9 Who is Pinchas Zukerman? Just go to Rackham Auditorium to find out. Zuckerman, a renowned violinist, will be joining the world-famous Tokyo String Quartet at tonight's special concert. The program will feature works by Shubert, Bartok and Beethoven, among others. It begins at 8 p.m. Tickets range from $26 to $35. Call 764-2538 for more information. _ __ __ _ Monday February 26, 1996 Questions By Jeo Petlinski Daily Film Editor Rosellen Brown's bestseller deserves more Her novel captures the struggle of an ordinary family and the murder that threatens to tear them apart. And unfor- tunatoly, director Barbet Schroeder's big-screen version of "Before and Af- t "'can't do the same. .arolyn, a doctor, and Ben Ryan, an artist; are your average parents. Mom comes home from the office each day to Dad and their kids, Jacob and Judith.. All fotir sit around the dinner table and discuss their problems - Mom had a headache at work that day, Dad couldn't come up with an idea for his sculpture, plague Streep's latest [ p REVIEW Before and After Directed by Barbet Schroeder; with Liam Neeson and Meryl Streep At Ann Arbor I & 2 and Showcase 17-year-old Jacob got a C on his alge- bra test and Judith got in a fight with her friends at recess. One day, their lives just stop moving. Martha Taverner, a girl in town, is found face down in the snow, dead. After her death, both Carolyn and Ben find out that, not only was Jacob dating her, but he was also the last to be seen with her, making him the key suspect in her mur- der. Jacob runs away from home and Carolyn and Ben must look beyond everything they know to find the truth. In the process, both parents must make their own decisions on how they might save their son. "Before and After" should have all the key elements that constitute a suc- cessful movie - an unpredictable plot, a psychologically disturbing storyline and a cast that includes Meryl Streep, Liam Neeson and Edward Furlong. After all, what more could anyone want? We still need more. The story cer- tainly is a good one - when it's in Brown's novel. When on the screen, however, a potentially incredible tale becomes, at best, pure blah. Extended pauses between characters' dialogue, theirover-dramatized pain, acompletely random sex scene and the addition of the jail and court scenes are all to blame for the film's downfall. Everything is overdone: The characters' motives be- come false, and we are left in our own struggle to understand them. Rosellen Brown tells it better. Her words invite us to understand their struggle: In the novel, it's not about the jailhouse, the court scenes and Jacob's running away. Instead, in Brown's story, the questions posed are what make it so utterly powerful. Here, we have an av- erage all-American family - a loving mother, father, sister ... and a son who might be a cold-blooded killer. As an audience, we are forced to hear their side of the story, not the victim's. With whom are we supposed to side? Are the other townspeople justified in their abhorrence of the entire Ryan fam- ily? Should Carolyn and Ben side with their son? If they do, will they go about defending him in the same way? In the book, these questions are endless. And the main questions, sadly enough, in the audience members' minds are not these, but rather: "Is this movie going to be over soon?" "What's the point?" or "If I go to the bathroom now, will the people in the aisle seats be angry that they have to stand up?" These questions, we might guess, were not what Brown intended us to ask. Performances by Neeson and Streep, although powerful, do nothing to help the plot. Neeson's Ben becomes a beast the second he finds out about the murder. Driven by love and anger, he destroys evidence to protect his son. Unfortu- nately the loving aspect of his character becomes lost in the harshness of his initial reactions. As a result, we are not entirely clear how we should perceive him. Streep, however, is wonderful as Carolyn Ryan. Although she under- stands her husband's suffering, she can- not understand the way in which he decides to protect their son. She wants to fight for Jake the right way. Streep makes sure we understand the motives that drive her character. Edward Furlong ("Terminator 2") is perfect as the soft-spoken Jacob Ryan. After he decides to speak (Furlong goes silent for the first half of the film, spending all his time in his treelouse by himself), we find out that he, in fact, has the most meaningful lines in the movie. Only one minor question might bother us about him: What the hell is a 17-year-old boy doing in a TREEHOUSE? Isn't he past that age? After two hours, the movie turns into sentimental fluff, leaving those of us who have read the book feeling a little bit cheated. In ajailhouse scene near the end of the film, the entire Ryan family hugs, kisses and makes-up in a matter of moments. We wonder, what happened to the torn, struggling family? Why did I just sit through this poor film? Sadly enough, we are left with noth- ing better than a cheesy, Bob Saget- style, family lovin' episode of "Full House"- which is something we could have seen without even leaving our homes. "I'm Eddie Furlong." Georgia': A melodic masterpiece=f By Michael Zilberman Daily Arts Writer t Condensed into a synopsis, "Geor- ia" - a nearly plotless story of two. Oging sisters - has just about every-s thinggoing against it. There hasn't been a single good study of a sisterly rela- tionship in recent American cinema-F notincludingmanneredextremitieslike: "Sister My Sister" and Woody