A late, minor addition to the Robert Altman collection — but a treasure all the same — A Prairie Home Companion is more likely to inspire fondness than awe. This is entirely appropriate, since the movie snuggles deep into the mood and sensibility of its source, Garrison Keillor's long-running public radio variety show.
Beloved by tote-baggers across the land, Keillor's weekly cavalcade of wry Midwestern humor and musical Americana has never set out to make anyone's hair stand on end. Notwithstanding the occasional crackle of satire or sparkle of instrumental virtuosity, it mostly offers reliable doses of amusement embedded in easygoing nostalgia. It looks back on — or, rather, reinvents — a time when popular culture was spooned out in grange halls and Main Street movie palaces, and when broadcasting was supposedly a local affair sponsored by mom-and-pop purveyors of biscuits and Norwegian pickled herring.
In the film Keillor, who wrote the screenplay and also plays himself (as a jowly, owlish and curiously detached master of ceremonies), supplies the whimsy. Altman, a more cantankerous spirit (he comes from Kansas City, Missouri, a wilder corner of the Midwest than Keillor's Minnesota), brings his unrivaled sense of chaos and his mischievous eye for human eccentricity. Together they have confected a breezy backstage comedy that is also a sly elegy: a poignant contemplation of last things that goes down as smoothly and sweetly as a lemon drop.
PHOTO COURTESY OF SKY DIGI ENTERTAINMENT
The action takes place during the final performance of A Prairie Home Companion, a live radio broadcast that, unlike its real world counterpart, is not made possible by the generous support of listeners like you. Its home station, WLT, has been gobbled up by a Texas-based chain and a corporate heavy, known only as the Axeman (Tommy Lee Jones), has been sent north to shut the program down.
Not everyone involved knows about this — and some who do know don't seem to care — but the show, in any case, goes on. As he has before — in The Company, in Ready to Wear and in Nashville, to name just a few — Altman shuttles his camera gracefully from the wings to the stage, so that you can't always tell where the performance ends and the buzz of regular life begins.
Shooting almost entirely within the Fitzgerald Theater, named for the author F. Scott, in St. Paul, Altman observes the doings of a loose tribe of artists, technicians and hangers-on. The sometime-narrator is Guy Noir (Kevin Kline), a mainstay of the actual Prairie Home Companion here incarnated as a onetime private eye and part-time stage-door security guard. He is the first to notice the presence of a mysterious woman in white (Virginia Madsen), who turns out to be an angel and also the film's literal femme fatale.
As the show rambles through missed cues, heartfelt songs and semi-naughty jokes (courtesy of singing cowboys Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly), we become aware that death, actual and metaphorical, is hovering over the proceedings. Not everyone will survive the evening. Someone will murder a famous murder ballad. Inevitably, the house will go dark, and the players will leave the stage. And in the meantime, a moody young woman (Lindsay Lohan) writes poems about suicide.
The film is, partly, a protest against the smooth, standardized, bottom-line culture represented by the Axeman, and a defiant celebration of imperfection, improvisation and accident. Sometimes you forget a song lyric, your joke falls flat or you scatter the pages of your script all over the floor.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist