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If you’re like us, you couldn’t help but wince at Gosford Park director Robert Altman’s loss to Richie Cunningham at this year’s Academy Awards, if only because Altman must have an all-time classic Oscar acceptance speech in him that’s just dying to get out. With any luck, he’ll get another shot before the decade is out, and not just in the guise of some lifetime-achievement retirement trinket. Thanks to the Independent Film Channel and waning suggested-retail-prices on digital cameras, there’s no shortage of convention-bucking filmmakers out there, and despite the fairweather mainstream accolades, Altman remains a worthy hero for any commercially challenged artisan. In the process of giving some of Hollywood’s finest actors (Warren Beatty, Tim Robbins, Sissy Spacek) the most distinctive showcases of their careers (McCabe & Mrs. Miller, The Player, 3 Women), he’s developed the kind of uncompromising yet wholly malleable aesthetic that can turn any movie genre into a gently experimental playground. Critics like to swipe at his overlapping narratives and restless pans and zooms, and there have been more than a few stinkers on his C.V. over the years. But jeeze, even Opie Howard had a couple of Gung Hos and Far and Aways en route to A Beautiful Mind. Oak Street Cinema’s month-long Altman salute sticks to the good stuff, from M*A*S*H to Nashville to Short Cuts, including several newly restored prints. Oak Street Cinema, (612) 331-3134

The last time John Woo directed Nicolas Cage, it was in Face/Off, a hammy sci-fi shoot-em-up sandwiched between Cage’s throwaway turns in the clumsy flicks Con Air and City of Angels. Now the Hong Kong action specialist re-teams with his most vexing leading man for (of all things) a World War II flick—not the most immediately promising prospect after the flame-out of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor and the muted viewer response to Tom Hanks’ Band of Brothers miniseries. Embellishing on a few factual elements of the war in the Pacific, Windtalkers concerns the strained camaraderie between Native American soldiers and their white comrades, complicated by the use of the Navajo language to encode classified U.S. military secrets and an unsavory protocol for dealing with fluent speakers who are on the verge of Japanese capture. No matter how deeply Woo delves into the racial and emotional complexities of the (kinda true) story, we’ll assume that MGM hired him mostly for his expertise in the field of eye-popping movie combat. While it seems incongruous to imagine the slick melees of Mission: Impossible 2 transposed to suit the low-tech grunts of WWII, maybe less authentic battlefield action is just what multiplex regulars need, faced as they are with plenty of present-tense military realism by way of their daily papers and 24-hour newscasts.

It’s too bad that Akira Kurosawa’s last film isn’t one of his best; it feels slow and contrived and a bit too steeped in self-congratulation in the same way the later works of his hero John Ford did. But this story of a retired teacher and his devoted students is a fitting testament in other ways. Besides the touching homage it pays to Ford in all the scenes depicting rituals of male society, it is also a tender and sometimes funny paean to Kurosawa’s own experience—that helpless will to live just a little longer, do just a little more, which tugged at him to the end.

Those among us who spend too much time combing the shelves at video stores are all looking for the same score—the little movie we neglected to check out, or never heard of, that turns out to be a revelation. This one registered first as a curiosity: What, an Albert Brooks movie released straight to video? Not quite. There’s only so much you can say about the plot without saying too much, but let’s stipulate that it’s conventional enough to outward appearances. A lonely and cautious middle-aged businessman hires an equally lonely and disaffected 17-year-old goth chick to work in his clothing store, and they become friends. You can see where the story goes, right? Maybe you can, but the telling is filled with so many unexpected touches of grace and feeling that the ride seems anything but familiar. Brooks plays the same neurotic mensch as ever, though to more measured effect, and Leelee Sobieski takes utter command of every scene she’s in. If it weren’t for the movie’s inexplicable failure to show up on Hollywood radar, she could have been up for the “little picture” Oscar as easily as Sissy Spacek or Halle Berry. And Sobieski isn’t the biggest surprise. My First Mister was directed by the longtime yeoman actress Christine Lahti, who apparently has been spending her time on the wrong side of the camera.

