Category: Article

This is the Bristol duo that almost singlehandedly invented the late-90s genre du jour, “trip-hop”—meaning atmospheric, heavily remixed club music that brought together elements of electronica, turntablism, rock ’n’ roll, film soundtrack, and torch song. You probably remember Geoff Barrow and Beth Gibbons best for “Sour Times,” a wonderful, sepia-toned single that hit the airwaves right around the time REV-105 went off the air forever. Their second, self-titled album was a mostly inaccessible mash of aural dementia, but the concert album PNYC was among the very best records of the 1990s. The five-year hiatus bodes well for this particular group: Either the world is ready for a trip-hop revival, or Portishead will again rewrite the rules of prerecorded pop music, or possibly both. Like a dog and a tin whistle, the ears of every critic in the country will be tuned to this one. Whether you should care about that, of course, remains an open question.

He was the Hendrix of jazz, was Charlie Parker. The living genius who flamed out young, so consumed by his music that he could practice 15 hours a day if he wasn’t strung out on junk. He helped forge a new form of jazz—bebop, in this case—and improvised riffs on his saxophone that fellow musicians sometimes could barely comprehend, let alone copy. His skills were elevated to an almost ludicrous level of worship by journeymen sax players, and even now, Bird is the word. This three-disc collection captures him during his last four years—not generally pleasant ones for him. The combination of heroin abuse, exhaustion and hounding by the authorities was ravaging him to such an extent that when he died in 1955, the coroner thought he was 60 when he was only 34. But he could still play like wildfire when the mood took him, and some think his best work lands square in the middle of these years.

Terry Gilliam’s work had always had anarchy deep in its heart, and more than once anarchy has overwhelmed the project entirely. Certainly, our favorite hometown Python can say with some justification that his failures are more interesting than a lot of director’s successes. There is, in fact, a whole cottage industry devoted to chronicling his fights to keep his artistic vision and his films alive: The Battle For Brazil, Losing the Light and The Hamster Factor and Other Tales of 12 Monkeys. And now this wry documentary, a blow-by-blow account of Gilliam’s catastrophic attempt at Don Quixote. Gilliam’s the first to admit he thrives on disorder and brings much trouble on himself. But the windmill giants he contends with to make The Man Who Killed Quixote are too numerous even for a director nicknamed Captain Chaos: An infirm and incomprehensible lead actor, budget-smashing monsoons, and a shooting location a stone’s throw from a practice site for NATO bombers. And though it’s sad to see Gilliam’s inevitable abandonment of the project, at least this documentary means that somebody got a decent film out of the experience.

David Cronenberg is infamous for his unique style of horror filmmaking. His films—among them The Fly, Naked Lunch, and Dead Ringers—gaze with icy formalism on worlds where biology has gone mad. They’re a catalogue of physical breakdowns, sexual dysfunctions, florid mutations and hallucinations. His latest, Spider, based on Patrick McGrath’s novel, stars Ralph Fiennes as a muttering, schizophrenic Londoner struggling to make sense out of his fractured relationship with his mother (Miranda Richardson, terrific in a triple role). Quieter and largely grue-free, it’s still a clearly Cronenbergian film, and his best in years.

Krzysztof Kieslowski’s marvelous trilogy provided a worthy capstone to his three-decade career as a leader in European cinema. He retired after finishing Red, and died two years later. Similar to his Decalogue series reinterpreting the Ten Commandments, Three Colors is nominally a loose exploration of the Revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality, and fraternity. Kieslowski himself downplayed this in later interviews, saying he merely wanted to tell stories about people, but that he could get financing from across all of Europe if investors were given the hard sell on the trilogy as noble ideological artifact. And it’s true that each movie can be seen separately, as three unconnected love stories, without becoming incomprehensible. (Juliette Binoche’s powerfully understated performance in Blue is surely worth singling out.) Still, the thematic connections are there, and trying to make them is a good part of the trilogy’s fun. Liberty intertwines with grief, equality with revenge, fraternity with loneliness, and all connect with Kieslowski’s overarching interest in how random caprice shapes our lives.

