Author: rakemag

“You’ll feel like you’re in Mexico!” it says on EBM’s website, which may explain why Dick and Lynne Cheney kept their visit short last March. For our part, we always leave with more than we came for. El Burrito’s boggling array of dried peppers, from ancho to pasilla, can lure anyone into the Mercado, and our latest trip to the deli case netted a bag of burritos including chorizo, puerco en verde, pollo, and our favorite: shredded bistek in an oily red gravy unmatched anywhere in the metro. If you want to cool your heels, the cafeteria has a new seating area, and they say beer is coming soon.

D-Day turns sixty next month, bringing a barrage of notable World War Two movies on the DVD release front. We’re especially fond of this one, a very different proposition from what you’ll usually find in the genre. Directed in 1968 by John Boorman (at his creative peak, after Point Blank and before Deliverance), Hell avoids cliché with a story set on the sidelines of the Pacific Front, as two enemy soldiers stranded on a remote island must decide whether to kill each other or cooperate to survive. Beautifully shot and intriguingly scripted—realistically, the language barrier never is resolved—the film is most interesting as an actor’s duel between tough-guy greats Lee Marvin and Toshiro Mifune, a sort of cinematic Ali/Frazier matchup. Though its ending’s antiwar message is painful in its “shocking” obviousness (it was 1968, remember), this film’s a clear victory.

Our only regret, really, is that it took us so long to finally check out this bustling Vietnamese spot, one of the reasons Nicollet Avenue earned the nickname “Eat Street.” Big portions, tasty dishes (love the chicken with ginger sauce), and nicely affordable: We splurged on one of the most expensive items on the menu—the weekends-only seabass and jumbo shrimp soup—and were set back a mere eight bucks. And in our ongoing quest to find the perfect eggroll, we may have found a new contender. On second thought, we won’t regret anything, we’ll just eat.

Best known for M and Metropolis, director Fritz Lang made this intriguingly offbeat 1933 thriller just before fleeing Nazi Germany—and small wonder he had to. Though the Nazis supposedly offered him a chance to run Hitler’s film industry, they couldn’t have liked the parallels Testament drew between its titular villain, an insane criminal genius, and Der Fuehrer. Besides its political daring, Testament was a forward-looking piece of cinematic art, bridging German expressionism and the later styles of Alfred Hitchcock and the James Bond-style spy thriller. And the character of Mabuse himself, who runs a shadowy crime empire from an asylum cell, is an exemplar of the line of fictional evil masterminds stretching from Moriarty to Hannibal Lecter. Criterion’s two-disc DVD is jam-packed with extra goodies—interviews, a fresh English translation, and production-design sketches—that nearly comprise a film-school seminar of their own.

Cooing jazz chanteuse Diana Krall met pop-punk icon Elvis Costello at the 2002 Grammys, and so far two great things have resulted—their marriage, and an inspired, romantic collaborative album. Krall is known for giving new life to old standards. Girl In The Other Room, however, breaks that tradition as the first of her eight albums to showcase her songwriting talents. Sexy down-tempo numbers such as “Abandoned Masquerade” and “I’ve Changed My Address” are highlights that foretell a great future for Krall/Costello originals. Costello lends his songwriting finesse on six numbers, and Krall also covers the likes of Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits. Longtime fans will see this as a departure from her usual fare of simple standards, but fear not—this clever, more sophisticated material still preserves her signature elegance.

East L.A.’s band of wolves have had a thirty-year career of remarkably high-quality work, though that hasn’t always translated into the mainstream success worthy of their talent, their 1987 monster-hit cover of “La Bamba” aside. And although it’s good news to us merely that they’re back with their first disc since 2002’s stellar Good Morning Aztlan, seeing who else Los Lobos have invited along for The Ride makes this one especially intriguing. Guests include Richard Thompson, Tom Waits, and Bobby Womack, who joins the band on a remake of his seventies soul classic “Across 110th Street.” Elvis Costello and gospel singer Mavis Staples lend vocals to reworked versions of two older Lobos tunes, “Matter of Time” and “Someday.” Mark your calendars for September 1 and 2, when the band’s crackling live show brings them to the State Fair stage.

