Author: rakemag

Anchee Min has been remarkably lucky at least three times in her life. As a reward for her loyalty to China’s Maoist regime, she was selected by Madame Mao to star in a government-produced film. Her good fortune wasn’t long lasting, though; Mao’s death and the end of his regime sent Min back into the ranks of the lowly. Her friendship with actress Joan Chen allowed her to move to the United States, and when she chronicled her sometimes shocking experiences in China (she describes herself as the “product of Maoist brainwashing”) in Red Azalea, she earned critical hosannas and cracked the bestseller lists. In her native country, Min is frequently criticized for sharing too much. Here, though, she is admired for her portraits of a remarkable time and place. 10500 Hillside La. W., Minnetonka; 651-209-6799; www.hclib.org

A literary follow-your-heart poster girl, Elizabeth Berg worked as a nurse for a decade, pulling bedpan duty while inventing imaginary worlds in her mind. Such mundane jobs are a boon to writers, of course; if nothing else, they liven up a resume. Berg surely witnessed a thousand dramas and characters in her job, some of which no doubt provided fuel (not to mention fodder) for her many bestselling novels, whose subject matter tends toward the painful and domestic. We Are All Welcome Here is her latest, based on the true story of a paraplegic polio victim raising her daughter amid the social upheavals–both race- and Elvis-related–that besieged Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1964. 2020 Lake of the Isles Pkwy. W., Minneapolis; 612-374-4023; www.birchbarkbooks.com

Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate Jose Saramago is a contemporary Kafka, spinning existential fantasies built around his obsessions with the nature of vision, insight, perception, and imagination. In his books he grounds these philosophical preoccupations through everyman characters and settings so vibrant, distinct, and outlandish they confound attempts to connect them to any specific time and place. In Seeing, Saramago’s latest novel, an epidemic of blindness breaks out, affecting everyone except an eye doctor’s wife, who helps a group of newly blind people survive in a world gone dark and confusing. Toss in a general election with perplexing results (held during an unending rainstorm), and Saramago has created one of the most memorable–and inscrutable–revolutionary scenarios in literary history.

Sebastian Junger’s career resembles, at times, an Indiana Jones movie. As a journalist he’s traveled to war zones in Sarajevo, Sierra Leone, and Afghanistan–in that last country, he tracked down Ahmad Shah Massoud, leader of the Taliban resistance, shortly before he was killed. He’s also immersed himself in often-harrowing vocations like smoke jumping and commercial fishing, the latter of which became the topic of his first book, The Perfect Storm. Junger says he first recognized his thirst for danger during his recovery from a brutal chainsaw accident, which happened on the job with a tree-trimming company. While his massive leg wound was healing, he mused about the pleasure he and others take in risky work, and decided to train his writer’s eye on people he described as “fools and heroes.” Despite his rakish good looks (George Clooney wished to star in an adaptation of one of his stories), Junger is self-deprecating enough that he’d put himself in the fool category, we think. He’s also quite earnest. He approached The Rake’s Desert Island challenge with the kind of intense seriousness he gives to his higher-stakes endeavors, and opted for an everyman’s second-person voice in presenting the five items he’d want to bring with him to the isle. “I’m reaching for some sort of human needs common to all of us, and not just to me,” he explained. So here’s what he–and we–could use:

1. No matter where you go, you need a good knife. Not a folding knife, because over a lifetime it will break. Without a knife, you feel powerless, exposed, and vulnerable, and you have no tool to change your world with.

2. You need a mirror, because over a lifetime you will forget what you look like, and that will be a fundamental loss of identity that you cannot afford if you are alone. It is also good for signaling passing airplanes.

3. You cannot live without music, so you would bring a guitar–which you don’t know how to play, because I hear it takes a lifetime to learn guitar. That way you will be well-engaged with something until you die.

4. If you’re like me, you’re an atheist, but you’re from a Christian culture. You will therefore bring the Bible because you will finally have enough time to read it and maybe figure out what wisdom it may contain. Religion aside, it contains a multitude of stories and maybe those would keep you stimulated over the course of the coming decades.

