ARTS Thursday, January 10, 1985 Page 5 The Michigan Daily lj Another brother hits and misses ByIByron L. Bull HE BROTHER From Another Planet is certainly not a bad film, nor is it a very good film. It's a real hit and miss package, wonderfully unconventional but not that absorbing. Watching it I couldn't help but think that writer/director John Sayles has better things to do with his time (and ours). Sayles is the intelligent, independent young writer turned film maker whose previous work (Return of The Secaucus Seven, Liana, Baby It's You) is charac- teristically low budgeted and crudely crafted, but full of genuine wit and humanity. Brother is Sayles' first pet project, a purely fanciful fun project that concocted so he could fool around with some of his favorite guilty pleasures, namely a love of sci-fi and martial arts B-movie adventures. Brother is basically a left field inter- pretation of the E.T. premise, concer- ning black mute extraterrestrial (Joe Morton), who fleeing an interplanetary slave trade, crash lands his ship into the Hudson Bay. He swims ashore, ap- propriately and poetically enough, onto the ruins of Ellis Island, where the walls still echo with the ghostly clamor of past immigrant hordes when he rests his hyperempathetic hand on them. Making his way into New York's famed ghetto, he's quickly assimilated into the city's underlife, and taken into the fold as just another street urchin by the gang at the local hole-in-the-wall tavern. With a knack fo repairing video games with but a touch, he quickly fin- ds a job and wins the affection of the ghetto's denizens who take the gentle loner in as a surrogate child. Only when two strangers, nerdish white men dressed all in black (one of whom is played by Sayles himself) come calling on him with nasty intentions do they suspect the Brother is more than just another derelict. Brother flows rather raggedly, more a series of short, individual contained scenes than any kind of a complete narrative. Sayles, who cut his teeth as a short story writer, does concoct some nice little moments: a one night stand with a jaded soul singer, or a hallucinatory odyssey through the night streets, but it's all just tacked together. Then he drops in an incongruous sub- plot about a businessman/dope dealer that never develops into anything sub- stantial and sticks out like some mutated appendage. The single worst scene, concerning two hopelessly straight white college kids who wander lost into Harlem, is sloppy, selfindulgent, and not the least comical. The dialogue, usually Sayles' strongest point, is here surprisingly stale, more like what second rate writers usually stick black actors with on television programs. Unlike the whimsical caricatures of white middle- class dialects that Sayles polished to perfection in his previous three films, his characters here are stuck muttering witless, cliche riddled pseudo-black phrases. Sayles' biggest fault is that he still hasn't developed a cinematic sense. He stages his scenes like they were for the stage, and his camera set-ups are un- dynamic and stiff, as is his editing. He at least gets his camera out of doors this time, and moves it with a little more fluidity and confidence. What Sayles really doesn't show any sense of developing is any visual style. Brother is as textureless and unstylized as a first film. The idea for this film supposedly came to Sayles in a dream, and it's such a dreamlike, slightly surreal feel that the material needs an alien, exotic ambiance to make the ghetto as unworldly as the Brother sees it. But Sayles just aims his camera and shoots, and the rest is unevocative and dreary. Even the Brother's accidental heroin trip (he finds a needle in a gutter and just sticks himself with it) is blan- dly, unimaginatively rendered, save for some garish lighting effects. Morton gives a fine performance in a limited role. Not having any dialogue, he manages to neatly communicate his characters gentle, Bambi-like presence without resorting to cheap miming gimmicks. But for all his amiable charm, in the end there's little for him to delve into, and Brother is as enigmatic at the films closing as he was at the outset. The rest of the cast is comprised of amateurs who, without strong direction, wander through their roles looking consciously a bit unsure of just what it is they should be doing, and where they should stand. Sayles' script for Brother was sup- posedly concoctted in only two weeks, and the film subsequently shot under austere, restrictive circumstances. As a result, the finished product seems only half finished, its never as clever or surprising as one keeps expecting it to be. I did enjoy the film despite its faults. Even when Sayles is at only half per- formance, he's still far more original and interesting to watch than just about anyone else working in the commercial cinema. I just wish he'd put out the masterpiece he's capable of instead of fooling around like this. Hello . . . is that right? The Daily? The Michigan Daily? Carries Bloom County ... THE BLOOM COUNTY? / Now in SAT.& SUN.FIRST MATINEE ONLY $2.00 HE'S NOT JUST ANOTHER OUT-OF-TOWNER! JOHN SAYLES BEST FILM YET! 'I , THURS. 7:00, 9:10 FRI. 8:30 p.m., MIDNIGHT DIRECTED BY JONATHAN DEMME Killing Fields Warner Brother's newest release 'The Killing Fields' outlines the eventful story of New York Times reporter Sidney Schanberg and Cambodian jour- nalist Dith Pran in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. Records Visage-Beat Boy (PolyGram) It's a mild shock (one more amusing than unpleasant) that Visage, a.k.a. ex- Blitzboy centerfold Steve Strange and mentor Rusty Egan, have bothered to give the record market another go at this point in time. After all, the short- lived New Romantic fashion-as-music craze of which Steve was joke King is long dead (though by way of in- troducing several groups it had a far greater impact on the;U.S. market than anyone could have realized at the time), and Steve's subsequent retirement from the recording industry in favor of running a ridiculously fashionable British disco seemed the right eulogy. Yet here