Collaborations between actor and director have created some legendary pairs—think John Ford/John Wayne, Akira Kurosawa/Toshiro Mifune, Sergio Leone/Clint Eastwood. But none was more volatile, even violent, than the creative ferment between Germany’s Werner Herzog and the enfant terrible Klaus Kinski. The two childhood friends made five movies together in the seventies and eighties, including an atmospherically creepy remake of Nosferatu and the sublime Aguirre: The Wrath of God, about a Spanish conquistador’s descent into madness. Kinski’s genius at portraying wild-eyed insanity was matched only by his ability to act insanely in real life. His out-of-control behavior included attacking actors on the Aguirre set with his sword for becoming distracted by bananas (yes, bananas), and wounding others by firing a pistol randomly into the tent where they were sleeping. Still, Herzog claims that the extras were most afraid of him, figuring that anyone who could deal with Kinski so calmly must be the truly crazy one. This limited-edition set collects all five films plus My Best Fiend, Herzog’s documentary on his love-hate relationship with Kinski.
Year: 2004
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The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra
With so much unwitting awfulness in theaters already, it seems like overkill to try to make something bad on purpose. But that’s the point of this often very funny, straight-faced spoof of 1950s sci-fi movies like Robot Monster and Plan 9 From Outer Space. Writer/director Larry Blamire shows his affection for the semi-competent cinema of the Atomic Age by assembling his deliberately nonsensical story from a mix of walking Ed Wood cliches. Aliens and mad scientists, none of whom can act, fight over a space meteor made of “atmosphereum”; a “living” skeleton (clearly operated by strings) tries to take over the world; a mutant monster played by a stagehand in a cheap rubber suit is gravy. Cadavra relies too much on jokes about cheap sets and clumsy writing, but Blamire has a fine ear for parodizing banal, repetitive dialogue—our hero, fatuous scientist Dr. Paul Armstrong, wakes up his wife with “It’s your husband, Dr. Paul Armstrong.” And the cast is adept at getting laughs without descending into unbearable camp. Cadavra screens with the 1937 Ub Iwerks-directed cartoon Skeleton Frolic, a visually inventive, Halloween-y gem from Disney’s Silly Symphonies.
Lagoon; 1320 Lagoon Ave., Minneapolis; (612) 825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com -
Cinematic Pilgrimage: Six From Chris Marker
A reliable biography of French filmmaker Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve does not exist, apparently by his choice, which leaves us unable to verify the rumors that he was born of Mongolian nobility, or explain his choice to rename himself after the Magic Marker beyond its obvious utility as (ahem) a pen name. If you know his name without knowing his films, it’s probably because his short experimental sci-fi La Jetée—a time-travel vision of apocalypse told almost entirely in still photographs—was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys. But most of his work has been in documentaries, which in his hands are not so much reportage as a combination of ruminative essay, radical politics, and visually punning avant-garde poem. Besides La Jetée, this series features five of Marker’s most prominent works, including his ethereal travelogue Sans Soleil and cinematic tributes to his two favorite Russian directors: One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, on Andrei Tarkovsky (of the non-George Clooney Solaris), and The Last Bolshevik, on silent-era pioneer Alexander Medvedkin. Arsenevich and Remembrance of Things to Come also happen to be Marker’s two most recent works, so this is an excellent opportunity to see what he’s been up to lately.
Oak Street; 309 Oak St. S.E., Minneapolis; (612) 331-3134; oakstreetcinema.org -
Erik Larson
There’s a quintessential dichotomy about the American big city: a place where smart or lucky nobodies strike it rich, and where the unlucky and rootless get swallowed up. Larsen’s Devil In The White City, a finalist for the National Book Award, tells of two men of 1890s Chicago who embodied that split: Daniel Burnham, the architect behind the 1893 World’s Fair, and H.H. Holmes, the nation’s first and perhaps deadliest serial killer. The two men didn’t know each other, but both used the megalopolis to get what they wanted. Burnham and his team created a sparkling city-within-a-city that drew amazed crowds from around the globe—a testament to Chicago’s creative and commercial power. The city also brought Holmes a steady supply of victims who disappeared into the block-long mansion he converted into a secret death factory, a ghastly parody of the slaughterhouses that fueled Chicago’s wealth. Larsen skillfully weaves his factual history together as if it were a thriller. (A minor aside: He also tells us that Holmes’ second wife, a Minnesotan, preferred him to Twin Citian suitors since “in Minneapolis there had been only silence and the inevitable clumsy petitions of potato-fingered men looking for someone, anyone, to share the agony of their days.” Ouch.)