5. Finally, you will bring a photograph of your family or your wife or your best friend or maybe all of them together–the people you love, the people without whom you would feel lonely even in a city of ten million.

Sebastian Junger presents “Myths and Legends, the Stories that Haunt Us,” a free-form storytelling event at which he will spin tales about all manner of disasters and monsters. Topics are slated to include the Titanic, the Loch Ness Monster, the Edmund Fitzgerald, the Bermuda Triangle, and the Boston Strangler. April 22 at the Fitzgerald Theater, 10 Exchange St. E., St. Paul; 651-290-1221; www.mpr.org

It’s always been something of a feat for Minnesota Film Arts, a small but stalwart nonprofit, to pull off this annual, all-you-can-eat buffet for cinephiles. It’s been in large part a labor of love on the part of the legendary Al Milgrom, who only recently underwent bypass surgery. Considering that, along with the financial trials Minnesota Film Arts is enduring, and this year’s festival–which, we are assured, will go on–seems only just short of a miracle. What’s more, it will open with a fanfare: the Midwest premiere of a documentary about Al Franken. God Spoke chronicles his evolution from Saturday Night Live humorist to persistent thorn in the side of certain political players to his potential transformation into a politician himself. In addition, the festival will screen nearly a hundred works from forty-plus countries, including a brand-new selection of gloomy Scandinavian pictures; short works by Minnesota filmmakers; glimpses of life in the Middle East by resident and visiting filmmakers; and the return of last year’s innovation, the Childish Film Festival. The lineup isn’t final until the lights come back up on the last day of the festival, so visit the festival’s website regularly for updates. www.mnfilmarts.org

Photographer Sharon Lockhart is better known for her still images, which she stages as meticulously as a filmmaker might set up a shoot. Rather than capturing the moment, her work creates the moment, igniting different stories for each viewer. Likewise, her films ride this tension between truth and fiction, even when she’s in documentary mode. Lockhart filmed Pine Flat over three years in a small town in the Sierra Nevadas of California, tracking the rhythms of life through the eyes of its youth. Through the editing she creates a certain storyline, but the personalities and lives of her subjects ultimately trump her directorial vision. After all, the typical teenager’s life is stranger than the fiction of most scriptwriters. When Lockhart stands back and lets the camera watch, her characters take over the show. The full two-hour film will receive several screenings during the run of an exhibition of Lockhart’s work in the Walker’s galleries. There, Pine Flat will be deconstructed and shown as short film-loop portraits of individual teens, along with photographs of them shot in a local barn-cum-studio. The Walker will also screen four of Lockhart’s shorter films on April 28 and 29. 612-375-7600; www.walkerart.org

A feller employs a crack marketing team to dress him up as a modern-day cowboy, and the whole shebang works like a charm–gets him elected, even. But then those dang movie folks come along to cause trouble. First it was those gay shepherds, passed off as cowboys, and now this movie by some German guy, Wim Wenders. Do they even have mountains in Germany? Anyhow, his rendition of a cowboy is something of a movie star and a drunk–not even the electorate would buy that one. Nevertheless, Sam Shepard plays the cowboy, and he rides into the sunset on his horse; goes home to his mother; meets his adult, illegitimate kids; and dodges a detective. It’s a completely unwholesome movie and makes cowboys look bad. It’s downright un-American. Uh, that’s why it’s German. 612-825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com

Sophie Scholl was one of the few female members of The White Rose, a resistance group that waged its war against Hitler with leaflets and graffiti at the University of Munich. Marc Rothemund’s Oscar-nominated picture re-imagines the final six days of her life–from the mission that got her arrested to her execution just six days later. Since much about Scholl’s pre-arrest life remains unknown, The Final Days is less a biopic than a meditation on the strength of her character in the face of murderous male authority (and in this regard it harks back to Theodore Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc). Rothemund took as much from history as he could, availing himself of Scholl’s interrogation records and reports from prison guards, who noted how bravely the student walked to her execution, as well as her prophetic last words.

