Author: rakemag

Now that Neal Pollack is past the indignity of being widely suspected to be Dave Eggers’s pseudonym, he’s been able to get down to the business of being his own pseudonym. As fans of his 2002 Neal Pollack Anthology of American Literature and his consistently funny weblog know, in “Neal Pollack,” the real Pollack has engineered a pitch-perfect parodic voice–a pompous, wildly egocentric buffoon of celebrity journalism. He wields that voice like an oaken club of comedy in his debut novel, Never Mind the Pollacks—a rolling-thunder revue through rock history like Forrest Gump with Hunter S. Thompson as the main character. The novel runs out of steam well before it runs out of pages, one problem being that music mytholology becomes more depressing and less fun the more you move from Elvis to Kurt Cobain. That said, Never Mind contains some terrifically funny stuff, especially the mystical old bluesman Clambone Jefferson. (If you’re one of those crazy types who likes listening to rock as well as reading about it, know that the Neal Pollack Invasion has released a CD and plays at the 400 Bar October 20.)

A very impressive first novel, Sebold’s The Lovely Bones deals with the grief, self-destruction, and eventual healing of a suburban family after daughter Susie is brutally raped and murdered. What saves the book from drowning in its grim premise is her deft choice of narrator—the murdered girl herself, who watches from the afterlife with sadness, love, and pity for those she left behind. If you haven’t yet sampled Sebold’s artfully constructed prose, do so now before the movie version coming next year inevitably colors any future discovery of the book.
Adath Jeshurun, 10500 Hillside Ln., Minnetonka, (866) 468-3401, www.hclib.org

While the British royal family may have closets full of tantalizing scandal and deceit, the “Royal Family of the Circus” continues to live up to its sterling reputation for perfection in the circus arts. Ah, the bore of the privileged life. Maybe fewer heads would have rolled through history, if the circus had been in charge. The Royal Hanneford once amused the likes of King George III—that means nearly three hundred years under the big top, although this incarnation, run by scion and former clown Tommy Hanneford, has been around only since the sixties. This time around brings a program of all-new acts to downtown St. Paul, featuring horseback rider Mark Karoly, Mongolian contortionists and Chinese aerialists, elephants and big cats, and much more. Ringmaster Billy Martin, we will point out pedantically, is not the late Yankees manager, although that Billy also knew a thing or two about circuses.
Xcel, 199 W. Kellogg Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 726-8240, www.xcelenergycenter.com

Georges Lopez teaches. The point of Nicolas Philibert’s documentary, filmed for six months in Lopez’s little one-room schoolhouse in rural France, is to show us exactly what that means. Surrounded by a gaggle of kids ages four to ten, the stern but grandfatherly Lopez clearly lives for his work—and indeed, he literally lives above the schoolroom. He is retiring next year, we learn, and what that means for his life is anyone’s guess. To Be is charming but never cutesy, though it’s hard to resist a four-year-old named Jojo who has trouble finishing his coloring and can’t resist playing with the photocopier. The film begins slowly and doesn’t build toward any overt narrative point, the better to create a depth of characterization that makes perfectly clear the bond between Lopez and his charges. It’s the sort of film that makes you suddenly remember your favorite grade-school teacher and want to send him or her a little note saying Thanks for helping me learn to tie my shoes. Maybe you ought to invite them to this movie.
Bell Auditorium, 17th St. S.E & University Ave. S.E., (612) 331-3134, www.ufilm.org

Why isn’t there an official touring film series that collects each year’s Oscar short-subject nominees, which most people never get a chance to see? It seems like a no-brainer, but maybe that’s why we don’t work in marketing. For now, we’ll happily make do with programs like this, a nifty assemblage of nineteen films from eight countries, compiled by animators Mike Judge (King of the Hill and Beavis & Butt-head) and Don Hertzfeldt. Highlights include the avant-garde English claymation Ident, and a snippet of the 1957 space documentary Mars and Beyond, a Disney-imagined view of Martian life that helped the space program get off the ground. Hertzfeldt steals the show with his brilliantly funny, Oscar-nominated Rejected, a satire of commercial advertising work and cutesy TV promos that collapses into total mental breakdown. Here’s hoping next year’s installment has this much good material. (Hertzfeldt will be at the show’s opening night, October 8.)
Oak Street, 309 Oak St. S.E., (612) 331-3134, www.oakstreetcinema.org

