The Michigan Daily - Friday, April 9, 1999 - 9 4iars concert claims to be 'Best Ever' 'Pleasantville' DVD restores TV ma gic Zaheer Merchant the Daily If there is one thing the Friars have larger quantity than talent, it is ibition. That, or the possibility that y just have a sense of humor about ryihing, seem to be the only expla- t' for the fact that their annual X is titled "Best Concert Ever." nsisting of 20 songs, this hour-and- a-half length con- cert promises to deliver exceed- ingly large doses the Friars of great music,y irreverence and Rackham humor that Auditorium huo tat , Auditat8 threaten to put ~ , Tonight at 8 "Hash-Bash" to ' shame. Currently in tou their 44th year, The Friars, known for fine singing and comedy, mount one another. the Friars (named for the presti- Collins in 1955, they are a subset of The Friars have perfor gious drinking the University's Men's Glee Club, and where from New York City society that flour- for a team of eight tuxedo-sporting Denver to Atlanta and wer eoat the University in the early college guys, they pack one hell of a during Spring Break. Foll 0) are an eight-member, all male punch. Their emblem, the frothy beer Spring Break trip, they arei g group and are, incidentally, the mug, signifies the hallmark of every ly) glad and relieved to be lest on campus and the second old- Friar performance -- "light hearted and assure a "guaranteed g 9the nation. Founded by Walter spontaneity." all." "Intoxicated on makin Rolc aere tus excitement a phrase they use to describe them- selves, and after attending one of their practice sessions in the Bell Tower, I was left with no reason to argue with that. This concert marks the final appearances (for all you die-hard Friar-fanatics) of three graduating seniors: Nate Pierantoni, Jeff Hogg and Patrick Evoe. It will also witness the debut of two new Friars, Phil Kitchel and Jess Chestnutt. The songs cover a wide range of music; every- thing from the sincerity of "Why Should I Cry For You?" to the foot- stomping irreverence of "Liposuc- tion" and "Banana Split." If you just can't seem to get enough of the Friars, they will be performing again, tonight at Hill Auditorium, along with the rest of the University's Men's Glee Club, adding their charac- teristic touch to the cultural event. Taking this one step further, and prob- ably one step too far, you can also catch them running the Naked Mile, donned in their designer bow-ties, vests and beaming smiles. The Friars Annual Concert is an event not to be missed, whether you are an a cappella fiend or just a cappella curious. med every- y to Hawaii, e in Cancun owing their (surprising- back home ood time for ng music" is olicage Limited Edition ygnosis tystation Rng games are an insidious lot. Ever since "Pole sition" they've been fun while remaining strangely ring. The best have been slightly off the main cir- it; "Rollcage" is such an aberration. Unlike most racing games, "Rollcage" gives the syer access to weapons and driving on the walls and iling. It's quite a cure for the repetitive nature of ving around a track. Depending on your definition a racer, it may not even be such a disc. Weaponry, ving in three dimensions ... It might seem like a glimulator to some. Just with tires and some phat. That would also explain the reason the tracks were sfted with-a great degree of creative leeway. The scenery changes track to track. From an icy pine tree- lined road that you slip off of and into a wrecked sub- marine to an active volcano where some of the roads are glowing magma, each of the 40 or so environ- ments has unique problems to overcome and soft spots to help you along. These traps and tricks are beyond the average devices of mere hairpin turns and straight-aways, especially factoring in the massive differences in handling of different drivers you can choose. There's also the design of the vehicles in the game. Your car can flip over and keep on driving on what was its undercarriage. And neither you nor anyone else is ever actually destroyed; the kids won't be turned evil by killing video game people. Or maybe they will be turned evil by seeing no effects to vio- lence. Ah, you're old enough to play. The game's wall crawling makes the controls very difficult and you're more likely to get blown off track to race games than to do the same to the surrounding cars at first. Instead of ricocheting off an embankment, you fly up the wall and, often, into the air, flailing helplessly like a character in a Dalton Trumbo war novel. You don't normally have much recognition of the X, Y and Z planes while driving in real life, and strangely that's harder to deal with than shooting or being shot at. Must be the effect of the '80s. The Rolleage Limited Edition also comes with a soundtrack CD. While a common practice in Japan, it's fairly innovative for this country. The music, which also plays in a less crisp way while you race, includes tracks from Fatboy Slim, amongst other video game-friendly musicians. The album is atmos- pheric, and it really plays best once you have positive racing experiences in the game while one of the songs is playing. It would be nice if it could stand on its own, but that would likely detract from the game. - Ted Watts By Erin Podol ky aly Wt When I was younger, I used to dream of living in the 1950s, when my parents were kids - although I will say that the 1950s of the early 1990s television series "Brooklyn Bridge" seemed more appealing to me than the bland WASPiness of "Leave it to Beaver." Everything