While HBO continues to congratulate itself (deservedly so, we’ll admit) over the steamrolling successes of Sex and the City, The Sopranos, and Six Feet Under, it has neglected one of the most gifted and talented kids in the family. Showcasing the wonderfully reckless comedy of Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, the network’s Mr. Show series married the satirical edge of the best Saturday Night Live with the kooky, free-associating abandon of The Kids in the Hall. Unabashedly acerbic, stridently goofy, and somehow self-effacing at the same time, the duo’s freewheeling sketches are amusing on multiple levels and mysteriously dovetail into something like a cohesive “story” by each episode’s end. Like the best comedy, you just gotta see it, which is why it’s a pleasure to see the first and second seasons of Mr. Show given the same DVD treatment as the aforementioned HBO superhits. In addition to compiling all of the series installments, the set includes in-character audio commentary tracks and a must-see bonus segment featuring Ronnie Dobbs, Cross’ drunken-white-trash-fugitive alter-ego (whose feature-length tribute Run Ronnie Run is reportedly being held in limbo by the confused suits at New Line). With Will Ferrell no longer appearing live from New York every week, this set may come in awfully handy.

I’m 12 years old, scooted up to my dad’s octagonal dining table, the backs of my thighs sticking unpleasantly to the vinyl kitchen chair on a sweltering August day. Stepmom Debbie has prepared her specialty, Swedish sausage, a gray tube of meat-like substance that looks a lot like the photo my health teacher Ms. Nick recently displayed of a large intestine. And then there’s the tall glass of two percent milk resting heavily before me, beads of sweat running down its exterior, thick and disgusting white fluid within. Before leaving the table, I will be forced to swallow the milk, all of it, no matter how much I gag in the process. I will have to swallow it because, insists my dad, it’s good for me. Against this truism I, a scrawny kid with chronic earaches and poor appetite, am defenseless.

If only I’d had access then to today’s impressive and growing body of research that threatens our sacrosanct belief in milk as the epitome of wholesome food. Critics now point past the dangers associated with the sins of factory farming— growth hormones, antibiotics, and infectious secretions from unhealthy animals—to the most shattering question of all: whether clean, pure cow’s milk is fit for humans to drink in the first place.

“Ask yourself this question,” coaxes Robert Cohen, author of Milk, The Deadliest Poison, and founder of Notmilk.com, “Does organic human breast milk sound like a delicious drink for an adult human? Instinctively, most people know that there are substances in breast milk that are not intended for their adult bodies. Same goes for pig’s milk and dog’s milk. Same for cow’s milk.”

Seems logical to me, especially when coupled with the real horror stories behind mass production of dairy products. That’s why I tried so hard back in the late 90s to replace dairy in my own and my children’s diets with alternatives, mostly soy based, such as soy milk for pouring on cereal, Tofutti instead of ice cream, and the unpalatable, unmeltable, and dare I say inedible soy cheese products of that era (if they’ve improved, I wouldn’t know, having given up on them for good). Being dairy-free wasn’t easy. After six months of strict veganism, I broke down and bit into a warm, gooey slice of cheese pizza. I haven’t gotten back on the wagon since.

Little did I know that with my foray into dairy alternatives I was buying right into a decade-long marketing campaign to gain consumer acceptance of tofu, soy milk, soy ice cream, soy cheese, soy sausage, and soy derivatives. It coincided with a U.S. Food and Drug Administration decision, announced on October 25, 1999, to allow a health claim for products “low in saturated fat and cholesterol” that contain 6.25 grams of soy protein per serving. Cereals, baked products, convenience food, and other items could now be marketed as promoting cardiovascular health, as long as they contained one teaspoon of soy protein per 100-gram serving.

It was a weak will, not health concerns, that brought me back to Pizza Hut, but given my demonstrated history of swinging with the dairy-soy pendulum, it was probably no coincidence that my personal roundabout dovetailed exactly with the millennial tide turning against soy consumption. As it turned out, shrieked the critics, I—along with the rest of the unsuspecting health-conscious masses—had been bamboozled by the soy industry. Soy protesters began waving fistfuls of anti-soy studies. There are links between soy and fertility problems in certain animals! Soy contains a natural chemical that mimics estrogen, and it alters sexual development! Two glasses of soy milk a day, over the course of a month, contain enough of this chemical to run my menstrual cycle amok! And if that’s not bad enough, soy also promises to disturb my digestion, give me breast cancer, and shrink my brain. Of course, all of this is disputed heatedly by those who claim soy is a healthy, low-cost, versatile food for a new generation, but the debate in itself is enough to turn some consumers back toward the milking pail.

