Year: 2005

The sexiest thing in this 1967 classic isn’t the young and charismatic Warren Beatty, or that tart blonde Faye Dunaway, playing the legendary bank robbers. It’s a 1934 Ford V-8, in the role of the car that Clyde stole from Bonnie’s parents, driving the lovers off into the bloody sunset. The film’s climactic shootout rivals Mel Gibson’s Christ-beating reverie for perversity; the couple’s bodies flop out of the car and dance to an endless volley of gunfire. In real life, the car took 160 bullets; afterward, Ruth Warren, whom Clyde stole it from, leased it to various carnival promoters. “The Bonnie and Clyde Death Car” took to the road again, ultimately ending up–where else?–in Vegas, where it resides today. 612-825-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com

In the early 1800s, two German brothers were looking for stable, well-paying jobs in order to support their younger siblings after their parents’ deaths, so they became librarians. (Today’s librarians might say that sounds like a fairy tale.) While working in the stacks, the brothers Grimm became the leading folklorists of their day, compiling more than two hundred folk tales and legends. Perhaps due to their own dark past, most of the supposed kiddie tales the brothers collected are twisted and disturbing, driven by envy, vengeance, and the craving for tender young flesh. It’s rich fodder for a film, and Terry Gilliam (who has already taken a crack at fairy tales with Jabberwocky and the Monty Python franchise) adds lots of humor to his revisionist version. However, he misses a great, cathartic moment by not feeding Matt Damon to a wolf.

For nearly thirty years, music- and film-lovers have gathered around a concrete slab in Loring Park to dance in the grass, toss Frisbees, and picnic till dusk, when Walker curators project film classics onto a modest movie screen. This year, the musical lineup emphasizes local acts, like teen idols Melodious Owl (at right, August 1) and big-band punksters Thunder in the Valley (August 8). The film selection focuses on the work of Wisconsin boy-made-good Nicholas Ray, including Rebel Without a Cause (August 1) and The Lusty Men (August 15). Ray, who died in 1979, had a great interest in music, associating with ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and musicians Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie, so he’d probably love seeing his films paired with a little rock-n-roll. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org

Ignore the unappealing title, along with any thoughts conjured by the word “quadriplegic.” Even moviegoers who couldn’t care less about rugby or haven’t yet climbed aboard the documentary bandwagon have found themselves in thrall to this film’s jaw-clenching suspense, unsentimental plot, and rugged characters. Its stars play on the U.S. “quad” rugby team, and they are guys who survived debilitating diseases, car wrecks, and brutal fistfights. Now, confined to wheelchairs, they smash each other around the court without pads or helmets or mercy. They’re tough guys who don’t pity themselves in the least, which explains at least in part how they’ve become a new kind of hero and even sex symbol–some of them were recently featured in a New York Times Magazine fashion spread. 612-825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com

We must be closing in on peak carrying capacity for the planet, because it seems that authors are increasingly having a difficult time making up new names. Writers like Jonathan Safran Foer and our own Shannon Olson are giving their characters names that are really easy to remember–their own. Now Bret Easton Ellis has a book about a guy named Bret Easton Ellis, and it’s not a memoir. But it does draw upon Ellis’ life and previous novels for material, sometimes to highly creepy effect, as when a literary psychopath tries to act out the violent plot of the author’s American Psycho. This ghost story, set in a decaying and drug-addled suburbia, seems to find an older and wiser Ellis regretful about the topics (drugs, violence) his earlier works romanticized.

Berger is on the doorstep of eighty now, and for decades he has been one of the most elegant writers in the English language. He’s a master of the elegy and the vignette, and whether in the form of fiction or essay, his work has always had the long-view precision of a satellite photo. Berger’s enduring themes have been the power and pull of memory, the tangled messes and miracles of history, and human relationships. His latest, Here Is Where We Meet, which is described as “a fiction,” combines semi-autobiographical reveries and affectionate portraits of a diverse cast of characters from history and the authorÕs still-vivid imagination. Berger’s narrator spends a good deal of time meditating on a lavish dinner preparation for friends, and ranges across Europe and Asia in search of the dead that “don’t stay where they’re buried.”

Now that even the Boundary Waters is full of cell phones and GPS units–there’s probably even a laptop in a dry bag up there somewhere–it seems there’s no escaping technology. MIT student Eric Brende started to question his addiction to this higher power source, and decided the only way to escape technology’s grip was to really get away. He and his wife moved to an off-grid community of Amish-like people he calls the “Minimites,” who use no electric machines and run a barter society exchanging homegrown food and goods. Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology chronicles the eighteen months Brende and his wife lived in the community. Apparently, they missed a few things; he now lives in St. Louis, where he works as a rickshaw driver. Coffman Memorial Union, 300 Washington Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-625-6564; www.bookstores.umn.edu

X may have emerged from the trash-strewn bowels of L.A., but it always had its finger on America’s rural music traditions. In fact, this offshoot of the legendary punk band excavated those roots long before MTV Unplugged and O Brother Where Art Thou made it cool to strum acoustic instruments and act like a hick. The Knitters’ 1985 album “Poor Little Critter on the Road” not only had a great title; it also made a bunch of hipsters think twice before trashing any tune with a banjo or accordion in it. Twenty years hence, the Knitters are back with a new album and returning to the road (like most all bands from twenty years ago, it seems, including their “parent” band). If X’s recent shows are any indication, these players haven’t lost any of their fire, and, in many ways, have only gotten better.

With his snarky stage name, a voice you’ve got to learn to love, and a maddening compulsion for jumping genres, Declan McManus has become a pop music icon almost in spite of himself. Why? Because his songcraft, when it jells just right, has yielded some of the best pop of the last several decades. From organ-driven dance numbers like “Pump It Up” to smoldering ballads like “Alison” and the best antiwar anthem ever, “(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding,” Costello’s top-drawer tunes are simply unforgettable. His most recent album, the roots-tinged “The Delivery Man,” is an up-and-down affair with fewer instant classics than we hoped for. But hey, at least it’s not another collaboration with a string quartet or Burt Bacharach. 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul; 651-690-6700, www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy

A couple of years ago, a scorching bit of celebrity gossip shocked the MPR-listening, granola-eating, prairie grass-planting fans of the contemporary folk scene: Singer-songwriters Greg Brown and Iris DeMent had secretly married. The couple keep their relationship strictly off the record (although once when we called Brown’s Iowa farmhouse, DeMent answered the phone, and we could hear breakfast cooking in the background), but the pairing is picture-perfect. Like Brown, DeMent writes smart, knowing, sometimes political, sometimes achingly personal songs set to warm country-folk music. We love her incomparable voice, and we’re hoping to hear it paired with Brown’s rumble sometime after they own up to their connubial affiliation. 651-290-1221, www.fitzgeraldtheater.org