rakemag The Jungle seems to have struck on a formula worth exploring. After a long and successful (and extended) run of The Blue Room, David Hare’s adaptation of Schnitzler’s La Ronde, The Jungle now presents this premiere of a script by St. Paul playwright Craig Wright. Blue Room, you’ll recall, is a sort of Eyes Wide … Read more
This is a six-shooter of great Westerns encompassing the sweep of the genre in all its forms, from the highly traditional to the highly revisionist. Let’s round them all up: The Magnificent Seven, a remake of Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai, is breezier and less insightful but tremendously entertaining. Yul Brynner shines as the white-knight gunslinger, … Read more
What better way to spend your Monday nights than in the dark with Billy Wilder? This summer’s Walker Art Center-run outdoor series gives due props to the Austrian expatriate, who died in March leaving behind one of Hollywood’s richest legacies. The six films here barely scratch the surface of his filmography. Besides familiar classics Some … Read more
Some of us have a love-hate relationship with the short story: We love it for the discipline and small miracle required to write a decent one, and for the simple, satisfying fact that we can read it in a single sitting. But we hate it for not pulling us in and keeping us there the … Read more
Kate DiCamillo has some writing habits that we truly envy. She writes every day at the same time, and produces at least a page or two of usable material. She continues to get together regularly with the same group of writers who’ve been meeting for years now to critique one another’s work. And she “hangs … Read more
We have to confess we’re not familiar with Mosley’s signature series, the Easy Rawlins line of detective stories, but it’s been a sin of omission. Truth is, we’ve been putting off acquainting ourselves with those books because Mosley had ventured into more high-brow territory with a few intriguing side projects in the 90s. In 1996, … Read more
This is the guy who wrote Fight Club, which of course made him an instant millionaire because it was made into a crap movie starring Brad Pitt. But don’t let a major motion picture stand between you and a delightful new author. Palahniuk is one of those hip celebrity writers who deserves the attention, if … Read more
It’s hard to compress Gary Hallman’s fruitful three-decade career into a single gallery show. Though he’s honored here with a one-person show spanning both floors—the sum of all the PARTs, as it were, and only the fourth time they’ve done this—we found ourselves wanting to see more. The show begins circa 1971, with Hallman’s outdoor … Read more
People sometimes say that if a meteor struck Uptown, the Twin Cities would lose half its artistic community. While we’re still waiting for NASA to get back to us on the scientific accuracy of that metaphor, it’s certainly true that Intermedia Arts’ annual celebration of the Hennepin & Lake ZIP code’s creative set has no … Read more
We set out on our expedition to scale Everest in a rusty Toyota loaded with five famished explorers and a trunkful of climbing rope. I could not help but feel underequipped, since weeks of fruitless searching had turned up no Sherpa guides anywhere in the metro area, not even in the yellow pages. St. Paul … Read more