Wolfgang Petersen’s early 80s submarine actioner was a surprising hit in America, netting six Oscar nods and much bigger audiences than would normally have turned out for a brooding German drama with an unhappy ending. While sub thrillers had been around long enough for cliches to stick like unwanted barnacles, Petersen found something fresh by combining nailbiting battle sequences with a documentary-like depiction of what serving underseas was like. Namely, claustrophobic and often monotonous, punctuated by moments of exhilaration and terror during combat. Especially in the 3.5-hour director’s-cut version here, Boot remains unsinkable. No sub movie since has been able to top it, and all have quoted from it. Especially effective are the sound effects, ratcheting up tension and transforming the ship itself into a character, its pressure-battered hull creaking and moaning like an angry whale.

We know some of you wonder what it is with this little Swedish movie that makes it the quasi-official foreign film of the Blockbuster crowd. Our guess is somewhere along the lines of New York Times critic Luke Y. Thompson, who called it “a tad overrated, but still charming.” True enough. Director Lasse Hallstrom’s later work includes The Shipping News, Chocolat, The Cider House Rules, and the utterly brilliant What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, and his first crossover hit touched on something that keeps people coming back. But more than that, My Life as A Dog is decidedly palatable, fresh in that foreign-film way, but not so unfamiliar as to be “difficult.” Set in the 1950s, the coming-of-age tale follows Ingemar (Anton Glanzelius), a 12-year-old whose mother is dying of tuberculosis and whose father has ditched. Ingemar must confront the stirrings of puberty, confusion, and affection—and loss, grieving, and release when his mother and beloved dog die.

Brainerd’s gift to Broadway, Linda Eder has come a long way since the 12-week winning run on Star Search that first put her in the national spotlight. A successful run in Jekyll and Hyde cemented her place on the stage and netted her a husband in its composer, Frank Wildhorn. Her albums have grown steadily stronger, especially after she shook off a creeping case of Streisand-worship and staked out a vocal mode of her own. Her strength is her unabashed emotionality; it’s also her weakness, as she can sometimes punch her way right through and over the top. Later this year she’ll star in Camille Claudel, a new musical about the life of the sculptor and lover of Rodin, written specifically for her by Wildhorn. Her Orpheum show will surely be an occasion to preview a few numbers from Camille, plus selections from her new collection of classic stage standards, Broadway My Way. Orpheum, 910 Hennepin Ave., (612) 339-7007, www.hennepintheatredistrict.com

There’s been no new Boiled in Lead record since 1998’s best-of Alloy, but nobody’s yet come along to take over the reins as Minnesota’s premier Irish band. Though even that title is ironic—or perhaps we should say Eire-onic—since the BiL crew’s penchant for rock and world rhythms makes clear that shamrocks are not the only things that make them shake. These days, the four principals are chiefly occupied with other projects. So Leadheads can fill up at a live show but twice a year—during Halloween if you’re down in Mexico, and the annual St. Paddy’s day bash at the Ave, which has been ongoing since 1985, and why stop a good tradition? First Avenue, 701 1st Ave. N., (612) 338-8388, www.first-avenue.com

Christian McBride made his name as a bright light among jazz bassists with five progressively more adventurous albums on the Verve label, culminating in 2000’s Sci Fi, which found him more sure-footed as a bandleader and skillfully interweaving the threads of his previous work. He moves over to Warner for his new fusion-friendly Vertical Vision, which wanders nicely between hard funk and mellow smoothness. His sidemen are strong players in their own right, especially saxman Ron Blake and keyboardist Keezer, each of whom provide splendid compositions of their own on Vision. Dakota, 1021 E. Bandana Blvd., St. Paul, (651) 642-1442, www.dakotacooks.com