Local Community News
The Minnesota Twins had an awful season last year — they finished with a record of 59-103 — the worst in Twins franchise history and the worst record in the majors last year. This performance by the club prompted a front office overhaul with Derek Falvey hired from the Cleveland Indians as the Chief Baseball Officer and Phad Levine hired from the Texas Rangers as General Manager.
Much like January, April is mostly a dead month in the film world with one big blockbuster film that’ll overshadow the rest. In this case, The Fate and the Furious takes the top spot. It’s highly likely it’ll dwarf the box office like an all-consuming black hole.
Anime to live action adaptations have a troubled history. Unless I’m forgetting something, I don’t believe there has ever been a successful or well-done adaptation of an anime movie or television show. Of the most recent ventures, Dragonball: Evolution and Speed Racer were both critical and box office failures, and that’s putting it nicely.
Ghost in the Shell, then, had quite the mountain to climb to overcome past grievances and honor both the original anime movie while introducing the story to non-anime audiences. While it’s not perfect by any means, struggling to go as deep as the original, it still keeps the soul of the movie rather than settling for a shell, but also knows when to be its own thing. The end result is a satisfying science fiction that many people will enjoy.
The line to see the Minnesota-based film Wilson grew quickly at the Showplace Icon Theater at the West End in St. Louis Park, hosted by the Twin Cities Film Festival. The excitement was palpable. It’s been some time since a major studio out of Hollywood set up shop to film an entire movie in the Twin Cities. Local actors and crew were excited to see their work on the big screen.
According to director Craig Johnson, the film was originally planned to be shot in Oakland, but that location was “cost prohibitive.” However, With the help of the “Snowbate” by the Minnesota Film Commission, a reimbursement program to attract major films, Johnson and Fox Searchlight decided to bring the production to the Twin Cities. According to Lucinda Winter, Executive Director of the MN Film & TV Board, they filmed over 50 Minnesota locations in under 30 days, hiring local actors and production crews, totaling 165 people working on the production. Overall, Fox Searchlight spent 4 Million dollars in Minnesota, benefiting the local economy.[Continue Reading]
After the roaring success of Godzilla, the resurgence of the monster movie was officially in full swing, giving studios the green light to release several more remakes and reboots of classic monster films. And while we wait for them to unearth Steve McQueen’s The Blob (crosses fingers), we’ll have to settle for more popular franchises like King Kong.
Kong: Skull Island does everything it needs to be a crowd pleaser minus one pretty important piece. It’s heavy on the action and comedy, providing a fun escape to the theater, but the overflowing humor and lack of solid, likable three-dimensional characters weaken the stakes. It has great potential, but it doesn’t seem to care to go any further.
Christopher Nolan has never shied away from bold decisions, creating unique cinematic effects like Inception‘s mind-bending hallway scene, casting oddball actors like Heath Ledger as The Joker, and telling stories in mostly non-linear and splintered fashions. In the past, his creative instincts have led him to great success both critically and financially. Now, he’s making another bold move, and no it’s not casting One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles (though, that is head scratching), it’s creating a PG-13 war movie.[Continue Reading]
Xeroxed copies of brackets are pinned to cubicle walls across America in anticipation of the start of March’s annual “Madness.” Amateur office bookies are collecting five and ten dollar bills from last minute entrants, each of whom believes they can employ their personal method of bracketology to foresee the hidden upsets and ultimately “win the pool.”
The king of flow – Jaomir Jagr.
In its seventh year of existence, the much-anticipated annual YouTube video that celebrates the unique hairstyles of Minnesota’s best prep hockey players has turned… poetic.
After a quick jab at the sitting POTUS’s notorious hairstyle, our droll narrator (John King) channels the likes of Whitman, Wilde, Poe and Dylan to grace his viewers with a poem honoring the hair highlights of this past weekend’s tourney, before taking us through his picks for this year’s AHH team.
Last year, Golden State Warrior superstar Steph Curry launched an individual offensive display of historical significance, making 402 3-point field goals during the regular season while shooting a highly accurate 45.4% from behind the arc. This total bested the previous record (set by Curry the year before) by a remarkable 116 and really is a ridiculous outlier stat no matter how you look at it.
Originally, I was going to write up a review about the upcoming Beauty and the Beast live-action remake, but the more I considered it, the more I realized it was better to take a different direction.
The Beauty and the Beast remake is essentially a frame-for-frame copy of the cartoon. That isn’t to say that changes weren’t made, but overall, the cartoon to live-action transfer is fully complete to ignite millennial nostalgia. It’s a gorgeous CGI-display of Emma Watson’s Beauty prancing in the open fields and Dan Steven’s Beast growling and mostly being angry until he’s not supposed to be anymore. Musical lovers will gush at all the wonderfully choreographed singing and dancing scenes and Disney fanatics will be perfectly happy accepting this newly repackaged gift. In other words, there’s nothing I’m going to tell you that will change your mind about seeing Beauty and the Beast, with one exception.
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