Allen's ยข Talented author taps baseball history By Elizabeth Lucas Daily Arts Writer Some baseball seasons can be recalled to memory by simply naming a year- 1919 or 1984, for example. Not many people would include 1946 in that category. However, Mark Winegardner's new novel, "The Veracruz Blues" (Viking, S23), recounts the '46 "season of gold," when numerous American baseball players joined the Mexican League. It provides a fascinating story, and a look at a surprisingly little- REVIEW known historical event. Mark "This was the big- gest sports story of Winegardner 1946, but it kind of The Veracruz Blues got lost to history," ' Winegardner said, in an interview be- -_- - - - -- fore his reading at Borders on Thursday. "It was the first fully integrated season in the history of professional sports, but at that time, that wasn't seen as an important th ing." Rediscovering this forgotten piece of history wasn't a simple task. Winegardner was talking baseball with a direc- tor on a movie set, when he originally heard the story of the Mexican League. "It turned out he told it way wrong, but it stuck in my head, I don't know why. Several months later I thought, well, I haven't been to Cooperstown in a while, I'll go to the research library there. And what really happened down there was so weird and wonderful and rich - a day into it I knew there was a book there." That wasn't the end of Winegardner's efforts; he spent a summer in Mexico researching the book. "I talked to a lot of the people who were there, who were still living - many of them were dead, of course. And as it says in the acknowledg- ments for the book, I really did read every single page of every issue of five different Mexican newspapers. "But I was really just trying to understand the culture. A lot ofthings I was learning about weren't done in interviews, but in just hanging out. Going bowling with the media relations director of the Monterrey Sultans was as useful as anything I did." Winegardner said he was often asked why lie didn't write a non-fiction book, given the amount of research he did. "I understand that question intellectually, but I don't under- stand it emotionally. ... A novel allows you to get inside the heads of these people, allows you to be these people. A nonfiction book would keep this kind of respectful distance, but wouldn't get inside the skin and the head and the emotions, and that was always what the story was about." Certainly, the characters are the most striking thing about "The Veracruz Blues." Although they are nearly all real people, here they are united with a fictional common bond. As Winegardner described it, "The common denominator of all these characters is, everybody in this book wanted every- thing big to happen to them, and nobody has it happen, really. But it causes them to lose sight of the fact that they were all people who aimed for the moon and stars, and got to the top of a very tall building." Winegardner's narrative technique allows the reader ex- tensive insight into his characters. Five different narrators relate the events of the 1946 season, and each one fills in another side of the story. Their conflicting voices, all vividly differentiated, reflect the piecing together of the historical truth from a variety of competing versions. Even the charac- ters who don't narrate the book -- in particular, Jorge Pasquel, owner of the Mexican League - are seen from See WINEGARDNER, Page 8A REVIEW .Georgia Directed by Ulu Grosbard with Jennfer Jason Leigh and Mare Winningham At the Michigan Theater Bergman knockoffs. And there hasn't been a single good aspiring-rock-star movie in ... um, forever. "Georgia," essentially a family ject (written and co-produced by Warbara Turner, starring and co-pro- duced by her daughter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, and daughter's best friend, Mare Winringham), brazenly combines the two near-impossible tasks and pulls them off with unexpected ease. Contradicting its own title, the movie concentrates not on Winningham's fa- mous folk singer Georgia Flood, but rather on her wayward sister Sadie, *yed by Leigh. The irony here, of course, is that Sadie can't shake off her sister's name - whatever she does, she'll be Georgia's little sis. And she wants to do the same thing: sing. Jennifer Jason Leigh plays an aspiring singer in "Georgia." Sadie is an eternal adolescent, with limbs wildly flailing around as she speaks and her eye shadow (all two tons of it) smeared as if she's just finished playing around with her sister's vanity. The film opens with her moving to Seattle, where Georgia plays sold-out concert halls; Sadie tries to fit into the local rock scene. We know she's doomed: Her attention span is shorter than a Ramones song and she has an uncanny ability to piss off everybody in sight. We follow Sadie on a string of random gigs (one of them involves her singing "Hava Nagilah" at a Jewish wedding -a sight as surreal as anything you've seen on film) punctuated by cutaways to Georgia's sold-out performances. She See GEORGIA, Page 8A I ** * Zero ... Classic Excellent ... Good ... Fair Poor A Bomb Student Supper Club at the Deli! Show your college I.D. and get 20% off the price of your sandwich! Sunday through Thursday, 4- 8 p.m., through February. Birthday Discount! If it's your birthday(Flash that I.D.), we'll give you a percent discount off the price of your sandwich for every year since you've been born! The older you are the more you saves Don't Panic!! 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