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Jasper Fforde
One of Woody Allen’s funniest short stories involves a humanities professor who has a disastrous affair with Emma Bovary by magically transporting himself into Gustave Flaubert’s novel. Welsh writer Fforde takes this concept to a whole new level in his three very witty novels about Thursday Next, a detective who works the mean streets of Western literature. Bibliophiles will find the newest, The Well of Lost Plots, a hoot. Though Fforde’s love for extended tangents makes it occasionally difficult to follow the storyline, the tangents themselves are exceptionally clever. Where else will you find Wuthering Heights characters grumbling and complaining through a court-ordered rage-counseling session?
Bound To Be Read; 870 Grand Ave., St. Paul; (651) 646-2665; www.boundtoberead.com
Barnes & Noble, Galleria; 3225 W. 69th St., Edina; (952) 920-0633; www.bn.com -
Amy Tan
Amy Tan is out on the lecture circuit in support of her new essay collection, The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings. She’d rather be out in support of her fifth novel, but… Well, that’s one of the things she writes about in Fate: her fight against a rather nasty bout of Lyme disease, which has played havoc with her memory and destroyed the timetable for a proper followup to her bestsellers The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. We hope for a speedy recovery, but until then, Tan’s nonfiction makes a worthwhile tide-me-over. She’s always shaped her fiction from her life story, and if Fate is a little chaotic, it also shows us sides of the author not always at the forefront of her novels. She writes movingly about her illness and her painfully complex relationship with her Chinese-born parents, but also about the mortifying experience of having her work turned into Cliffs Notes. She’s also “rhythm dominatrix” for the celebrity-novelist band Rock Bottom Remainders, which apparently involves buttock-whipping Stephen King, Dave Barry and Matt Groening. That’s show biz.
O’Shaughnessy Auditorium, 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul, (651) 690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy -
Kinky Friedman, The Prisoner of Vandam Street
Long before Queer Nation and Niggaz With Attitude adopted the slurs of their oppressors as a show of unapologetic might, seventies country band Kinky Friedman and the Texas Jewboys were giving us Yid Kids up north proof that the goyim were more than people to give your lunch money to. Authentic country, the Texas Jewboys sang that when necessary, some lantsman needed to take out a good old can of kosher whip-ass against the Christers—Kinky’s signature song, “Asshole From El Paso,” was written in response to “Okie from Muskogee,” that noxious paean to redneckism sung by the no doubt foreskin-bearing Merle Haggard. Later the Kinkstah began writing best-selling mystery novels featuring a Lone Star-stater private eye named Kinky Friedman fighting crime and injustice in Gotham. His merry band of pranksters serve as Dr. Watsons for the cigar-chomping, whiskey-swilling shamus. The Texas Jewboy calls upon all his self-dubbed “Village Irregulars” in his just-out, just-great The Prisoner of Vandam Street, in which Kinky is mysteriously stricken with malaria in the heart of Greenwich Village.
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Lawrence Block, The Burglar on the Prowl
Any month that includes a new Block novel has at least one thing going for it. A master of both heavy drama and light comedy, Block’s capable of some powerful writing; at his peak, in a novel like When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, he can stand next to Raymond Chandler and stare him in the eye. His latest, featuring charming gentleman thief Bernie Rhodenbarr, is the tenth in a comic series that’s as inconsequential as a meringue, but just as tasty. Burglar on the Prowl sees Bernie relieving the boredom before an easy heist with some extracurricular nighttime crime. Soon the bodies are piling up, and guess who looks guilty? The protagonist might steal diamonds or hearts, but he’d never kill anybody—after all, Block based Bernie on Cary Grant’s dapper persona; it’s perhaps doubly apt, then, that George Clooney’s working on a film version of the first Rhodenbarr novel.