appeared so much simpler then. No global warming or AIDS epidemic, white picket fences, unlocked doors, the security of the future being just that: The future, unknown, untested and unspoiled. In "Pleasantville," David (Tobey Maguire) dreams of that same place; in fact, he visits it every day after school in the TV Time network staple "Pleasantville" (show within the movie, billed as "24 hours chock full of warm family values") where they use words like "swell" and "keenest" with abandon and there is an endless supply of mom-baked cookies, while David's reality is filled with a nerdy existence, a bad complexion, divorcing parents and teachers who constantly drill into him how much the world he's grow- ing up in sucks. David's sister, Jennifer (Reese Witherspoon) is a slut-in-training who is "from the cool side of the uterus" according to her friends. During a vicious fight over the remote control (David wants, no, needs to watch a "Pleasantville" marathon while Jen is planning an MTV-chaperoned date with a popu- lar jock), Don Knotts shows up as a TV repairman from hell. He gives them a special remote that sends them into Pleasantville, where they assume the roles of Bud and Mary Sue Parker, characters reminiscent of the kids from "The Donna Reed Show" If this little turn of events sounds like the bomb "Stay Tuned," it isn't; if it sounds like the inverse of "The Truman Show" it is. The appearance of these two '90s teens in the '50s world causes a rev- olution in Pleasantville that at first shocks and dismays David, but he eventually comes to realize that progress is power. The changes are touched off by two key scenes, as writer/director Gary Ross tells on the excellent commentary track included on the DVD. The first is Jennifer-as-Mary Sue going out with Skip; the second is David-as- Bud showing up late for work only to find Mr. Johnson (Jeff Daniels) practically wiping a hole through the counter because he doesn't know what else to do. What these characters all learn, Ross tells us, is that free will exists. The disc also includes an isolat- ed score audio track, as well as a commentary by composer Randy Newman. Both commentary tracks are fascinating, especially the director's. Ross talks early on about his penchant for taking high con cept ideas and seeking out the sub- versive, complicated, human ele- ments behind them (he also wrote "Big"-- kid trapped in man's body - and "Dave" - president has stroke and is replaced by looka- like). Everything is kicked off by a color adjustment instruction set on- how to make sure your TV will dis- play the color and black/white sequences correctly. There is a lot of subtle humor to be found in "Pleasantville." There is a lot of biblical imagery, as well, as the Edenic Pleasantville existence is changed, for better or for worse, for- ever by the '90s interlopers. Pleasantville becomes a town revolu- tionized by sex, by thought, by reali- ty, where characters and real people alike realize that change is possible and the world is what you, not some crummy TV writer, make it. I wonder now if growing up 40 years ago I would have known that I was living in the TV cliche I longed for. It's a fairy tale, really. You see, David gets the luxury that none of us have: ltving in a time gone by with the knowledge of this time. That's what "Pleasantville" is - it's a film about a place that probably never actually existed, but it looks oh so appealing. David finds out about it first hand and discovers that maybe the present isn't so bad after all, and that maybe a world without color isn't a world worth living in. playwiight examines lives of 'Comfort Women' LOS ANGELES - Usually, when it mes to conducting interviews, a tape -o r is merely a tool of the trade. In e of South Korea-born play- -ight Chungmi Kim, however, the zxpensive little machine placed on the >le at Du Par's, tucked between the a ght's healthy plate of fresh fish d her interviewer's slab of pie, trig- rs a surprising flood of emotions. The tape recorder reminds Kim of an terview she did - or rather, tried to with an older woman in Korea eim returned to her homeland in 9 d do research for her new play, lanako."The drama premiered ednesday at the David Henry Hwang seatre in downtown's Little Tokyo dis- et, presented by East West Players. Kim wanted to interview the woman out her experiences as one of the omfort women,"a deceptively deli- te term used for as many as 200,000 sian and European women, about 80 rcent 'of them Korean, who were en or abducted to serve as sex v for soldiers in the Japanese perial Forces from the 1930s until e end of World War II in 1945. Kim says that "slave"is the only word rwomen who were systematically nsported as military supplies and tor- red and raped by as many as 40 men r day. Many were killed; many others lled themselves. "She was a good person, and she was gt pain. I wanted to get the story it of her, and she wanted to tell 'Kim remembers. "We were sitting in r small room, and I said, 'Do you nt to talk?' And she tried, she really d, but after two meetings and many tone calls, she still couldn't do it. "Finally, I gave her the tape recorder id said: 'Keep it for yourself-talk to urself, into this tape recorder, and ep it for yourself. Let go of the mem- et T woman, a survivor of multiple iled suicide attempts, could not talk, en alone in her room, to a tape corder. She insisted on retuming the achine., Ultimately, Kim decided that the tape corder, or what the woman would ve said to it, didn't really