So maybe humans are the only mammals that drink the milk of another mammal. What we drink is hardly the most significant distinction between humans and our animal brethren. So the newest purists believe that raw milk, in its most natural, unadulterated state, is the dairy product most fit for humans. But to get it, they’ve got to form a relationship with an organic farmer willing to bypass wholesalers and market his or her raw, unpasteurized milk directly to consumers.

For years, when my family lived in the country, I bought raw goat milk from a friend down the road, and my children appeared to me just like Heidi and Klara on the Alm, growing strong and rosy on the herb-rich milk of Schwaanli and Baarli. They got used to the thick, salty flavor of the goat milk, and I appreciated the simplicity of it, the fact that we were drinking it practically straight from the goat. It felt right and good, and we only drifted away from it after moving back to the Twin Cities.

Of course I knew raw milk could cause illness, even if I didn’t know that an estimated 100 Americans each year get sick from unpasteurized dairy products, and that some critics claim that figure is far too low since food-borne illness is often misdiagnosed as “flu” or viral illness. Indeed, outbreaks of raw-milk related illnesses occur every year in Minnesota, and in one 1992 incident 50 people got sick after ingesting raw milk at a church picnic. Raw milk can apparently harbor a variety of dangerous micro–organisms including campy-lobacter, salmonella, staphylococci, E. coli, and even rabies. Symptoms can range from mild stomach cramps to coma and death.

It’s a hard world. Risk lurks everywhere. From terrorism to traffic, our lives are at stake with every polluted breath we take. I’m all for eating well, supporting organics, keeping hope alive. But I’ve given up the notion that every sip I allow to pass through my children’s lips is going to make the difference between health and disease. The hysteria, if anything, is bound to make us sick. That harmless looking soybean, that creamy glass of goatmilk that got Klara up on her own two feet, that once-revered carton of two percent in the cooler at the corner store—they’ve got their problems. But are they going to kill you? Probably not (immediately).

Jeannie Ouellette is Associate Editor of The Rake.

It took eight years to catch the man who killed Linda Jensen in her Big Lake home—even though two other men had already confessed to the crime.

Sherburne County 15 crosses the Elk River just north of highway 10, then takes the first of several gentle curves west toward Big Lake. It’s the kind of rural two-lane you might see in an SUV commercial—mom at the wheel undaunted by the icy road, back seat full of kids gazing out at the snow-softened landscape. The homes are set back in wooded lots every quarter mile or so, close enough to be neighborly, but distant enough to be secluded. The distinctive stained-wood exterior of the house that Charlie Jensen built still looks the same as it did one winter evening in 1992 when it was plastered all over Twin Cities’ television screens, but Charlie hasn’t seen it in a long time. “I can’t bring myself to look at it,” he says.

The Jensen’s nine-year-old son Joe had gotten off the school bus at the end of the long driveway about 3 o’clock that afternoon. He dragged his bum leg through the snow toward his house, and pushed the unlocked door open. He cast a quick glance at his baby sister Lisa who was sitting in her playpen with poopy diapers and teary eyes, then made a beeline for his room and booted up a video game. The aliens materialized, and started to advance. Lisa began crying. Otherwise it was too quiet in the house. Joe wondered where his mom was. He and Linda Jensen were close, and he had a feeling that something was wrong.

While Joe had called three men dad in his life—two abusive drunks and Charlie Jensen— his mom was a constant. She’d mothered him with a special passion because of a stroke he’d suffered at birth that left him with a limp and a weakened arm. She’d protected him when the men in her life got nasty, and comforted him when he brooded about his handicaps. Linda Jensen’s presence was something Joe had always been aware of. Now he sensed her absence. He walked over to the open door of his parents’ bedroom and looked in. The bedclothes had been pulled off. They were piled on top of something on the floor at the foot of the bed. He ran back to the living room and lost himself in the video game. About an hour later Charlie Jensen arrived home. As he drove up the driveway the symbols of the day’s frustrations were in plain view. The pickup truck he had for sale sat unsold behind the house, and nearby his wife’s van was up to the hubcaps in freshly fallen snow. Obviously it hadn’t moved, yet he’d been trying to reach her off and on all day. Why didn’t she answer the phone, he wondered, vaguely irritated.

