Author: rakemag

We’ve taken our licks, and Garrison Keillor just keeps ticking. In fact, our resident superhero of literature is aging like fine wine. Honestly, he just gets better and better, and pretty soon he’ll have earned the comparisons that immoderate people (mostly on the coasts, you know) have been making between his writing and the truly timeless of American literature, by which we mean hall-of-famers like Mark Twain and F. Scott Fitzgerald. There has been a gratifying improvement in quantity along with quality; we don’t know how the maestro manages to crank the stuff out, but we ain’t complaining. Love Me may be Keillor’s most honest and funny novel to date, covering the latter period of his autobiographical oeuvre, and venturing beyond the well-established brand of Wobegon to describe the transcendently debased world of the solitary author. A writer writing about writers writing is rarely this effortlessly entertaining. Barnes & Noble Galleria, 3225 W. 69th St., Edina, (952) 920-0633, www.bn.com

You wouldn’t expect a United Nations press officer to write a book about an aging Faulknerian simpleton on a rural farm. But that’s what we have in Laird Hunt’s second novel, Indiana, Indiana, just out from local publisher Coffee House Press. Hunt’s hero is a Hoosier State farmer named Noah Summers, somewhat bitter and uncomfortable in his 77-year-old skin and struggling to come to terms with his family history—which includes a lifelong series of psychic flashes and a house fire that killed his parents and threw his wife on the harsh mercy of electroshock-era mental hospitals. The stream-of-consciousness prose style and Southern Gothic plot are quite consciously indebted to works like The Sound and the Fury, but if this is Yoknapatawpha County pastiche, it’s certainly well done. Noah himself sums up the book’s appeal well during a conversation with an itinerant saw player who tells him, after some cajoling, how he lost a finger. “My daddy would like that story. He likes stories that don’t make regular sense,” says Noah. “Well then,” says the saw player, “I reckon he likes most stories.” Ruminator Books, 1648 Grand Ave., St. Paul, (651) 699-0587, www.ruminator.com

San Francisco writer Johnson was highly praised for his debut collection of short stories, Emporium, and set a record for consecutive appearances in the Best New American Voices anthologies. His best work has the same satiric bite of a Vonnegut or a T.C. Boyle, sharp and funny and surreal. But his first try at the longer form, Parasites Like Us, can be kindly called “promising.” It’s rather an unfocused mess, wandering though several pointless subplots on its way from satirizing a hapless anthropology professor at a small South Dakota college to destroying the human race by plague. He’d have been better off developing the book’s initial setup, a sort of offbeat Wonder Boys-on-the-prairie thing, instead of the unconvincing apocalyptic final third. Kurt Vonnegut destroyed the world with a great deal more flair, and with a more sharply defined satiric point, in Cat’s Cradle. That said, we’re looking forward to Johnson’s second.

If only more horror films were made with this level of creativity. The much-ballyhooed 28 Days Later didn’t send much of a shiver up our spines—too much gimmicky herky-jerky camera and too few new twists on the ideas it steals from earlier and better horror films. Cabin Fever is another beast entirely. Not that it isn’t derivative—all horror movies are these days, but this one does it smartly, mixing up its shocks with a cruel cleverness that left us genuinely unsettled. A protégé of David Lynch, director Eli Roth shares the same deadpan, macabre sense of humor, which he uses to especially good effect with weirdo supporting characters like doofus cop Officer Winston and the Deliverance-esque hicks at the town store. Be warned that this is quite bloody and grotesque—flesh-eating virus is the chief villain here, but far from the only threat to our cabinful of doomed college students. We recommend this one only to those who think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is artistically comparable to Scorsese and Kurosawa. You know who you are. You’ve been waiting for this one.

