Month: July 2006

In the hands of Outkast video director Bryan Barber, this unusual musical boasts gorgeous cinematography, the kind of rich detail that recalls The Sting, and songs that mix hip-hop with the spirit of Cab Calloway. Set in the Prohibition-era South, Outkasters Antwan A. Patton (that’s Big Boi to his fans), and André Benjamin (aka André 3000) star as the manager and piano player at a speakeasy; two lifelong friends, they’ve grown up with a shared love of music, and, apparently, trouble. The real-life duo have described Idlewild as an “Outkast album in visual form,” but given their reputation for ambition and experimentation, the film is likely to find an audience beyond hip-hop fans.

As we draw closer to the five-year mark, filmmakers have grown less shy about portraying the tragedy that, as many people say, felt like a big-budget, special-effects movie in the first place. With World Trade Center, Oliver Stone focuses on two Port Authority officers (played by Nicholas Cage and Michael Peña) who found themselves trapped in the wreckage of the second tower, and makes what feels like Irwin Allen’s September 11th. Call JFK and Nixon historically incorrect, but at least they were masterpieces of paranoia and hugely entertaining. Here, Stone brings perhaps the most charged day in history to a grinding halt, though patriots might appreciate the excessive slo-mo, the chest-thumping religious allegories, and his obvious support of the war in Iraq.

The Quinceañera is the traditional Mexican celebration of a girl’s fifteenth birthday and subsequent graduation into womanhood, but one young lady has beaten the party to the punch. Magdalena gets kicked out of the house when her Catholic parents learn she is pregnant; forced to turn her attentions from party dresses and limousines, she finds refuge with a great-uncle and gay cousin who have been similarly shunned. This film was shot in family homes throughout the Echo Park area of Los Angeles, a longtime Latino community, and the casting of actual neighborhood residents brings authenticity to what is already a spirited story. That might help to explain how Quinceañera walked away from the Sundance Film Festival this year with both the grand jury prize and the audience award.

Faith in Woody Allen was restored for many with last winter’s steamy British thriller Match Point; now the director is reviving his comedic antics with a playful murder mystery. As Allen once again sets his story across the pond, Scarlett Johansson, his muse of the moment, plays an American journalism student in London who telepathically receives clues to a murderer’s identity during a magic trick. In order to catch the man known as the Tarot Card Killer, she naturally pairs up with the magician (thankfully, it’s in a platonic way, since he’s played by Woody). As can often befall a detective, even an amateur, she grows sweet on her suspect: a hot-to-trot aristocrat played by Hugh Jackman who is definitely humorous, but may or may not be homicidal.

“Where’s the rest of me?” cries the newly amputated Drake McHugh, which was easily Ronald Reagan’s finest performance (that is if you don’t count those sixteen years he spent as a figurehead for California and the U.S.). Based on a scandalous potboiler, Kings Row is the story of “the town they talk about in whispers.” A group of childhood friends leave their stifling hamlet in search of great fortune. But returning years later, they find themselves embroiled in torrid love affairs, dementia, suicides, and the clutches of a sadistic doctor who’ll cut off the legs of any young man with designs on his daughter. We can only wonder why Kings Row never found new life during the Dutch Administration, and it would be a camp classic if it weren’t so somber.

Herschel V. Jones, a newspaperman and museum trustee, wowed the art world in 1916 when he donated thousands of prints to the young Institute. This exhibition is curated to offer an overview of techniques and trends in a genre that, because of its affordability, has always cast an eye toward market concerns. Thus the popularity of peasant festival scenes in the sixteenth century, replete with vomiting and fondling and buffoonish antics that intrigued the bourgeoisie. Also on view are masterpieces by Dürer, who used his incomparable engraving skills to render light refracting through the windows of St. Jerome’s study, and seemingly every last hair on his companion lion. At the opposite extreme is Francis Jourdain’s White Cat, made almost five hundred years later, whose economy shows the influence of Japanese art, which captivated many French at the fin de siècle. 2400 3rd Ave. S., Minneapolis; 612-870-3131; www.artsmia.org

Could the Rochester Art Center be aiming to become the Walker Art Center of southern Minnesota? This exhibition of eleven recent works by Manglano-Ovalle, many of them made in the last year, is certainly some kind of coup. The Madrid-born artist uses scientific data and cutting-edge technologies to create minimalist pieces that, conceptually, are quite complex. In the main gallery are three works dealing with natural forces: scale models of an iceberg and a cumulo-nimbus thundercloud, as well as Random Sky, a projection generated in real time from data gathered by a mini-weather station set up right in the room. Playing off those large-scale works is a trio of smaller pieces centered on the human individual; one involves the DNA of an anonymous volunteer, another the artist’s own fist, and the third, his child dozing in a crib. Taken all together, these pieces generate a host of ideas about man and nature (and human nature), borders and boundaries, time and transition, systems and the scientific method. 40 Civic Center Dr. S.E., Rochester; 507-282-8629; www.rochesterartcenter.org

Offering an artistic take on the corporate practice of outsourcing, the collective of curators/artists behind this exhibition (including Douglas Padilla, Xavier Tavera, and Alexa Horochowski) commissioned help from south of the border in making the works on view. As part of Padilla’s installation on a faux business called “Ameri-Art Industries,” there’s a photographic “org-chart” made up of portraits of workers in Minneapolis, San Diego, and Tijuana (again, the task of snapping these shots was outsourced). Also on view is a cart laden with hand-crafted souvenir tchotckes made from seashells, horsetail hairs, naturally dyed wool, and, perhaps most impressive, El Zorzal Criollo (pictured here), a piece made of steel, auto body-paint, air-bag hydraulics, plus a kick-ass stereo and subwoofer. In short, it’s a bed-like platform that wants to be a low-rider, one that gives those lounging on it quite a ride. 520 2nd St. S.E., Minneapolis; 612-623-9176; www.soapfactory.org

Like his contemporaries Aharon Appelfeld and Amos Oz, Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua explores universal dilemmas that have been at the forefront of debate in his native country for decades. His often controversial views on Israeli identity and culpability have earned him fierce criticism at home and abroad, though he is widely regarded as one of Israel’s greatest living writers. His latest, A Woman in Jerusalem, displays many of his signature humanitarian concerns, and also shows off his Kafka influence to good effect. It centers on an anonymous victim of a suicide bombing who turns out to be a Slavic immigrant who had been working as a cleaning woman. An unnamed bureaucrat is dispatched to unravel the mystery and return the woman’s body to her family—a strange journey is marked by moral uncertainties, anguish, and genuine tenderness for a woman who had no real stake in Israel’s politics.

When queried about the meaning of his generally surrealistic stories, Haruki Murakami replied, “I’m very realistic. But when I write, I write weird.” That’s true enough, as the writer’s rabid cult of fans could attest. His new collection of twenty-five stories features, among other things, a shrinking elephant, an identity-stealing puddle of quicksand, and a variety of physically disabled characters. Murakami’s tales, with their diverse influences ranging from popular culture, Buddhism, western philosophy, and Jungian theory, are told with such shape-shifting fluidity that a reader often runs the risk of confusing their hallucinatory plots with the storylines of his own dreams.