Author: rakemag

This fall’s two new exhibits at the Science Museum showcase the spookier side of the invertebrate world. Glow explores the fascinating topic of bioluminescence-that is, how creatures like fireflies and jellyfish have the ability to produce their own light. This whole glowing thing is useful in mating rituals, prey attraction, and cancer research (by humans, not jellyfish), but given how ugly some bioluminescent fish are, you have to wonder if they wouldn’t be better off under cover of darkness. The museum’s other new exhibit is even creepier and crawlier, delving into the grisly police work that is forensic entomology. Inspired by the hit TV show, but without all the bad one-liners, CSI looks at how scientists use corpse-loving insects to establish crucial information about suspicious deaths. A morbid discipline, to be sure, but important. Lawyers aren’t the only lower life forms working to bring criminals to justice.
Science Museum, 120 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 221-9444, www.smm.org

The original Singing Detective, Dennis Potter’s 1986 BBC miniseries, was one of those bizarre and unrepeatable triumphs of pure creativity over the strictures of narrative form-a hallucinatory mix of noir film, paranoid fever dream, and Fosse-esque musical that built up and intertwined layers of story just so it could rip them apart and recombine them. Unrepeatable, and yet here’s this movie, which would seem to have no reason for being except that its translation from the small screen was Potter’s final project before his death from cancer in 1994. It’s challenging and strange material, and with a running time shorter than a quarter of the miniseries it also can’t possibly be as rich as the original. Indeed, it’s one of the year’s most critically divisive, loved by a few and hated by a few more, since its debut at Sundance last January. (Even so, it’s as uncontroversial as an episode of Friends compared to producer Mel Gibson’s upcoming The Passion of Christ.) We suspect that reviews are kind of superfluous with movies like this in any case; if you’re going, go with your mind open and your hopes medium-high, and know that the presence of Robert Downey Jr. in the lead can’t help being a positive.
Uptown Theater, 2906 Hennepin Ave., (612) 925-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com

If Pirates of the Caribbean was any indication, there is an unmet public appetite for seafaring and swashbuckling, which bodes well for what could be a long series of movie adaptations of the well-loved series of historical novels by Patrick O’Brian. In a way, casting Russell Crowe as a hard-fighting Napoleon-era British sea captain is our dream come true, at least in that our dream is to set him adrift in a small boat in the middle of the Pacific. But we’ll grudgingly admit that he’s well cast as Jack Aubrey, O’Brian’s brave but decidedly imperfect hero. The action is here is actually taken from the tenth book, which has one of the series’ meatiest plots, with Aubrey and his spy/surgeon buddy Stephen Maturin chasing a powerful enemy frigate around South America. Purists will grumble about any number of changes, for instance that the bad guys are no longer Americans, but French-leading us to wonder whether they’re also changing that infamous Churchill quip to “rum, freedom fries, and the lash.”

These four films from the most productive decade of Humphrey Bogart’s career might be second-tier in the Bogie canon, but only because pretty much anything is second-tier to Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. Included here are two of the last films of his pre-leading-man days when he was still playing villains and supporting charactersÑthe gritty noirs High Sierra and They Drive by Night, directed by the sometimes workmanlike Raoul Walsh near the top of his form. 1944’s To Have and Have Not, the legend goes, was the result of a bar bet between Ernest Hemingway and director Howard Hawks. Papa claimed Hawks couldn’t make a good film from his worst novel; Hawks got William Faulkner to write the script and won the bet. The weirdest one here is the 1947 thriller Dark Passage, in which Bogie’s wrongfully accused fugitive gets plastic surgery to hide himself while tracking down his wife’s killer-and for the first hour, while the bandages are on, the film is told entirely through a Bogart’s-eye camera view. Gimmicky, yes, but it gives new meaning to “Here’s looking at you, kid.”

We go back and forth about which of Sergio Leone’s mid-sixties spaghetti Westerns is our favorite, like an indecisive diner trying to choose between their four favorite pie flavors at Bakers Square. Right now we lean toward For a Few Dollars More, but if anyone wanted to argue for West, the last, longest and most operatic of the quartet, we wouldn’t make them draw pistols at high noon. On the downside, Charles Bronson’s expressionless, flinty hero is simply not as compelling as the expressionless, flinty hero played by Clint Eastwood in the previous three films. And the pacing is, truth be told, pretty slow. But Leone did pull off a brilliant bit of stunt casting by convincing Henry Fonda, for the only time in his career, to be the bad guy. He’s just terrific. Those clear blue eyes, icons of benevolence in everything else he did, here become emblems of pure and icy evil.