Sofia Coppola has one venerated filmmaker for a husband (Spike Jonze) and another for a dad (Francis Ford C., who made a couple of halfway decent movies before Jack and Captain Eo). But her own debut as writer-director, The Virgin Suicides, proved she can at least hold her own in such company. Even if it ultimately left us flat, Suicides had a great sense of mood and, better, boded well for the future. With her followup feature Lost in Translation, she tries her hand at quirky arthouse comedy in a Wes Anderson vein, throwing Bill Murray and Ghost World’s Scarlet Johansson together in an unfamiliar Tokyo. Though he’s had a very good past few years, thanks in part to supporting roles in Anderson’s movies, this is Bill’s first leading role since the dumb spy spoof The Man Who Knew Too Little, and to that we say it’s about time. Uptown Theatre, 2906 Hennepin Ave., (612) 925-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com

Ridley Scott takes time off from the epics of violence he’s been specializing in these days (Hannibal, Gladiator) for this crime comedy about a tic-ridden con man (Nicolas Cage) reunited for the first time with his wayward daughter just as he’s about to pull off a massive swindle. It sounds to us like Paper Moon as rewritten by Charlie Kaufman, which is a promising enough beginning. We’ll cross our fingers about a couple of things, though. When you throw Cage a solidly weird role like this one, he has a tendency to ham the place up something fierce. And we also hope that the story line’s better than what we’ve seen from source novelist Eric Garcia, whose first two books were cute but unoriginal sci-fi mysteries with a kinda dumb premise about a Chandlerian private eye who’s really a (gasp) velociraptor.

Following up the enormous cult success of his breakthrough documentary American Movie, filmmaker Chris Smith takes us through five wildly disparate offbeat homes, including a refurbished nuclear-missile silo, a treehouse in the Hawaiian jungle, and one completely redesigned for the convenience of the owners’ dozen-odd cats. In this way it reminded us of Errol Morris’s brilliant Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, which similarly gathered five eccentrics with nothing apparently in common, and drew some deep and surprising connections between them. Although it’s fun to see the quirky lifestyles Smith’s subjects have created so passionately for themselves, Home Movie is not so insightful, perhaps because it was originally commissioned by a corporate real estate website, or maybe its ever-so-humble running time of sixty-five minutes. But when we drive past the endless acres of identical beige suburban townhouses, it’s nice to know that there are some folks out there for whom there really is no place like home.

One of the wags around the office keeps calling soccer “European kickball,” and not coincidentally he’s an irredeemable devotee of that other game, the misnamed and cretinous game of football as it’s played in America. But he’s in the minority. You don’t have to be smart or pretentious or unpatriotic to love the world’s favorite sport, and we can think of no better tribute to that egalitarian spirit than this charming diversion. So it’s basically a teenage romance. Why shouldn’t a movie about the world’s favorite sport have a plot based on the world’s favorite pastime—love? Don’t sweat the title. Even if you have no idea who David Beckham is or how he bends it, you’ll enjoy this British feel-good flick just fine.

Our favorite eccentric Brit re-disbanded the reunion of his first band the Soft Boys in March, so there’ll be no full-band major-label followup to 2002’s enjoyable Nextdoorland. Instead, Luxor is the polar opposite—a DIY self-released set of acoustic songs recorded in a single afternoon in his living room: “I thought, screw it, I’ll just put a fresh set of strings on my guitar and play through whatever I can find in my notebook,” he’s said. It’s much better than that implies. Mostly Robyn has his full-on Nick Drake mode going here, though the unique imagery he brings to his lyrics makes it clear that this can be nothing other than a Hitchcock record. Nobody else writes folky laments like “she’s got a thing about yams. … I am not a yam, I am not a yam.” Luxor’s a good showcase for his underappreciated fingerstyle guitar work, with some fine songwriting throughout—“Round Song” could have come directly from his 1984 career-high I Often Dream of Trains.

Fairly or not, the words “David Byrne solo record” suggest inconsistency and pretension as much as clever musicianship. But the ex-Talking Head leader’s latest, a soundtrack to the new film based on the novel by Scottish Beat writer Alexander Trocchi, is worth overcoming any low expectations. Scotland-born himself, Byrne assembled a backing band made up of members of Hibernian emo bands including Belle & Sebastian and Mogwai, and the results are often intriguing. Though it’s 1) a soundtrack album that’s 2) written according to what Byrne calls a “John Cagian indeterminacy,” this is by no means a dull record. Quiet and low-key, yes, but Byrne’s songs strike a balance between Enoesque ambience, Forest-era orchestral work, and noirish jazz. Much of Temptation would fit well next to Angelo Badalamenti’s swinging work for Twin Peaks, including a slinky version of Charles Mingus’s “Haitian Fight Song.” (You might have to wait a year or so for a “proper” new Byrne disc, but in the meantime you could also check out his other new art project: a DVD of PowerPoint slides set to music. Yeah, sounds boring to us too. Sorry, David.)