The sweat dripping off the guitarist’s nose, the brand of beer the singer swigs between songs, the exact wording of the rude phrase on the drummer’s T-shirt: These are details you just won’t catch from your seat at the bar. Concert films are great for filling in those gaps, and for preserving the inspired mix of stage patter and altered renditions of songs. But the Beastie Boys’ latest concert flick, directed by Beastie Adam Yauch, plays on both a DIY and collaborative aesthetic by outfitting some fifty roving fans with cameras at Madison Square Garden during one of their concerts. The result is a full-on fans’ view of the show–including trips to the bathroom. Such peripheral activities are mixed with the Beastie’s funky proceedings onstage, which makes for a rapid-fire collage that could inspire legions of fans to claim they were actually at this show. 612-825-6006; www.landmarktheatres.com

Jeff Feuerzeig appears to have plenty of years left, but he feels he’s already completed his life’s work: the film The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Since first encountering Johnston’s music more than twenty years ago, Feuerzeig has felt it was his divine duty and unique privilege to make a film about its creator. He began collecting music, articles, and artwork by Johnston, carefully amassing a body of research that would prepare him for the more than four years he spent making this collage-like life story. “This is not a rock documentary,” Feuerzeig wants us to know. “It’s more along the lines of Crumb, a portrait of an artist and a journey of madness and creativity and genius.” That’s aiming high, but we felt the comparison was apt.

What was your introduction to Daniel Johnston?
In 1985 I got hold of one of his handmade cassettes, Hi, How Are You, which is his Meet the Beatles album. Not only were the songs so achingly beautiful and raw and real, they were just such a breath of fresh air amid everything else going on in music at that time. He sounded like Billie Holiday to me, or early Bob Dylan. He’s a unique voice, a great piano player, and the art on the cover was captivating. Plus, he put his mom yelling at him on the tapes, which I loved.

He never toured much; hasn’t made many albums. Why did you remain interested?
Because he is such an enigma. I felt like I knew him, but only through his art and music. But that’s the best way to appreciate him. As you see in the film, he remains an enigma, he’s a living ghost, and he’s not even really interviewed in his own film. He recorded his whole life on cassette tapes, as living diaries, and he made cassette letters for friends–so you get to hear him throughout his life, talking about his life, which is much more powerful than an interview. I simply created an internal monologue for his incredible journey.

His life to me was very cinematic. He ran away from home and joined the carnival. He’s made all this amazing art. He created a folk legend about himself. And life with mental illness is never dull. It’s scary, harrowing, tragic, and beautiful. And funny. He’s a very funny guy.

How did it work for you, trying to get inside the mind of a person who has struggled so painfully with mental illness?
It was a pleasure, every minute of it. It was my dream to be in his mind and it was so satisfying to go on that journey that the low point is that it’s actually over. I really felt like I was in his head, and it was so incredible to be so close to this fire that burned so brightly. The rest of the world is just not that exciting.

w did Johnston respond when you approached him to make this film?
He was thrilled and very cooperative. I’d already made a film about Daniel’s friend and collaborator Jad Fair, from Half Japanese, so he knew that I would take his life and art very seriously, and try to make a great film.

So how do you follow up your life’s work?
Well, I’m working on a film about a boxer named Chuck Wepner, a former heavyweight champion who was the real-life inspiration for Sylvester StalloneÕs Rocky. I grew up in Jersey, and he was a very big figure there. He fought Muhammad Ali in 1975, went fifteen rounds and then lost. I love the story of Wepner, and I’m fully immersed in it, but I wouldn’t have been able to make it if I hadn’t done The Devil and Daniel Johnston first.

Has he given up music for art?
His art career is his second act in life. His work is at the Whitney Biennial in New York right now. This is a guy who was in the CBGB gallery just last year, and now the art world is really taking notice of him. But he’s not an outsider artist, despite what many say–he’s studied art, went to art school. He’s the ultimate insider. And it’s just incredible that he’s still alive.