Author: rakemag

Matthew Barney’s experimental five-part series has become the toast of the museum crowd, while flying beneath the radar of the average moviegoer. You may have seen his name in the gossip columns, since he just had a child in September with Icelandic diva Bjork. (And you thought your mom and dad were weird.) Their couplehood echoes their complementary approaches to art; if you like Ms. Gudmunds-dottir’s unapologetic avant-garde take on club music, you might want to check out Barney’s visually explosive reconstructions of genre film, reminiscent of David Cronenberg by way of Busby Berkeley. As you can tell from the series’ title, named for a muscle in the, erm, male reproductive system, Barney’s chief preoccupation is masculinity. Previous segments have taken inspiration from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, spaghetti westerns, and Barney’s own experience as a football quarterback. Cremaster 3, the final and most elaborate of the quintet, explores creativity and male sexuality through rapidly shifting, dreamlike sequences, epitomized by a Masonic initiation rite involving buckets of liquid Vaseline, the Chrysler Building, and the hardcore punk band Agnostic Front. We’re just getting started, here: It’s also populated with disturbing, dreamlike mutants—a zombie of serial killer Gary Gilmore, a disabled athlete who chops potatoes with blades attached to her prosthetic legs, and so on. Rather than force an interpretation onto the material, just let the images wash over you, and let Barney’s subconscious filter into your own. Walker Art Center, (612) 375-7622, www. walkerart.org

In 1952, nobody expected any staying power out of Singin’ in the Rain. In fact, it was thrown together hastily out of old songs to cash in on Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s previous An American in Paris. That’s why the movie is set in the early days of Hollywood—to go along with music that was nostalgia-inducing even then. Part of its strength is that the dancing doesn’t have to carry the whole film by itself—the zingers traded between Kelly and Donald O’Connor (no mean dancer himself) are a treat, as well as the scenes poking fun at hapless silent actors flustering through the advent of talkies. But there’s a good reason why we all remember Gene swinging that umbrella and splashing through the puddles. One viewing of that robust boisterousness (and O’Connor’s backflip, while we’re at it), and you know why they called them hoofers. Move over, Moulin Rouge. The Heights is screening the 50th-anniversary restoration that’s been touring the country; as a cute additional touch, they’re giving away umbrellas. Heights Theater, (763) 788-9079, www.heightstheater.com

Roman Polanski’s best movies—Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion, Chinatown—are all about dread and mistrust. But up until now he’s never made a film about the part of his personal history that very likely caused that rare affinity with dark material, namely his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. He’s wanted to film it his whole career, but never found the right vehicle until now. The Pianist is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist who, with the rest of his family, barely escaped death at the Treblinka camp . It’s a story Polanski surely resonated with, having lost his mother at Auschwitz. And like Szpilman, Polanski hid in the ghetto with the help of compassionate strangers. The Pianist is being hailed as his best film in years, netting the Palm D’Or at this year’s Cannes, despite some complaints about coldness of tone. That doesn’t strike us as a problem—Polanski at his peak was a master of icy detachment; it’s his way of framing horror.

Jean Luc-Godard’s biggest popular success has been praised in some quarters as the greatest European artwork of the 20th century. We wish we liked it that much. To us, the film’s narrative weaknesses overpower its good points, and what others call iconoclastic genius, we call stubborn mulishness. Still, warts and all, Godard changed the direction of cinema as an art form. His 1960s New Wave work, among which Contempt is front and center, helped set off the wave of experimentalism that marked the decade. If you think Jean-Luc Godard is the captain of the starship Enterprise, it’s time to brush up on your film history. (And maybe your Star Trek lore too.) Contempt is several things at once: a self-consciously recursive film about filmmaking that casts the great German director Fritz Lang as himself. A recasting of The Odyssey with sneering film producer Jack Palance as a modern Cyclops. A study of the disintegration of a marriage, as Brigitte Bardot realizes she cannot trust her screenwriter husband Michel Piccoli. It’s beautifully shot (did we mention Bardot?), and this DVD showcases Raoul Coutard’s exquisite cinematography especially well. The colors are revitalized, and the image is back in its proper Cinemascope wide aspect—which makes a big difference despite Godard’s own sabotage by deliberately placing characters outside the frame. (There’s also a rich supply of supplemental material, the most interesting of which is an hour-long conversation about filmmaking between Godard and Lang.) Godard revelled in willful obscurity. In fact, after Contempt he turned his back on big-budget producers, preferring to make small films in which he was answerable to no one but his own muse.

