Calhoun

This week’s picks

Thursday, November 27
If the blindly patriotic, crassly commercial nature of Thanksgiving is just too much for you, head to First Ave, where you can really stick it to ‘em by enjoying free turkey and music by a Soviet panda.

Friday, November 28
After battling the Black Friday crowds to score that discount Oreck, take Sanctuary with a delicious and—most importantly—leftover-free meal downtown. MORE »

World genre cinema is alive and well in Minneapolis with the opening of Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In at the Lagoon Cinema. The film, which has won several awards at film festivals around the world and carries a 97% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, is the first in Magnet’s Six Shooter Film Series, a showcase of six of the best films from the vanguard of international genre cinema. MORE »

This week’s picks

Thursday, November 20
Does Joe Dowling have the Guthrie logo tattooed on his arm? I haven’t checked, but I suspect not. Jeremey Catterton, artistic director of Lamb Lays With Lion, now literally wears his heart on his sleeve—specifically, on his inner forearm. The LLWL troupe will be at the Hexagon tonight performing The Little Skeleton That Could Not, a work of “info-tainment” about alcoholism, AIDS, and anorexia. Stick around afterwards for music by Fort Wilson Riot, Plastic Chord, and Speed’s The Name.

Friday, November 21
Last Christmas you gave your godparents a terra cotta garlic cooker…how are you ever going to top that?! Try a work of original art from a student at MCAD; the school’s annual art sale opens tonight. MORE »

by Matt Peiken, 3-Minute Egg • 11/19/08 •

Five small, independent theater troupes in the Twin Cities have banded together to stage an evening of Quickies—a smorgasbord of scenes and slices of upcoming productions—at Bryant-Lake Bowl.

Horror films may be, artistically, the most dismissed genre in film, but the genre has become a cash cow for studios. Films in franchises like Halloween, Friday the 13th, and Saw can cost less than $10 million but make triple that in opening-weekend ticket sales. Unsurprisingly, many of the older horror franchises have been recently remade or updated—a new Friday the 13th film is opening on Friday the 13th of February, 2009. MORE »

Roger Ebert, the critic who inspired me to become a critic, argues that entertainments should be judged not on their objective merits but by how well they deliver on what they promise to do. If a thriller makes you laugh and cry as well as jump, that’s gravy—but really, it’s not fair to expect it to do anything more than make you jump. By that standard, Quickies 2008: Human Curiosities, a theatrical presentation currently playing at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, is an unqualified success: it lives fully up to its title. If you just need something quick and curious, then by all means, go. MORE »

by Matt Peiken, 3-Minute Egg • 11/14/08 • A researcher for Dance USA by day, John Munger has been producing his own dance works and participating in the dances of others locally since the 1970s. This past Wednesday, as part of his occasional series at the Bryant-Lake Bowl, Munger invited a handful of other local dance-makers to perform an evening of solos.

One doesn’t need to be especially cynical to see the annual December screening of the British Television Advertising Award winners at the Walker Art Center as the Twin Cities’ most honest holiday tradition. Instead of paying to be preached to about peace and love and selflessness, museumgoers pay to be preached to about the power of material goods to solve all ills. Given that most mainstream movies are essentially advertisements for associated merchandise, it’s refreshingly candid of the Walker to tell it like it is: we’re going to charge you to watch a lot of ads. MORE »