The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

This is a good time for animation -- maybe one of the best ever. Just look at some of the films that have been made in the past few years, such as Pixar's Wall-E and Howl's Moving Castle from Studio Ghibli. Even a lot of the mediocre fare is great fun, such as the Shrek films, which might not be great art but know their way around pointed satire and clever parody. Heck, even television animation, such as Robot Chicken, is about as smart and as funny as you could hope television might be.

Taken is a movie about a government spook whose daughter is kidnapped abroad, so he tracks her down and kills everybody connected to her kidnapping. I'm not giving away anything by telling you that -- the plot is spelled out by the advertising campaign, which features the spook talking to his daughter's kidnappers and informing them, in a quiet and measured voice, that they will soon all be dead. Frankly, if the spook didn't do what he promised, there wouldn't be much of a movie. So there are no surprises in the film's plotting. For some critics, the surprise is in the casting.

The way it looks now, it's hard to imagine that Hennepin Avenue was once a Great White Way of cinematic wonder, each downtown block blessed with at least one tempting marquee adorned with blinding lights. In my own early years of moviegoing, I was able to take my pick of many single screen palaces on the strip, all showing the hottest new releases — at least, "hot" in the eyes of a preteen horror buff. This included the State (where I saw Blacula), the Mann (Blackenstein!), the Orpheum (Godzilla Vs.