Charlie stomped the snow off his shoes in the walkout. Joe was sitting in the living room in front of the video screen, a few feet from the playpen where Lisa sat sniffling. “Lisa’s here alone—mom’s not around,” Joe blurted out, before Charlie could ask. Charlie picked up his daughter. He glanced into the bedroom, saw the stripped bed, and hurried down to the laundry room. Linda wasn’t there. He went back to the bedroom with Joe following him, noticed the bedclothes on the floor, and saw his wife’s head poking out from underneath. The bedspread, he realized, was pinned to her chest with a knife. Shocked, he put the baby down and pulled back the bedclothes. Linda Jensen had been disemboweled. She’d been murdered so brutally that Charlie’s first thought was of some grisly ritual.

“I couldn’t stand to look at it,” he told investigator Gary Polusny of the Sherburne County Sheriff’s office. “I said, ‘Joe, mom’s dead you know,’ and Joe went hysterical. Then I called 911.” That evening Charlie told investigators that he suspected Joe’s biological father was the killer. “He’s got a hell of a temper, and he hated Linda for not staying with him,” he said. “He’d call her up and just scream at her.” Charlie’s speculation on the evening of his wife’s murder was the first promising lead in a gruesome murder case that took eight years to solve.

A cold river rushes by, and cottonwood trees have toppled in along the bank. On a sandstone bluff, 20 feet up, there’s a dancing Shiva carved deeply into the rock. The Hindu God of Destruction has been defaced by kids, farmers, fundamentalists. When Jim Langford carved it 15 years ago, a few Faribault evangelicals mobilized. They xeroxed flyers and put them in farmer’s mailboxes throughout the area. They claimed the “paganistic idol” would sicken cattle and kill crops. Theirs was a decidedly Old Testament view of things.

Each summer, Langford still makes the trip south to visit his handiwork at Scott’s Mill, a piece of Isaac Walton League land halfway between Northfield and Faribault, on the Cannon River. “Shiva was dancing on the head of ignorance,” he said recently, still relishing the truth of it. “But not anymore. Some farmers came with a shotgun and took target practice.” Years later, Langford saw the head of ignorance again—at a friend’s house. The friend had found the fragment in woods near the bluff, and brought it home to the safety of his garden.

Langford is a tall and energetic man, a happy father with fraternal twins in first grade. He travels five days a week, giving financial seminars in Atlanta, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. In 1986, he was a senior at St. Olaf College. Through the arcane knowledge of upperclassmen, Langford learned about Scott’s Mill— a remote but favored location for the usual college bacchanals. And in a long-since extinct program that was on the leftiest fringe of a liberal arts education, he fashioned a senior project that encompassed American studies (think Huck Finn), Asian religion, and three-dimensional art. It all came together in the eight-foot-in-diameter carving.

The outrage of the locals was palpable. The Faribault Daily News was moved to remark on the public outcry. “Not since the city council considered cat-leashing has a story created such a stir here,” one reporter exclaimed. Religiously-inclined folks bridled the most, while the secular objected on the grounds that Langford had vandalized park property. Then again, Langford’s handiwork was simply the latest and most accomplished in a long tradition of local vandalism. Sandstone, which yields to pointed sticks and strong fingers, practically cries out for the initials of teenagers.

Langford spent six months working on Shiva, through the spring of 1986. He built his own scaffolding, waded through meltwater, and spent about six hours a day on the project. As final exams and graduation approached, he even hired an assistant. But the aide couldn’t handle the work, and suffered an episode of neurosis that involved staring at the sun for long periods of the workday. Believers might have called it a demonic possession. “He had issues,” explained Langford with the benefit of hindsight.

Despite a decade and a half of abuse, Shiva still dances on the sandstone bluff. “Oh yeah, he’s really in there for good,” said the artist, who received his baccalaureate degree as his reward.