At home or in the theater: What's the last great movie you watched?
That's easy!
The only movie that you could sum up as "Sophia Coppola meets Dario Argento."
Advertised at my local theater as a mirror rival to Twilight, Let the Right One In makes you intimately aware of the everyday horrors of an ordinary 12-year-old in suburban Stockholm: bullying, silence, and drunken indifferent parents. What's new: the young protagonist, Oskar, finds respite in the kindness of a barefoot, blithe vampire girl next door. When she shows him how to solve his Rubik's cube, that boy's in love.
The sound crew placed microphones in the most unusual places, recording sounds below eyelashes and next to throats, falling snow and corduroy pant legs (source: Kristen McCracken's interview with the director Tomas Alfredson). The result is a movie that's stylized but not pretty-pretty. The sound and visuals mean that certain little events are extra-perceptible in this movie, as if you'd borrowed heightened perception of a sensitive boy and a restless vampire.
Show us your favorite landmark in your current hometown.
The light-swamped, intuitively designed Hennepin County Library, Cesar Pelli's latest gem.
Sculpture by Oldenburg and Van Bruggen, Walker Art Center Sculpture Garden, south of downtown Minneapolis.
The most romantic place: the Stone Arch Bridge, for trains in 1883 and now for pedestrians only, over the Mississippi, near the old Mill district north of downtown. Photo by Adam G.
