FargoReviews.com

Restaurant:  Old Chicago. Located on 45 St S just south of I 94, Old Chicago is a chain restaurant offering primarily Chicago style Italian food.  What is Chicago style?  The kind that makes cardiologists wince.  They have a nice selection of pizzas in three sizes,  both in thin crust and deep dish(Chicago style).  They also have strombolis   and a selection of burgers and sandwiches and melts, including the Classic Italian Melt .  There is also a good selection of pasta offerings including the Traditional Meat Lasagna ... Read More

Possibly the second summer blockbuster is Inglorious Basterds, now showing at the Century 10.  This is a World War II adventure starring Brad Pitt as the Lieutenant leading a squad of Jewish American soldiers parachuted into Nazi occupied France with the mission of wiping out the Nazi high command.  The movie is directed by Quentin Tarentino, and much of the discussion of this movie is about comparisons to his other works.  I'm going to avoid that, and review this movie as a ... Read More

Time was that  The Speakeasy in south Moorhead behind the Safari Theater was one of my favorite restaurants in the Fargo Moorhead.   They were, about twenty  years ago famous for their prime rib.  Their anti pasta salad was wonderful and they had many tasty Italian dishes.  The wait staff were and are dressed in pseudo suits with fedora hats apparently supposed to suggest the Capone era.  There is a car from that era in the lobby: it used to be right by the entrance so the ... Read More

Finally, we have some of the usual summer blockbusters showing at our local movie theaters.  The first to appear is District 9, showing at the West Acres Cinema.  I was lucky enough to see it on the extreme screen, a definite plus for this movie. It won't be giving much away to say the movie is about 1.8 million aliens that inexplicably appear over Johannesburg, South Africa, in a giant space ship.  Now, science fiction is not usually my bag, and to ... Read More

Ever since my youth when I spent a summer in Las Cruces, New Mexico, I have been a lover of Mexican food.  In those days there few Mexican restaurants, even in Minneapolis.  Not that I don't like The Mexican Village or Paradiso, it's just not what I understand Mexican food to be.  Juanos is, I believe a more upscale type of Mexican food, sort of a Mexican fine dining.  But ther is another style, one with which I have been very familiar ... Read More

It's been a few decades since I'd been to a stock car race.  They're not foreign to me, having grown up on "Thunder Road" where the likes of Junior Johnson and Richard Petty got their training running moonshine before moving on to what eventually became NASCAR, they're just a ways down my list of priorities. Through a friend, however, I know of the races at the Norman County Racetrack in Ada, MN, held on most thursday nights during the summer.  A NASCAR ... Read More

Now playing at the Fargo Theatre's Off Broadway venue, the critically acclaimed Sundance film festival entry "Moon,"  starring Sam Rockwell(and only Sam Rockwell).  The hype on this movie  says that it's about a man stationed on the far side of the moon to manage a mining facility.  He's there for three years all by himself, which would drive anyone mad.  The movie does a good job of this.  He meets a clone of himself, and purportedly the movie is about their relationship ... Read More

The sixth installment of the Harry Potter series, "Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince" is now showing at major theaters.  Locally, it's at the West Acres Marcus theater.  I saw it on the Ultra screen, and would recommend seeing it on such a screen.  I don't notice a huge difference in the visual part of the movie, but the sound is out of this world. I haven't seen all of the Harry Potter movies, but I've seen enough so that most of ... Read More

The films at the 2009 Solstice Film Festival were divided into four groups: the opening night feature film "Don McKay shown on Thursday night, June 18.  On Friday, there were two documentaries followed by  the feature film, "Dawning," shown in the evening  Late Saturday morning and all afternoon the Festival was in session, beginning with the documentary "Bicycle Dreams" followed by the first gallery of short films, then the feature film "The Last Passport," followed by another short film gallery.  The Festival closed Saturday night with the ... Read More

2009 Solstice Film Festival "The Last Passport" is a movie about an old man that sits in a passport office, dispensing sound homespun advice to what apparently are disgruntled patrons tired of waiting in line, first to have their picture taken and then to get their passport.  Now, getting a passport is not that tough, so that should have been my first clue that all is not as it seems.  In fact, at the risk of giving away too much, nothing is as it ... Read More