Fargo excepted, Joel and Ethan Coen have had their greatest popular success with lighthearted, goofy comedies like Raising Arizona and O Brother, Where Art Thou? And that seems to be where they’re headed for their next couple of films. Due in 2004 is their remake of the Alec Guinness/Peter Sellers heist lampoon The Ladykillers, and this month sees the release of Intolerable Cruelty, a 1940s-style screwball comedy starring George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones as a shyster lawyer and gold-digging serial divorcée entangled in a web of seduction, love and revenge. It looks like the Coens’ most mainstream film yet. How mainstream? For one thing, the $60 million budget is more than any of their previous films have made. And there’s the full-page ad on the back page of this month’s Glamour. You can be sure that didn’t happen with Barton Fink. We’ve got high hopes for this one, not just as a new work from the Coens, but as a romantic comedy that might make us forget about recent genre junk like Sweet Home Alabama.

Nothing against Ken Burns, but this public-TV series looks about a hundred times more interesting than Jazz, which was earnest and informative but lacked that je ne sais quois you get when a documentarian knows and loves his subject long before he makes a movie about it. Here, that’s not a problem. Scorsese has a lifelong passion for this music, as do the six other directors involved in The Blues—including Wim Wenders, Clint Eastwood, and Mike Figgis. Rather than a broad historical overview—which someone really ought to do, but maybe next time—the series is a loose-linked collection of seven idiosyncratic trips through the music. We’re especially looking forward to Wenders’s segment, profiling three of the genre’s lesser-known geniuses: Blind Willie Johnson, Skip James, and J.B. Lenoir. The TV series is the flagship of a flotilla of ancillary releases, including a book, DVDs, and nearly two dozen compilation CDs including a five-disc box set; basically, if you have any interest in roots music (and you should), this is a golden opportunity to start exploring.

Roman Polanski’s first full-length movie got him so much attention worldwide that he was able to escape the stifling Polish studio system for France and Hollywood, where classics like Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown still lay in his future. Between Knife’s language barrier and the higher profile of his later work, it’s no wonder that his debut’s been largely forgotten. But this claustrophobic thriller, set almost entirely on a small seagoing yacht where jealousy reigns and three is definitely a crowd, is well worth a new round of discovery. The DVD is worth it just for Knife, but the second disc, collecting Polanski’s early short films, is a nice treat. Especially since it reveals that Polanski’s familiar obsessions with paranoia and violence were present in potent form in what’s literally the first minute of student film he ever completed, a simple yet chilling scene involving an efficient and anonymous stabbing.

It’s not an uncommon irony in mystery fiction that a detective so brilliantly able to perceive the hidden connections of the world still can’t make sense out of his own personal life—in fact, it’s a difficult cliche to avoid. But Cracker’s criminal psychologist Eddie “Fitz” Fitzgerald—an alcoholic, sarcastic, arrogant gambler—is a surpassing example of the form, both because of the sharpness of the series’ writing and the consistently great performance of Robbie Coltrane. The big Scottish lug has long been one of our favorites, an actor with an impressive range for both drama and comedy, and he breathes bristly life into the brilliant train wreck of Fitz, who you can’t bring yourself to like, but can’t stop watching. Originally made for Britain’s ITV, this three-disc DVD collects the three two-hour stories of the show’s first season. Coltrane would quit the series three years later citing fears of typecasting; his current role as Hagrid, the lovable hairy half-giant in the Harry Potter films, couldn’t be more different.

Back for their first proper album in three years, Glasgow’s finest exporters of sensitive, bespectacled pop have lost two founding members, switched labels and picked up a superstar producer in Trevor Horn, whose previous credits range from Rod Stewart to Yes to Tatu. None of these events has significantly changed the band’s sound, which is good. Horn gives Catastrophe a certain amount of orchestral lushness, but the heart of B&S remains Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting—heart-on-the-sleeve emotionality that’s utterly soaring at its best and twee at its worst—it’s no wonder he’s so often compared to Morrissey. There’s a bit of both on Catastrophe: “If She Wants Me” is a lovely piece of glossy, sophisticated pop, and “Stay Loose” filters the New Pornographers through skinny-tie new-wave-era Joe Jackson. But then there’s the earnest “Lord Anthony,” an anthem about a bullied schoolboy, which is Exhibit A in what makes Belle & Sebastian irritating to those who aren’t true believers.