Jennifer Aniston gets some kind of prize, perhaps a case of Turtle Wax, for being the first cast member of Friends to successfully anchor a drama on the big screen. Maybe it helps that Good Girl seems like a mild comedy on the surface. But there’s a shark under the waters. Director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White previously collaborated on the stalker-buddy movie Chuck & Buck, carving out a niche in stories about suffocating relationships among the socially damaged. Here again they take sadistic glee in placing their poor, normal protagonist adrift among a sea of losers and crazies. Aniston plays Justine, a well-meaning young woman trapped in a stifling marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly) and a stifling job at the soul-sucking Retail Rodeo. Enter Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a brooding college dropout with literary pretensions who seems to offer a chance of escape. They begin a secret affair, she playing Emma Bovary to his, well, Holden Caulfield. Of course, this isn’t the sort of film that goes for the happy ending. The writing is often cruel, but The Good Girl is redeemed by the emotional depth of its cast. We’ve come to expect good work from people like Reilly, Gyllenhaal, and Tim Blake Nelson, but Aniston is surprising and sympathetic in a role that takes her far beyond the boundaries of Rachel Green.

There are many ways to recognize a music snob, but probably the easiest is his insidious way of insisting that a band’s best work is invariably its earliest, least accessible stuff. In the case of New Order, of course, that early ouvre was Joy Division, the maudlin proto-gothic outfit from Manchester, England. We loved that dark, dense stuff 20 years ago—but then we grew up. Joy Division grew up too—or died, to be more accurate, after singer Ian Curtis hanged himself on the eve of their first American tour in 1980. Even the smartest rock critics were distracted by the tragedy, and didn’t notice that New Order rose from the ashes to redefine post-punk, heavily influence hip hop, and set the stage for modern electronica. How’d they do that? By taking their droney guitar rock and adding drum machines, synthesizers, and all the other impedimenta of the club scene. Today, historical revisionists rank New Order right up there with Kraftwerk as the pasty white progenitors of everything from Sir Mix-A-Lot to System of a Down.

Originally got out in 1995 and now re-released, The Thrill of It All box set hits all the high points of the Roxy canon. Early records had a more jagged sound thanks to Brian Eno’s synth experiments, but when he split to pursue tape-loop electronica, singer Bryan Ferry was left at the helm. His interests lay in smooth, lushly romantic pop. If he’d been born 25 years earlier, he would have been perfectly comfortable as a Crosby-style crooner. Instead, Ferry navigated the waters between disco, prog, soul, and Bowiesque glam, charting a new course toward adult contemporary. At times, the sophistication gave way to something soporific or preening. But there are moments of suave transcendence on all their studio records. While you’d still want Avalon and Country Life as separate albums, Thrill essentially replaces the rest of the Roxy catalog for the casual fan; you don’t miss much by culling the two good songs from Flesh and Blood and discarding the rest.

We’re not in the camp of those who idolize the Replacements’ earliest work—they’re like tomato soup, and had to cool down before we could stomach them. But it’s remarkable to listen to the increasing sophistication of Paul Westerberg’s writing, culminating in the whisky melancholy of “Within Your Reach” and “Unsatisfied.” The Twin/Tone albums chart the band’s growth from sloppy drunks with potential to perhaps the most important band in American alt-rock. But if you already own these records, there’s no pressing reason to rush out for, erm, replacements, beyond the sonic improvement of a digital remastering. If you want rarities, you’ll have to wait for ex-manager Peter Jesperson to finish his archival project culling a 70-hour stash of unreleased songs.

Even amid the ferment of punk and indie rock in the early 1980s, Camper Van Beethoven didn’t quite sound like anyone else, crossing R.E.M.-style jangle-pop with ska and surf rhythms and traditional European string melodies. Not that they made a big deal out of it. Laid-back, laconic, and tongue-in-cheek was their way, and especially on their brilliant debut Telephone Free Landslide Victory, it often seemed like they were simply winging it. That charming quirkiness gave way to more serious rock, inspired in part by a desire to garner some radio airplay. While they got it with their excellent cover of “Pictures of Matchstick Men,” intra-group enmity spun off singer David Lowery to form the less interesting Cracker. These days, the hatchet is buried, the nostalgia tour booked, the vault material re-released. In August, they put out a track-by-track cover of Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk, and in November Cigarettes & Carrot Juice, collecting early studio records and a 1990 live set. First Avenue, (612) 332-1775, www.first-avenue.com

Launched in 1997 by Barry Levinson (Diner, Rain Man), Oz showed other theater and film vanguards that the path to creative freedom on the small screen led to HBO. The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and The Wire soon followed. Oz follows the lives (and untimely and/or gruesome deaths) of the prisoners in Oswald Penitentiary’s experimental unit, the Emerald City. The cast of neo-Nazis, murderers, and arsonists make Tony Soprano and his goombas look like the Backstreet Boys. Long-timers have only eight more episodes, but new kids on the (cell) block should check out seasons one and two, newly released on DVD, featuring early cast members like Edie Falco (Carmela Soprano) as corrections officer Diane Whittlesey, alongside lifers like Rita Moreno as Sister Peter Marie, still going strong 52 years after her screen debut.