they are again, a good two and a half years after the release of their inane 2nd LP The Anvil. The sur- 'prise is that Beat Boy, while hardly good, isn't as hopelessly out of date as one would expect. As with many pure- product-type releases, the moneyed pool of hired talent come up with one or two uninspired but fairly appealing tracks-probably the best is the poppy "Questions," with its neat horn-section frills. Elsewhere, the sound is canny to several current structures for pop/dan- cefloor success. Egan and Strange ob- serve all the latest rules, particularly the re-introduction of big guitars into the synth-based arena. The title track "Beat Boy" captures that Duran Duran/"Reflex" feel of hitsville expan- siveness, adding a guitar at times oddly reminiscent of Queen's signature lead. "Casualty" sounds like a mildly funked-up struttin' dancefloor Van Halen. Elsewhere there are dilutions of Heaven 17, Kraftwork, etc. A few of the songs, particularly on the second side, do settle into the tedious electro-dumb category one would expect. Steve's vocals, which were moderately promising (considering his mannequin status) in 1981, are merely anonymously acceptable here. Visage is a pastiche of somebody else's parts, immaculately produced; the only thing that's missing is the feeling that there's ever an unstolen perspective behind it all. Beat Boy is deeply mediocre, but on the surface it will do, in passing. If you happen to hear it being played from an adjacent room, with the door closed, you may think "Who is this? It sounds great." If you really sit down and listen to the thing, you're likelier to think, "What is this? It sounds like everybody in general and no one in particular." The gift of mimickry ultimately doesn't count for much. -Dennis Harvey Elvis' Golden Records-Elvis Presley (RCA) 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong-Elvis Presley (RCA) As part of the celebration for Elvis'. 50th birthday, RCA is releasing several of the original recordings restored to mono, digitally re-mastered and pressed on virgin vinyl. There aren't any surprises in the packages-Elvis is still Elvis-but the mono does seem to help (RCA claims that the sound was altered when it was transferred to stereo) by giving it a more authentic feel. Much of the music sounds dated, but it still has a lot of energy and it hints at some of the rock music that it inspired. Elvis is a very versatile singer, at home with folk, rock, blues, or spiritual, and he shows all of his sides on the different albums. My personal favorite is Elvis. Released in 1956, it was Elvis' second record. It catches him just before he began to overpolish his pieces but also just as he was becoming comfortable as a star. With everything from "Rip it Up" and "Long Tall Sally" to "Old Shep," it shows Elvis in all his moods, yet remains a consistent album rather than simply a collection of songs. Elvis' Golden Records has most of the classics. With "Hound Dog," "All Shook Up," "Heartbreak Hotel," "Don't Be Cruel," and "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You," it shows in boldface that Evis is still an integral part of this country's musical heritage. The only problem with the album is that it singles out the hits. Because they come one after another, many of the songs lose some of the power they might otherwise have had. But that's a small complaint. Elvis Presley is raw Elvis. This was the first album he recorded for RCA and with songs like "Blue Suede Shoes," "Tutti Frutti," and "Blue Moon," it shows him as a star just becoming aware of his abilities. The cover perhaps sums it up best when it pictures him with his mouth wide, eyes closed, and hand poised for another stroke of his acoustic guitar looking more like a member of the Clash than a "country" singer from the mid 50s. 50,000,000 Elvis Fans Can't Be Wrong is another greatest hits album and was recorded in 1958 to provide RCA with singles to release while he was in the army. This album is much more polished than any of the others, and at the same time it seems a bit less in- spired. The hard-edged rock songs have been removed as well as the more delicate spirituals, and what's left is a collection of sure-fire hits that still sound pretty good. Again, the albums' cover tells much of the story, as it has several pictures of him posing in his now-famous gold suit. Even today almost everybody knows three or four of Elvis' songs, but all too often images of him are tied to the older parodistic junkie who occasionally graced TV Christmas specials and tossed sweat-laden scarfs to the women swooning in the audience. Hopefully RCA's rereleases will help recall an earlier Elvis, the Elvis who really deserved the title 'King of Rock and Roll'. It would probably be a bit much to buy all four of the albums, but on the same token it would be a shame not to listen to at least one of them. -Joseph Kraus S.mg TemgKieke Take-out & Delivery 995-0422 iu Ckioe ToFo& 355 North Maple Maple Village Shopping Center Mon.-Thurs. 10-9 Fri.-Sat. 10-10:30 Sunday 12-8 THE TALKING HEADS THURS. 7:20, 9:20 FRI. 6:50,10:30, MIDNIGHT STARTS FRI.1 TOGETHER THEY MAY FIND THE STRENGTH TO KEEP THEIR WAY OF LIFE ALIVE! MEL GIBSON SISSY SPACEK (PG-13) From the Director of "On Golden Pond" DOLBY STEREO FRI.7:30, 9:45 BUCK NIGHT... EVERY THURSDAY m0 'lc t's a New Year and there's a new club in town. A new place to party on Thursday nights. The music room has been made more spa- cious and more social. A new game room has been added in the basement. We've got 27 brands of beer in- cluding Bass and GnPame anra filnnd also feature reduced cover charge for stu- dents. Just a dollar. For dancing to the area's favorite bands. If you've been to the Pig before, check it out again. If you haven't, you're overdue. Make Thursday night "Blind Pig Night". 617 East University and all other participating Taco Dell Restaurants i I I -~ - ---- -- ~- ~-~~-~. T ~ r- I i i ".-- THIS COUPON GOOD FOR -- $1.000 OFF NACHOS BELLGRANDEM and medium soft drink T THIS COUPON GOOD FOR A 1 FREE BEAN BURRITO I with purchase of a ibstada and medium soft drink | i i i