matter. fter several attempts to interview for- er comfort women, she found that as r she was less interested in log- ngle details of camp life and indi- dual atrocities than in examining the Chungmi Kim wrote "Comfort Women." emotional scars of women who had sur- vived 50 years of shame. "They suffered during the war, they were tortured, beaten up, starved - and they survived,"Kim says. "And yet, when they came back to Korea, to their own country, they were ignored, neglected. They had to hide their identi- ty.... That suffering is, I think, more tragic than the deaths. "In this society, we have sexual free- dom - somewhat. If a woman is raped, she doesn't have to live with the shame, (victims) sue people, they speak up. But at that time, Korea was a Confucian society, and chastity was more precious than life itself." The story of the comfort women was not generally known until 1991, when one survivor came forward and told her story to a Korean newspaper, confirm- ing a truth that the Japanese govern- ment had long denied. Other women followed her lead, and, in 1991, six women brought a class-action suit against the Japanese government, demanding redress and monetary repa- ration. In Los Angeles, community interest in the comfort women led to the 1994 opening of a memorial library in Koreatown, under the aegis of the Los Angeles-based Coalition Against Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, a group dedicated to the campaign for justice and reparations. Kim's interest in the comfort women developed after coming to the United States, although she has never fully stopped researching issues on her own country. She came here more than 25 years ago, after receiving her bachelor's degree at Ewha University in Seoul, to study playwriting at UCLA. There she received a master's degree in theater arts and also studied television and screenwriting. She has written and pro- duced for TV, including producing a nine-part news series, "Korea Today,"for Los Angeles' NBC affiliate, KNBC, and several documentaries on Korea. Also a noted poet, she is the author of "CHUNGMI - Selected Poems,"and her poetry has been pub- lished in numerous publications, including Amerasia Journal Between Ourselves and the San Francisco Examiner. Kim also participated in the 1991-92 Mentor Playwrights Program at the Mark Taper Forum, where her play "The Temple of Mara"was presented as a staged reading as part of the Asian Pacific American Playwrights Reading Series. She became interested in the issue of the comfort women in 1993, after hearing a lecture by Chung-Ok Yun, a professor from Seoul and a co- chair of a similar Seoul-based coalition. As a result of the talk, Kim became involved in the local coalition. She had been working on a new play when members of the coalition encour- aged her to write something about com- fort women. She took the idea to the University of Southern Califomnia's Professional Writing Program, where she was awarded a fellowship in the fall of 1994 to pursue the project. "In 1994, I was given a book of the testimonies of these women (published by the coali- tion)'Kim says. "I was in tears - I was so compelled to write about their experi- ences, but I didn't know how."Her USC professors encouraged her, and the resulting one-act play, "The Comfort Women,"won the grand prize at USC's One-Act Play Festival in May 1995. After that play was presented, Kim returned to Korea at her own expense to continue her research for a different take on the issue; instead of recounting the horrors of war, "Hanako"focuses on a fictional meeting between some aged comfort women and a very traditional Korean grandmother of their generation who meets them when she emigrates to New York. Conflict arises when the traditional grandmother makes clear that she wants to know nothing of that chapter of the past. Kim sees the grandmother as a metaphor for what she believes is Japan's denial of the harsh realities of its history with these women, and Kim does not think any theater in Japan would be willing to produce her play. But, even though East West Players has received much sup- port from the Japanese community in Los Angeles, she makes clear she met with no resistance to the subject. East West Players artistic director Tim Dang says he already was interest- ed in the story of comfort women when Kim sent her script to the theater for consideration. And the play fit, too, because the theater had been looking for ways to reach out to Los Angeles' fast-growing Korean community. "It was one of those scripts you couldn't put down; I was captivated by it, and devastated by it"Dang says, and he hopes the play will foster the same type of dialogue between the Japanese American and Korean American com- munities as happened with another recent East West Players co-production, Philip Kan Gotanda's "Yohen,"about an aging Japanese and African American couple portrayed by Nobu McCarthy and Danny Glover. "This is the kind of play, when you walk out of the theater, you have to talk about it,"Dang says. "Since the largest group among our season subscribers is Japanese American, it will put two com- munities together." Without The Inside Scoop on Med School Admissions, you're just another applicant. When your goal is med school, you need advice from an expert, Kaplan's MOAT prep course now includes five "Inside Scoop" admissions lectures featuring the former Asst. Dean of Admissions at a top 20 med school. Attend a FREE sneak preview. 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