wonder if the sculpture should be melted again and recast as Don Quixote.

In America, there are approximately two hundred and fifty million firearms. Despite this penchant for personal protection, the U.S. is a world leader in homicides. So municipalities across the land have made sporadic attempts to mop up some of the excess with buyback programs and amnesties. Though Hennepin County will be smoke-free long before it becomes gun-free, the 1992 buyback, costing about two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, ranks as one of the most successful programs of its kind. But across the river, Ramsey County lived up to its quaint reputation with a program that entered people in a raffle in exchange for turning in weapons. Seventy-one capital citizens dropped off guns for a chance at Twins tickets and hotel coupons.

A similar tale has been playing out over in Iraq. The U.S. Army reported grand success with a program in Basra earlier this year that bagged four thousand AK-47s. And in June, a program in Karbala yielded “dozens” of weapons. But U.S. Army press releases have yet to boast of similar results in Najaf. There, Marines had surrounded the city and were in running firefights with the Sadr militia. Early estimates put the turned-in weapons total in Najaf at two.

Possibly the largest turn-in ever took place Down Under. After the 1996 massacre of thirty-five people in Port Arthur, Australia, citizens responded by relinquishing more than six hundred thousand weapons. The Australian government continues to fund buyback programs to this day. Violence perpetrated by humans is down, but, according to a recent report in the Guardian, crocodile attacks are up.

If there’s final proof that every gun turn-in program begets unintended consequences, Cynthia Gerdes has it. Since 1994, Gerdes has sponsored several toy gun turn-ins at her Creative Kidstuff toy store locations in the Twin Cities. When we spoke recently, she was unable to guess how many guns she took in. “We would fill boxes the size of thirty-three-gallon trash cans many times over. Thousands,” she said. Many of the toys are so realistic, she added, “they make the hair stand up on the back of my neck.” Gerdes always carts the weapons home for disposal to prevent them from being “recycled” out of the commercial dumpsters. Sadly, one was recovered there by a visiting nephew who took it to school and was promptly suspended.

Back at the Hennepin County Government Center, plans are underway to re-install Phoenix Rising on a lonely-looking footing poured on the plaza facing Fifth Street. The pylons surrounding the footing are there because the slab is not level with the plaza pavers, explained senior project manager Shirajoy Abry. It would not do for a citizen to trip and fall so close to the seat of litigation for the county. Nor would that be the first trip to court for the bird. The melting of the guns in 1992 was temporarily halted due to litigation by gun owners who wanted the inventory checked for their own lost or stolen weapons.

Later in the decade, the sculpture was mothballed during government center renovations and left in storage. Last April, just before the most recent attempt at installation, the five-hundred-pound aluminum base for the sculpture was stolen from the St. Paul shop where it was fabricated. A new one is being manufactured now, said Abry. How the fates may intervene this time is anyone’s guess. “I don’t even want to think about that,” said Abry. —Joe Pastoor

Mary’s watching: “Live Forever: The Rise And Fall Of British Pop”

I settled into my comfy chair and with every good bed-wetting liberal intention tried to watch the Democratic National Convention on TV. I felt like a big dumb demographic cliché. With one eye on John Edwards’ shiny hopeful face, my hopelessly Gen-X other eye drifted to the Vanity Fair in my lap. Mr. Sincere and Shiny, try as he might, could not compete with the pretty magazine and its photos of people who party with Paris Hilton.

I’m sure you’re thinking, “Here’s where Mary begins berating herself for her shallowness and political apathy.” Oh, how little you know me…

First, if most of my friends were honest, they would reveal that their true interest in Kerry amounts to little more than good hair, time spent in a garage band, and kite surfing.

So what? People say, “Vote for the candidate you can most relate to.” I’m happy to say I can’t “relate” to any of them. Can you?

I wasn’t born into money. I’ve never taken advice from my father. I’ve never been drawn to people who desperately seek the approval of strangers. I hate being told what to do. I think it would be creepy to know that there’s a good chance that I’m sleeping in a room that Ronald Reagan has had sex in (although Reagan was a SAG member and he regularly colored his hair, so I have more in common with him than any other president).

Sometimes the trifling, immoral details of a candidate’s life, the very things the spin doctors want to keep hidden, are the things most of us could relate to. Between blowing the sax on late-night TV and blowing the chronic, Clinton sealed the deal with a huge demo of voters. Bottom line, vote from your heart, vote from your ass. Just vote.

Now if only Nader smoked crack.

E-mail Mary at popularcreeps@yahoo.com.

“Zookeeper” is surely one of the top twenty coolest jobs in the world, and for Ross Taylor, a South Minneapolis native and University of Minnesota graduate, the path to this career started, oddly enough, in clown college. Studying to be a circus clown led to a job as big-top animal caretaker and then, for the past twenty-five years, keeper at the Minnesota Zoo. Taylor is one of the folks responsible for the animals on the Northern Trail—that’d be buffalo, Przewalski’s horses, moose, and of course the endangered Amur (Siberian) tigers. Lately he’s been especially busy with some new arrivals—a pair of female tiger cubs born in May. Visitors have been able to watch the cubs in their den via closed-circuit TV, but starting September 18, the youngsters will be on view romping around the main tiger enclosure. When we enlisted Taylor for our desert-island game, we were pleasantly surprised to discover that, unique among all our previous interviewees, he’s actually been stranded on a real desert island: specifically, Mili Atoll in the Marshall Islands, during his two years with the Peace Corps in the 1960s. “The minimum temperature the whole time was seventy-one degrees,” he says. Here’s what Taylor would take along for another stint in the South Pacific:

1) “A machete, because you can’t drink one of those big coconuts without them. You can use it for building huts, or just about anything you can think of.”

2) “A refrigerator. Boy, do you miss ice when you don’t have it for two years. Solar-powered, and stocked with supplies to make the perfect Hawaiian Sunset—rum, a
little pineapple juice.”

3) “Several blank canvases and painting supplies for capturing the island sunsets. I mostly paint with acrylics, because they’re so easy to handle. Recently, I’ve been painting animal-related portraits—tigers, actually.”

4) “A jar of mayonnaise, for when a palm tree falls down and you cut out the heart for a heart-of-palm salad. If you haven’t had salad for a year, it’s pretty much beyond description.”

5) “Two cats, to keep the rodent population down, which is a problem on a desert isle. Two cats because you can amuse yourself watching their interactions.” But Taylor would probably leave the tiger cubs at home—referring to the book The Life of Pi, he notes that on a desert island it’s probably best not to live next to a predator that weighs three times as much as you do. “I’d stick with domestic cats,” he says.