News & Views of Phillips Since 1976
Monday December 29th 2025
Phoenix Deadline May 30th: This is My Story
BY PATRICK CABELLO HANSEL
The third issue of The Phoenix of Phillips, our local literary magazine, will be published early this summer. The theme is “This is My Story”. We are looking for poems and reflections that tell your story, big or small: who you are, how you came to be in Phillips, what your hopes are for our neighborhood. Anyone who lives or works in Phillips, of any age and any ability are invited to submit. Deadline is May 30. E-mail your work to stpaulscreate@gmail.com, or mail it to: The Phoenix of Phillips, c/o St. Paul”'s Lutheran Church, 2742 15th Ave. S. Minneapolis, MN 55407
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“Hail Caesar”
“Hail Caesar”
****
Comedy/Mystery
PG13
Our beloved Minneapolis (St. Louis Park, exactly) native directors, brothers Joel and Ethan Coen, bring forth “Hail, Caesar!”, another off-the-wall comedy, screwy, boisterous similar to their other comedies “The Big Lebowski”(1997), “O Brother, Where, “Burn After Reading” (2008).
Like an old-school western, the Coens”' “Hail, Caesar! “rewinds the clock back to the Hollywood of the 1950s. What “Hail, Caesar!” does for me”“at least”“in the nostalgic sense, when I was a boy sitting in a theater (one screen) watching the fullness of CinemaScope, the new larger than life invention in 1953.There”'s a lot here that more than meets the eye, I mean, in “Hail, Caesar!”, especially for a baby boomer like myself.
To start off, Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin) is the head of Capitol Studios with his loaded hands of keeping a struggling studio going and helping actors out of difficult situations. He”'s a devote Catholic and he”'s willing to take his “transgressions” to the confessional box when sees something he”'s guilty about. Brolin”'s studio mirrors MGM and his character name is from a real person.
Laurence Laurentz Ralph Fiennes), director-producer (echoes Mervyn LeRoy, director-producer, 1900-1987), a perfectionist making one of his cast members Hobie Doyle (Aden Ehreneich) speak like an upper-class person on set.… Read the rest ““Hail Caesar””
“The Embrace of the Serpent”
“The Embrace of the Serpent”
Colombian
*****
2015
Adventure/Drama/HistoryÂ
Not Rated
“The Embrace of the Serpent” is filmed in black and white (except for a few emblazon moments), a film that takes us to the Amazon with haunting, remoteness and mysterious pace. Director Ciro Guerra”'s film is unique in every sense of the word, in the sense he depicts genocide of indigenous peoples of North and South America through the eyes of an indigenous person rarely done by Western filmmakers.
The film”'s first character is shaman Karamakate (as a young man played by Nilbio Torres) comes across a sick German ethnographer named Theodor Koch-Grunberg (Jan Bijvoet) looking for yakruna, a plant said to have healing powers, and Karamakate may be the only one that knows where it is. This is in 1909, at a time European industrialists and missionaries, wittingly or unwittingly, are destroying the forests by cutting trees for rubber or forcing religion down the throats of the local people. Karamakate doesn”'t trust the whites but soon becomes the guide for Theodor along with western dressed guide named Manduca (Yauenkil Migee). All three men in a canoe go down the Amazon River, which at times is treacherous. Fast forward, circa,1940, another white man, this time an American botanist Schultes Brionne Davis) is in the same area, along the Columbian-Brazilian border, again Karamakate (the older played by Antonio Bolivar) becomes the guide going down the same river looking for yakruna.… Read the rest ““The Embrace of the Serpent””
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