Author: rakemag

Trend alert at the Walker: Kaves R kool! Last summer, young gun Cameron Jamie set up one as part of his survey at the museum; now there’s Cavemanman, from Jamie’s illustrious elder, Thomas Hirschhorn. It’s a retreat of sorts, albeit a chaotic one, papered with pages from all sorts of philosophical treatises and lots of foil (an allusion, perhaps, to those who use the stuff to obscure the windows of their homes). As part of Heart of Darkness, Hirschhorn ’s cave is one of three installations that evoke, rather gloomily, either alternate realities, oddball utopias, or poetically individual spaces—take your pick. Ellen Gallagher and Edgar Cleijne imagine, via a film installation, magical lands peopled by dead Africans who never made it to America to become slaves; and Kai Althoff, an art-world darling who’s got some heavy German charisma going for him, constructs an elegiac “labyrinth” (call it a cousin to the cave) of loneliness. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org”

In the captivating Infamous, Toby Jones appears to have summoned forth the long-dead spirit of Truman Capote. He deftly portrays that storytelling dervish, delighting his high-society friends in New York and widening the peepers of the squares in Kansas with equal aplomb … and beating Alvin Dewey, the lead investigator of the Clutter killings, in arm-wrestling (he beat Bogart, too). But in his pursuit of the story that would shape his masterpiece In Cold Blood, Truman will, as we know, fall far from that place he attained in the literary firmament, and the result is devastating. Philip Seymour Hoffman and the makers of Capote should thank their lucky stars that their film was released first, since Jones’ performance, and this film itself, spins wicked little cartwheels around that lugubrious production. Simply put, Infamous is an amazement, and not to be missed.

In basing his new film on the Hong Kong thriller Infernal Affairs, Martin Scorsese brings a crew of tough-guy actors back to his own mean streets in New York. Perhaps he’s hoping for another round of Goodfellas-style success, but as his former stalwarts—from Keitel to Pesci—are apparently too old for this stuff, Marty’s left to work with the guy who nearly sank his Gangs of New York and couldn’t get The Aviator off the ground. So The Departed sees Leonardo DiCaprio as a member of an elite, undercover police squad bent on bringing down a mob-boss played by Jack Nicholson. Meanwhile, there’s a rat in the group, a seemingly squeaky-clean cop (Matt Damon) who is also on the mob’s payroll. Looks like we’ll have to settle for Nicholson’s Mephistophelian bad guy to give this one some edge.

“Give me the child at seven and I will give you the man.” With that Jesuit maxim in mind, Michael Apted and his crew set out to interview fourteen seven-year-old British children from different class strata and return every seven years to gauge their progress. Throughout the resulting Up series—Seven Up, Seven Plus Seven, 21 Up, and so on through the recent 49 Up—the number of participants has shrunk, but the most fascinating remain, from Suzy—who can’t answer questions about a boyfriend at 14, at 21 loathes the thought of marriage, becomes by 28 a mother, and at 49 is the matriarch of an empty house—to Neil, the young astronaut wannabe who slowly descends into mental illness, becomes homeless at 28, and later finds moderate success as a local politician. “Every seven years, a little pill of poison is injected,” says one of these brave souls about Apted’s project, but the end result is a collection of some of the most powerful documentary films ever made.

Flags of Our Fathers could be a warmonger’s dream: the true story of the heroic men who posed for the famous Iwo Jima flag-raising photograph that, it is claimed, helped end the war in the Pacific and made us all proud to be American. But director Clint Eastwood, though a known conservative, is not interested in drumbeating polemics. He chooses instead to show his characters as hardworking grunts who come home from the battle weary, frightened, and, at times, disgusted with the rah-rah of the home front. They are also quite obsessed with honoring their comrades who died—a subject that the press, then and now, often shies away from. Even more intriguing, Flags is only the first of Clint’s two films on that horrific battle; the other, Letters from Iwo Jima, to be released in December, will address the Japanese version of the same conflict. Will it take fifty years before a filmmaker of Eastwood’s stature takes such a bold approach with our current conflict?

Perfect for Jane Austenites eager to savor a Pemberly moment with their not-so-patient spouses, the 1940 Pride and Prejudice is easily the most charming—and approachable—of the many adaptations. While Greer Garson is a bit too old to play Elizabeth Bennet, her dandy sparring with Laurence Olivier’s ice-cold Mr. Darcy keeps this film light on its toes. Even better are the definitive Mr. Collins and Lady Catherine de Bourgh, played by Melville Cooper and Edna Mae Oliver. The former is a sniveling rector with the personality of a clam; the latter, a towering fussbudget whose battles with Lizzy are a joy to behold. Journeyman director Robert Z. Leonard teamed with screenwriters Aldous Huxley, Jane Furman, and Helen Jerome to make a modest masterpiece, which, oddly enough, also served as subtle encouragement for the U.S. to enter World War II.

As the years ticked by without a follow-up to Charles Frazier’s surprising (and fantastic) National Book Award-winning 1997 novel, Cold Mountain, the obvious conclusion was that Frazier was feeling daunted by both the wild success of his debut and the expectations created by the whopping advance he received for a second manuscript. Thirteen Moons doesn’t read like the work of a man who was in the least daunted, but it does feel like a novel that took almost ten years to write. That’s not a criticism. If Cold Mountain was Frazier’s Odyssey, then its successor is his Iliad. And, improbable as it seems, it’s an even better book. Teeming with history, heartbreak, and a host of memorable characters, Thirteen Moons also acts as a scathing indictment of the U.S. government’s treatment of Native Americans. Frazier is a master at narrative voice, and his elegant, careful descriptions of the natural world are as vivid as they are beautiful.

Lauper’s latest, The Body Acoustic, pays homage to her own greatest hits in mellow new interpretations. She still has that voice—half Marilyn Monroe, half Minnie Mouse—and she still has that wild, half-Pippi Longstocking, half-Billy Idol hair, but we’re glad that she doesn’t make as big a deal of herself as, say, another icon who dates back to the 80s, Madonna. One could even say Lauper’s talent has only grown over time; indeed, guest singers on Body Acoustic like Sarah McLachlan, Ani DiFranco, and Puffy AmiYumi help show why her songwriting has been so amazingly enduring. 2004 Randolph Ave., St. Paul; 651-690-6700; www.stkate.edu/oshaughnessy