1 Woody Allen's triumphant dramatic comedy "Blue Jasmine" is an unsparing portrait of a One Percenter in free fall. Jasmine shopped till her ex-husband's Ponzi schemes dropped. Beautiful, poised and bereft of any marketable skills, she is evicted from her Park Avenue penthouse and reduced to couch-surfing the cramped San Francisco walk-up of her grocery-clerk sister. Cate Blanchett makes Jasmine self-deluded, deplorable, dreamy and train-wreck mesmerizing, delivering the best film work of her dazzling career. It's like a Diane Arbus comedy routine.
2 Jay Z once said he's "not a businessman," he's "a business, man." After watching his 10-minute "Picasso Baby: A Performance Art Film," it's clear the hip-hop mogul deserves a new moniker. He doesn't make art, he is art, man. In July, Jay Z invited a select audience to a New York gallery to hear him rap the title song and improv with attendees. Acclaimed director Mark Romanek shot the mini-documentary, capturing the strange experience of one of music's biggest stars turned into an interactive performance artist. The result is fun, illuminating and more genuine than you'd expect. www.youtube.com
3 Old and new collide casually in "Home Stretch," the second CD from young pianist and composer Timo Andres, who'll be in St. Paul next March as part of the SPCO's Liquid Music series. Playing with the Metropolis Ensemble, he "recomposes" Mozart's Coronation Concerto with results that are alternatively cheeky and buoyant and wonderfully unadorned. Andres also performs his own 2008 concerto, and a sweetly dreamy riff titled "Paraphrase on Themes of Brian Eno."
4 Fresh from an ear-damaging set at last weekend's Kräftskiva Festival in Minneapolis, the Cloak Ox already had us extra amped for its full-length debut ("Shoot the Dog," Sept. 17) based on the preview track, "Pigeon Lung." The quartet of Twin Cities art-rock all-stars — Andrew Broder, Mark Erickson, Martin Dosh and Jeremy Ylvisaker — pile on the Television/Nels Cline-style angular guitar work around such unsettling lyrics as, "I won't let it make a maggot out of me." www.spin.com or the band's Facebook page.
5 The 20th annual Minnesota Fringe Festival ends Sunday with about 80 performances, so get out there before it's too late. These praise-winning shows have stagings in downtown Minneapolis: "Dear Madde," a one-woman show, with music, about letters to an advice columnist (5:30 p.m. at Red Eye); "The Zebra Shirt of Lonely Children," a son's absorbing and unsentimental tale of a father's death (4 p.m. at Cowles Center), and "The Nose," a must-see comedy adapted from a Gogol story (2:30 p.m. at the Illusion). www.startribune.com/fringe.