For those who know Toots & the Maytals solely from “Pressure Drop”—the best cut on The Harder They Come, the greatest reggae collection ever—a whole world awaits. With Jimmy Cliff, Bob Marley, and Bunny Wailer, Toots has kept on keeping on, even as public interest in reggae outside of Kingston, Jamaica, has dipped and doodled with the speed with which Minnesotans become Twins fans. Toots’ latest, True Love, is a guest-studded affair featuring the likes of Eric Clapton, Ben Harper, Bonnie Raitt, and Ryan Adams, perhaps in hopes of generating the same kind of crossover appeal that reminded everyone Carlos Santana was still alive. It’s an honorable introduction to our man Toots—and since people have been jumping on and off his bandwagon for a generation, no one will mind if you suddenly catch on now.

For its eleventh year, the Walker’s annual celebration of female film directors kicks off with the apropos new documentary In the Company of Women, a look at the vital role of female filmmakers in the nineties’ independent-cinema explosion. Though it sometimes feels like a ninety-minute commercial for the Independent Film Channel (which funded it), it’s still a heartening overview of the inroads women have made in the male-dominated film world. Other intriguing movies being shown include Double Dare, about Hollywood stuntwomen, and a free retrospective of the short works of Minnesota-born director Sarah Jacobson, who died of cancer in February. There’s also a number of strong features from outside the U.S., including the American premiere of At Five in the Afternoon, an intriguing, Spike Lee-like drama about a schoolgirl in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan who dreams of running for president. (612) 375-7622; www.walkerart.org

Few photographers have captured a neighborhood as well or as thoroughly as Wing Young Huie did with his massive Lake Street USA series of a few years back. For his latest project, he and his wife and collaborator Tara hit the open road to visit thirty-eight states, Canada, and Mexico in search of the Asian experience in North America. 9 Months in America: An Ethnocentric Tour combines about a hundred of Huie’s photos with video installations and nine short stories, creating both a personal exploration of Huie’s heritage and a look at what it means to be American at the beginning of the millennium.

THE RAKE: Your previous Frogtown and Lake Street series centered on specific Twin Cities urban areas, but 9 Months has a much broader geographic scope. Were you shooting for something more ambitious?

HUIE: Lake Street was pretty ambitious. I don’t know if I’ll ever do anything like that again. Coming off the heels of Lake Street, I really wanted to get away. And I also wanted to expand and try different stuff. Lake Street and Frogtown, none of it really focused on my own background. I’m the youngest of six; I’m the only non-immigrant in my family. Everyone was born in China. I grew up in Duluth. I’d always wondered what it would be like if I’d grown up in other parts of the country, in, say, Chinatown. Or in the Deep South. So basically, “ethnocentric” describes a viewpoint rather than a subject. The subject is really America, and our trip. But in this America, the Asians are the majority.

How did you meet the president of the Asian Worldwide Elvis Fan Club?

We were in Houston, and read an article about a guy who’d seen the image of Elvis on his tree, in his yard. All it said was that he was the president of this club. So we looked it up in the yellow pages and the next day, we were at his house, which he had turned into a shrine to Elvis. He sang for us. He’s not an Elvis impersonator, though his son is. But he sang for us a variety of songs—in Moroccan, in French, in Spanish; he did country western, blues, and of course Elvis. He’s a Vietnamese immigrant, and the only thing he didn’t sing was a song in Vietnamese. He was inspired by Elvis and how this poor backwoods person overcame his circumstances. He related to that, as a poor Vietnamese immigrant. Elvis was a role model for him.

Did you have a very specific itinerary?

We didn’t know going into a city what we would do. It was serendipitous. We had a rough plan, but for the most part, we’d drive to a city and go, “OK, what are we gonna do now?”

It must be second nature to you to look at something and say, “Oh, that would make a good photo.”

You know, when you see Miss Congeniality talking on a cell phone while walking down a street in Chinatown, you’ve got to take a picture of that… When I was working on Lake Street, I lived in the neighborhood. Because the project was so big, I felt like I was seeing photographs everywhere, and it got to the point where I would have to drive outside of the area to feel less anxious. With this project, at first I thought it was going to be mostly about Chinese restaurants, but the further we got into the trip, everything became photographable. And so you can’t shut it off. There were times when I’m thinking, “Am I going to go talk to this person, or am I just going to sit here and enjoy my coffee?” Because that’s how we’d meet people. You go to a Chinese restaurant and start a conversation.

9 Months opens April 17 at the Minnesota Museum of American Art’s new space on Kellogg Boulevard and Market Street in St. Paul. (651) 292-4355; www.mmaa.org.