The Wake

Eric Brew

It may simply be my aversion to any discussion of morality that marks my distaste for The Machinist. It could also be the high hopes I had for its’ seemingly intricate and inquisitive plotline. Even until the end, despite the better part of my ego telling me precisely what the protagonist’s reality was, I refused to accept the obviousness of the resolution. I was set on a conclusion that I still couldn’t decipher—something I was waiting for the film to show me. Instead the film gives an overdone facsimile of the psychology of guilt, one that questions both the continuity of experience and the ability of the mind to harbor illness.

If I were to concern myself primarily with what The Machinist contemplates, in regard to …

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On Friday, Nov. 20 the Nordic community of Minneapolis lifted the cinematic curtains to unveil some of the best films from the region. It showcased films from Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Sweden, and Greenland that chronicled Nordic culture, people, and politics throughout the weekend. In between screenings, presenters gave synopses and introduced the audience to the background milieu of the particular film. Taking place in the Parkway Theater, the atmosphere buzzed with foreign chatter, Cognac, and Swedish buns.

The premiere was entitled Prostitution Behind the Veil, in which an Iranian woman who fled to Sweden goes back to report on the lives of oppressed women who have no other way of sustaining themselves. Drugs, little children, and condoms scatter the house of two women …

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Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox is fresh and wonderful. Based on the Roald Dahl novel of the same name, it is what the child inside me has longed to see since The Nightmare Before Christmas. It’s witty enough in dialogue to keep adults entertained and playful enough to keep young children captivated.

Visually, Fantastic is radiant beyond imagination. The stop-motion animation gives it a unique feel; if it had been made with computer-generated animation like a Pixar movie, the cartooniness would have taken over. Sure, The Incredibles received great acclaim in its attempts to mimic a blockbuster, but it could have easily been shot as a live action film.

Anderson took advantage of the animation style to bring the audience closer to the film and perform shots “that you can’t do in live …

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There are two commonalities among most of the television networks: they produce mystery crime dramas, and they all suck. Fortunately, NBC has come to the rescue once again with its new show Community.

Community derives its name from the location and premise of the show: community college. Perhaps by happenstance, but more likely on purpose, the show’s creation comes at a time when real community colleges are being put into the spotlight—TIME Magazine recently ran an article on the subject: “Can Community Colleges Save the U.S. Economy?”

This is all beside the point: the show is absolutely brilliant. Community takes a cliché and turns it on its head. Instead of having the high school quarterback be dreamy, the snarky lawyer be affluent, the old guy be a kook, and the geeky girl be, …

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The City, screened at Oak St. Cinema on Nov. 19, may sound like any other violent, low-budget, action flick trying to live up to Scorsese or Tarantino. But a clever premise laced with smart subtext and wicked humor makes this a film worth seeing.

“I’d like people to walk away questioning what it is by their nature that makes them entertained by certain aspects of media,” writer/director James Vogel says. “Why do we as an audience expect to see violence and sex in films, and why are we entertained by it?”

Vogel, and his co-writers and stars, Ezra Stead and Greg Hernandez, clearly put a lot of thought into the meaning behind the film’s graphic images. Their story tells of a screenwriting student who falls in love with a charismatic underworld figure while seeking experience to …

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alt='FN'/>Set in Minneapolis and St. Paul, nobody is a movie for MSP lovers, artists and indie folk. The movie stars Lindeman (local actor Sam Rosen), a frustrated graduate student at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. After being declared “done with therapy” by his shrink, he struggles to find a way to regain the ever-so-inspiring depression that had guided his previous projects. The drama of the film unfolds as Lindeman becomes more and more frustrated with a looming final critique and only a few ideas for his final sculpture that, in his words, “kinda sucks.” As he experiments with such subjects as death, love, homosexuality and militant veganism, Lindeman realizes whoring himself out to the various philosophies and radical lifestyles of his colleagues will not give him the unique identity he is looking …

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A Serious Man is a dark comedic tragedy that borders on a parable of a dismantled existence. The story is set in 1967 suburban Minnesota and centered on a beyond–unfortunate—possibly curse —middle–aged Jewish father, Larry Gopnik. As a professor of physics at a small university, Larry clings to the routine of his life and the freestanding equations that supposedly describe his surrounding world. He is so far detached from this world that he lingers before he falls—as a cartoon character might after unknowingly speeding off a cliff.

Like most of the Coen brothers’ characters, Larry is a victim of his environment. As an academic living in a middle-class Jewish neighborhood, Larry finds himself lost and beleaguered as his wife leaves him. …

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One thing is for sure about The Informant! and it’s that Matt Damon is definitely not the same crisis-ridden amnesiac America fell in love with. Based on Kurt Eichenwald’s 2000 book, Damon stars as Mark Whitacre, a seemingly inept and neurotic biochemist who blows the whistle on his company’s global price-fixing scheme only to become a victim of his own head-scratching recklessness. The story begins in the early ‘90s where Whitacre’s employer, Archer Daniels Midland, a highly recognized agricultural conglomerate, has been working in collusion with their competitors to fix the price of lysine, a ubiquitous food additive. When two FBI agents arrive at ADM to investigate a possible industrial sabotage, Whitacre, posing as an honest man, confides in the FBI agents and reveals the …

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Unlike the recent regeneration of old-man clout in the music industry (Morrisey! Leonard Cohen! Yes, they’re still alive.), the film industry has been experiencing something a little different. We might call it the Nicolas Cage Phenomenon: a dirty rash of films characterized by disaster, ancient talismans, and men sporting long, formless hairdos that try to combat receding hairlines. That is to say, a bunch of middle-aged actors with exhaustive repertoires, such as Nicolas Cage and Tom Hanks, have been turning out increasingly successful but mediocre films.

