Erik McClanahan

Take-Up Productions continues to spread the filmic love for Minneapolis cinephiles with its latest new series, Trylon Premiere Tuesdays, which showcases a Twin Cities premiere of a new film on the second and fourth Tuesday of the month at the Trylon Microcinema. Spearheaded by Minneapolis film blogger Kathie Smith (my co-host on KFAI's Cinema Shanty), the series starts strong with Valhalla Rising, a graphic, brooding Viking tale that will surely show up on my year-end top ten list.MORE »

The opening credits of David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) were a revelation. The camera, the size of a dendrite, begins in the brain of our main character, the unreliable narrator played by Edward Norton. It pulls back through the frontal lobe, seemingly capable of going anywhere as it hastily makes its way through the skull casing, out a sweat gland, up a hair follicle, down his nose and up the barrel of a gun. Camera focuses in on Norton's face, we see the gun in his mouth. Less than two minutes into the film, set to the dynamic score by the Dust Brothers, (relatively) mainstream audiences had just been introduced to a host of exciting new possibilities.MORE »

Some movies are so bad they inadvertently become good, and find a rabid cult audience. That's the thesis of Best Worst Movie. The documentary, directed by Troll 2's child star Michael Paul Stephenson (who was understandably embarrassed by that movie for two decades), is now playing at the Lagoon Cinema.MORE »

This weekend at the Trylon, the monthlong retrospective of select Steven Spielberg films, subtitled "Father of the Blockbuster," concludes with screenings all weekend of Jurassic Park. The 1993 film has been hailed as a landmark of computer-generated special effects, which now completely saturate multiplexes from coast to coast. Here's a look at some landmark films in the history of this game-changing technology.MORE »