After six years out of the music scene since 1997’s Surfacing was the toast of Lilith Fair, Sarah McLachlan is resurfacing with a new album. About time. While Surfacing’s “Angel” is a good song, we’re ready to hear that brilliant voice sing a different tune. And true to McLachlan’s success, Afterglow’s lead single “Fallen” has already made its way to the top of the pop charts. But it’s the less overplayed, more thoughtful songs that have made us grow to love McLachlan and her music. And she’s had plenty to think about. In the half-decade since her last album, McLachlan gave birth to daughter Indie and lost her mother to cancer. She deals with these events in the candid and expressive style we’ve come to expect. It’s a blend of the old and the new. Six years is a long time, but it was worth the wait.

The real surprise about this remastered version of the Beatles’ swan song-besides the offputting title-is only that it took so long. Paul McCartney has never been shy about his loathing for the strings and dense production added by producer Phil Spector when the fracturing Fabs couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with each other, let alone finish the record themselves. Did he have to wait for the knighthood before he had the clout to get his hands on the master tapes? Beatlephiles (maybe the most minutiae-driven group in all of rock fandom) have been trading bootleg de-Spectored versions of this material for years-it’s truly incredible just how much marginalia and apocrypha from the Beatles’ studio sessions is floating around. But for those of us not off the deep end, this is a good opportunity to finally test whether McCartney’s conception is really better than the Wall of SoundÑand, ideally, to treasure both versions.

We all want to stay hip to the scene, but who has time to do all that work? We just hang out in Electric Fetus once a fortnight and eavesdrop, and this is how we heard about this amazing quartet of brothers (OK, one first cousin) from Tennessee. What the coeds in pigtails and hiphuggers didn’t say is that the Kings sound like what latter-day Butthole Surfers would have been if their muse had been Budweiser rather than peyote, or Jon Spencer if he’d majored in car repair. It’s raunchy and mumbling, with a lilting pop beat that we hereby dub “Heated Garage Rock.”

Weiler’s last record was called Fly Me Back, but she’s flown away instead. A highlight of the local folk scene throughout the late nineties (and winner of three Minnesota Music Awards), Weiler now lives in Portland, Oregon, where she’s just finished her fourth studio album, Cold Weather, out this month. (And it’s nice to see some cold weather we actually looked forward to.) Weiler never fails to bring style and comforting originality to her songs, and performing live, she has a captivating intimacy. You find yourself wanting to call her by her first name and ask her to hang out with you and your friends. Her new album is as insightful as we’d hoped it would be. She’s showing a new, darker side to her songwriting, as on the record’s opening song “Faucet.” And “Medicine” and “Christmas Sweater,” done in Weiler’s typically low-key fashion, make us want to sit back, relax, and press repeat.
400 Bar, 400 Cedar Ave., (612) 332-2903, www.400bar.com

Keeping on top of the full range of Robert Pollard’s seeming millions of solo albums and official Guided By Voices work is, frankly, more work than anyone should have to put in. It’s far too late, we suspect, to hope that he’ll hook up with a producer who can make him focus on quality over quantity and shoot for a dozen polished songs instead of two dozen songs that share four dozen half-formed great ideas. But that just isn’t what GBV is about-there have always been diamonds in the rockpile, but you have to be willing to mine them yourself. Their latest disc, August’s Earthquake Glue, is no exception-gifted, surreal lyric imagery and crunchy, powerful rawk that works brilliantly about fifty percent of the time. Pollard’s catalog of tunes is just crying out for a really well-done best-of compilation, and this month sees a pretty good, if not perfect, attempt. Two of them, really-there’s the single disc Human Amusements at Hourly Rates, and a slightly different version on the box set Hardcore UFOs, the rest of which, five discs of rarities and live stuff, only contributes to the GBV sprawl problem.
First Avenue, 701 First Ave. N.,
(612) 332-1775, www.first-avenue.com