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Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker
Now that Danticat, the youngest writer ever nominated for a National Book Award, is about to hit 35, maybe there’ll be less gushing about her age and more about her writing ability, which is considerable. The Haitian expat’s previous novel, The Farming of Bones, was a powerful account of a 1937 massacre in her homeland, and The Dew Breaker continues Danticat’s attempt to come to terms with the island’s terrible legacy of violence. Despite the euphonious name, a “dew breaker” is actually Haitian slang for the torturers employed by the old Duvalier regime—Danticat translated the Creole phrase to sound serene for maximum ironic effect. Her dew breaker is an old man, now living in America, whose history reveals itself in reverse over the course of the book as different characters remember him, usually with haunted eyes, from his days as a pain-wielding thug. Danticat’s too good a writer to leave us with easy answers. And, in fact, a twist toward the end of the book ensures only difficult questions remain in this pungent Carribbean take on the banality of evil.
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Hope in a Bottle
I have always warmed to authors who thank their spouses for preparing their index. Such marital harmony, such mutual society, help and comfort. You can imagine their kitchen: she sitting at the table rummaging through proofs and index cards, he standing at the stove turning Seville oranges into coarse-cut marmalade.
It is surely gracious also for professors to thank their students, not (heaven forfend) because they have published their students’ research, nor from fake humility or a failure to put in the necessary hours in the library, but rather to acknowledge two important gifts. One is the sense that there are others who care about what one loves and wants to study—the pursuit of truth for its own sake can otherwise be a lonely business. The other is a sense of hope. A lifetime of teaching impresses on those who teach that the end is not yet, that people do become wiser, or at least more knowledgeable, given the opportunity. Some more generous professors, I am told, even take this view of telemarketers who call at dinnertime.
I recently spoke to a friend at an English college where admission depends heavily on personal interviews conducted by the people who will actually teach candidates if they are admitted. Potential students in their very late teens, he said, were like young claret—the name given to the great wines of Bordeaux since the seventeenth century, when wines like Chateau Haut-Brion were already being enjoyed by the likes of Samuel Pepys, the diarist. Clarets do not leap into life fully armed, like Athena from the head of Zeus (or Dionysus from his thigh). Samples taken from the cask before the wine is ready to be sold taste largely of tannin. The initial impact on the tongue and palate and the taste left after swallowing (or spitting—in the cuspidor, that’s what it’s for, toreador) may suggest the pleasures of the finished article. But in between there is a hard, dry taste like leaf mold (no, I don’t, not often, anyhow) or dry tea leaves (politesse once obliged me to eat half a pound of dry tea leaves in a train on the Turkish-Syrian border, but that is another story).
These tannins will be absorbed as the wine lies in its bottle, waiting to be drunk. Sometimes, as with a memorable bottle of 1975 Haut-Bages-Monpelou consumed in the late 1980s, they are never absorbed; this was a wine as inky in taste as it was in color. Sometimes one waits too long, the wine lies in the cellar howling “drink me now” through its cork, no one hears, and what is eventually poured is brown around the edges and acid. But more clarets die, I fear, of infanticide than of old age. What my English friend was trying to say was that his interview technique involved assessing the potential for mellowing exhibited by the tannins in his future pupils, while at the same time savoring their possible depth, complexity and fruit. He quoted Mark Twain at me: “When I was 18, I thought my father was an old fool. When I got to be 23, I was amazed how much he had picked up in five years.” Not a scientific method, I guess, but humane and effective.
Not all the wines of Bordeaux are made for the long haul. Indeed, I recently enjoyed a bottle only three years old, which made up in pleasant warmth what it lacked in complexity. Like most red Bordeaux, the 2000 vintage of Chateau Saint Sulpice (Appellation Bordeaux Controlée) is a blend of Merlot (imparting mellowness) and Cabernet (imparting flavor)—in this case rather more Merlot than Cabernet. Upon opening there is little smell to it, but the first impact on the tongue releases a pleasantly “winey” aroma up inside the nose, followed by a light tanniny taste and a lingering flavor of grapes. Left to air for a little while, it mellows further. It would be good with cheese or pork; it made a homemade cauliflower cheese really quite palatable. This is not complicated wine, but it bears thinking about as it goes down. Moreover, at about $10 a bottle locally it does no excess damage to the budget—and that is surely a true foundation for domestic harmony.