Entertainment
•
r
Ci CM CI771
IMO MINI MEM ION= I ■
One Lunch or
One Dinner Entry
At The Movies
Catering 61
Carry-Out
- Daily Specials
When You Buy A Lunch Or Dinner Of
Equal Or Greater Value • 1 coupon per table
- 6o Gourmet Italian
Dishes to choose from
`Minority Report'
Lyalid Mon.-Thurs. • With Coupon • Expires 6/30/021
Hours: Mon-Thurs 11:30-10) Fri 61 Sat 4:30-11) Sunday 4:30-9
6263 Orchard Lake Rd in Sugartree Plaza
W. Bloomfield
248.855.3993
Steven Spielberg's latest film looks at the future.
L.:FR-1=R= •
NAOMI PFEFFERMAN
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
ITALIAN GRILL
j
A LIVELY NEIGHBORHOOD BAR & GRILL
WHERE LARCO'S TRADITIONAL MENU IS
FEATURED ALONG WITH SANDWICHES,
PIZZAS AND AN INNOVATIVE "PASTA
GRILL" SELECTION.
Open 7 days • Mon.-Thurs. 4:30 - 10 • Fri. 6- Sat. 4:30 - 11 • Sun. 4:30 - 9:00
6480 ORCHARD LAKE ROAD
NW CORNER OF 15 MILE & ORCHARD LAKE ROAD
248.626.6969
ALSO VISIT US AT OUR LARGO'S ITALIAN CHOP HOUSE IN TROY
PEA FODY5
A Birmingham Tradition For 25 Years
Two Hours Free Parking
In The Structure
Directly Behind Peabody's
Entertainment Friday &
Saturday Nights
cy
One Lunch Or
One Dinner Entry il 0 °
.1
I
OFF' . ..
.
When You Buy A Lunch Or Dinner Of Equal Or Greater Value
Valid Mon.-Thurs. • With Coupon • Expires June 30, 2002
248.644.5222
34965 Woodward ♦ Just South Of Maple
Reservations taken for 8 or more
Under New Managemnet
Pita Pantry
Fresh 4 ffeaOhy
Mideast Cuisine
Catering A Carry-out
A Party Packages
New Hours
Mow/ay - Friday 10alm-8p1++
Saturday 12. noon-stows
25% OFF
6/21
2002
82
Dine in L Dinner only
1.
wires 7/6/02
good taste
248.539.3001
Whole Bill
IN
:..always in
Interesting articles,
current events,
politics—Plus art,
literature, kosher
cooking and more.
What a great idea
for any gift
giving occasion.
Call to give a gift
subscription today!
248.357.5558
a
on Cohen, the co-screen-
writer of Minority Report, has
the perfect headline for
recent events in his life.
"Ordinary guy sits in room and writes
Steven Spielberg-Tom Cruise flick by
accident," he says with a laugh. It's an
apt way to describe the ascent of a for-
mer registered nurse who taught him-
self to write movies strictly from
books.
In fact, Cohen, now 47, never had a
screenplay produced until Cruise read
his Report and sent it off to Spielberg
in the late 1990s. Suddenly, the
Swarthmore, Pa., resident was meeting
with the legendary director: "It was
trippy," he recalls.
The meeting was as surreal as some-
thing out of Philip K. Dick, whose
noirish sci-fi story inspired Report. But
Cohen took it in stride.
"I didn't freak out," he says,
"because I was a nurse for many years
and I had people die and blood and
weirdness and big situations, so I
know what matters in life."
Cohen's life changed in 1997, when
director Jan de Bont asked him to
rewrite a screenplay based on Dick's
1956 story (he now shares screenplay
credit with Out of Sights Scott Frank).
The plot revolves around a futuristic
police squad that uses seers to predict
murders and bust potential killers
before they act. Everything goes hay-
wire when "Precrime" chief John
Anderton (played by Cruise in the
movie) gets fingered and goes on the
lam.
Dick's bare-bones story had already
boggled several screenwriters, but
Cohen discovered an affinity with the
late author. Not that he had popped
pills, guzzled scotch and burned
through five marriages like the notori-
ously paranoid Dick — who claimed
to be channeling a medieval rabbi
before he died in 1982 at 54.
"But Dick had, among other weird-
nesses, a vertigo problem, which gives
you a kind of dizziness, a skewed reali-
ty," Cohen says. "And I have double
vision, multiple vision, a slight genetic
abnormality that makes things look a
little weird to me. So I identified with
)
Dick's sense of feeling uncomfortable,
that something's not quite right with
the world."
Cohen, who wears thick glasses,
invented optic imagery to complement
Dick's concept of visionary seers —
resulting in some of the film's coolest
eye-candy. "Minority Report is the per-
fect story for a guy who's obsessed
with eyes," Cohen says.
The screenwriter's childhood was
more about Moby Dick than Philip K.
Dick. His father, an English professor,
was a Herman Melville scholar. A
Southern-born Jew whose German
grandfather immigrated to South
Carolina around 1890, he relocated to
Swarthmore in 1960.
Cohen, whose mother is
Presbyterian, grew up celebrating
Passover and Easter. Eventually, he
earned a degree in English, but — in a
move he describes as "both cowardly
Inffinority Report is a film
that strives to show that
seeing is not necessarily
believing — and how open eyes can
be a curse as much as - a blessing.
Rarely pausing for a breather
from the chase plot that sees John
Anderton (Tom Cruise) running for
his freedom after being tagged for a
murder he will commit two days
hence, the film manages to main-
tain its adrenaline level for a full 2
1/2 hours.
That's not an easy trick in today's
marketplace, and is just one of a
dozen reasons Minority Report rep-
resents a perfect marriage of
Cruise's megastar power and
Spielberg's bottomless well of corn-
passion.
In the year 2054, the highways of
our cities have been reconfigured to
operate up, down and sideways;
slideshows are so three-dimensional
it looks like you could actually
touch a memory; and Washington,
D.C., hasn't had a murder in six
years — thanks to Precrime.
The pilot police program uses the
special gifts of three "precogs" —
humans who exist in a sort of
amphibious, semi-comatose state in
,.. ..„.,:., , ..,,,,,„
.