Besides telling them to JUST CUT IT OFF! Bald is distinguished!, it might help to remind these guys that their current fame rides on their quirky roles from the past. There’s no point hoping actors will relinquish the way they …

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Watchmen has been in various stages of conception since the late eighties, and bears a weight of geek scrutiny which is almost unprecedented. Unfortunately, the lauded trailer shown with The Dark Knight was masterful compared to the final product.

Director Zack Snyder (Dawn Of The Dead [2004], 300[2007]) has chosen to remain visually faithful to the source material to the degree that it is a liability against the film. Trimmed segments, which are extensive and necessary, are not accounted for, and the film never eases into its own identity. Enough of the irrelevant is preserved, and too much thematic exposition is canned for the film to be anything but a jumbled mess. Context is often ignored in the interest of shot-for-shot reproduction of a graphic novel, which is itself flawed. Most of the principal …

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Clint Eastwood’s latest undertaking, Gran Torino, did not fail movie buffs and car fanatics this winter season (it did, however, fail to meet Oscar standards). Critics love the dynamic characters and chronicled dark history of the Hmong culture, and how it has basically informed the entire country of Hmong people’s existence. Set in a Detroit family suburb turned ghetto, Torino reports on the gangbanging nature of this neighborhood and the culture clashes that follow.

What’s surprising to know is that the roots of the film lie in Minneapolis and St. Paul. Bee Vang, who plays the shy Thao bullied by the local gang, resides in a suburb north of the cities. Like most of the actors, he was cast without any previous acting experience. In search of completely authentic Hmong roles, casting directors stationed themselves in …

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“We think we’re in the present, but we aren’t. The present we know is only a movie of the past.” — Ken Kesey Only three weeks after the chaotic RNC in St. Paul, the Hollywood production “Battle in Seattle,” narrating the 1999 WTO protests, came blockbusting into Minneapolis at the Uptown. In the aftermath of severe police intervention in the anti-war activities in St. Paul, the film’s dramatic representation of similar events drew on our own memory to make a powerful statement on oppositional politics and globalization. While filmmaker Stuart Townsend concludes the film by proclaiming the WTO protests a “success” story, it would be hard to consider our St. Paul anti-war/RNC activities a success: we were crushed by police force, our mainstream media stifled debate, the convention went off without a hitch, and the …

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Starting on Friday, Oct. 10th and continuing through Thursday,
Oct. 23rd, the Oak Street Cinema and the Film Society are presenting a retrospective of six of Jean-Luc Godard’s seminal 1960s French New Wave films in commemoration of the release of “Breathless”, his first feature film. Godard, a groundbreaking director and leader of the New Wave film
movement in France, directed 18 feature films and at least 11 short films throughout the 1960s. Filled with beautiful women and equally beautiful cinematography, Godard’s films are as complex as they are enjoyable, providing their viewers with ample food for thought. And, as I discovered when I attended
“Contempt”, the first film screened, one does not need to be a film connoisseur to enjoy a Godard piece.

Of the six films selected, two (“Contempt” and “Band of Outsiders”) have finished screening. “Contempt,” Godard’s …

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A flock of wild birds, a struggling musician and a very long pony tail help to tell one man’s story caring for a flock of rare conures in The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a documentary by Judy Irving showing this month at the Bell Museum of Natural History.When I was “bad” as a child I was sent to my room. When Mingus is a bad bird he is sent outside. Meet Mark Bittner, with a scruffy beard, thick glasses, and overgrown hair that he has pledged not to cut until he finds a girlfriend. He can’t leave his conure Mingus outside for too long, because “he is utterly terrified of being forced to leave,” Bittner says.Wild birds like Mingus, not native to San Francisco, or the United States for that matter, are Bittner’s closest …

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“Ask any dope rat where the junk’s spraying and they’ll say they scraped it off that, who scored it off this, who bought it off someone; after four or five connections, the list always ends with the Pin.” Right there is your typical piece of dialogue from the recent neo-noir Brick. It’s that kind of over-the-top pulp novel speak that will either make you giddy with absurdity or completely turn you off.The story’s crimes and investigations all happen in and around a California high school, a locale rife for noir treatment. With that as a backdrop, the film creates an interesting, immersive world—as long as you can accept teenagers who live a typical high school life while saying and doing things along the lines of Pulp Fiction.Brick’s plot has all the essentials of a great, …

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