4 Tuesday September 7, 2004 arts. michigandaily.corn artspage@michigandaily. com ft E 3td~an uu i YRTrS 8A ----.. ... . .SA... ....... 4 By Ian Dickinson y \ For The Daily su p 'Sweet Land' lives up to author's work The American assault on foreign movies contin- ues with "Wicker Park," a bland remake of the 1995 French thriller, "L'Appartement," that somehow manages to upend "Exorcist: The Beginning" as the worst film of the year. Josh Hartnett stars as a young and engaged investment banker who falls back in love with Lisa, a Czech dancer played by Diane Kruger, who left him two years Wicker Park earlier under ominous circum- stances. After some question- At Showcase able detective work, Hartnett and Quality 16 finds an apartment thought to MGM be Kruger's, only to find that it belongs to a different Lisa, a shy, clingy nurse played by Rose Byrne. Confused, Hartnett contin- ues to search for Kruger, pushed by flashbacks to uncover the truth about her disappearance. "Wicker Park" is essentially a neutered "Fatal Attraction," without the sex and violence that make the roman- tic thriller genre viewable. Preten-D tious throughout, APA T1 the film unveils the main characters' 'HRILLER 'W IC supposed artis- tic significance through montages featuring Hartnett taking pho- tographs, Kruger dancing and Byrne acting. Omit- ting the tried and tested aesthetics of the genre to instead exploit art to clarify the characters' intel- lectual depth is a puzzling move that backfires. The characters in this film are fundamentally bad people. Hartnett is a whiny yuppie who abandons his fiancee (Jessica Pare) for a woman who left him two years earlier. The other characters in the film share similar traits of selfishness and disregard for others, which are never acknowledged or used By Bonnie Keliman Daily Arts Writer Not many authors think stories about matters like murder, kidnap- ping, abuse, cults and insanity are sweet and can make their readers agree. Then again, E. L. Doctorow is not just another writer. Doctorow, the author of influential novels like "Ragtime" and "Billy Bathgate," has collected five of his short pieces for Never say, "I'll be right baaaaack..." this latest work, "Sweet Land Sto- ries." All of the sto- ries in the "Sweet Land" collection feature characters Sweet Land Stories By E. L. Doctorow Random House /lENT CHILLS KER PARK' DOESN'T SCARE to director Paul McGuigan's ("The Acid House") advantage. No characters seem to have any signifi- cant or redeeming qualities and therefore there is nothing at risk by the end of the movie. While the characters' coarse personalities dis- solve the emotional impact of the climax, the absence of any action also hurts the film's potential. Even the arguments in "Wicker Park" are dealt with indirectly. During every conflict, one of the charac- ters withdraws to the background or addresses the situation passively. A mysterious man stalks Kruger and shows up on several occasions without explana- tion, but never does anything and vanishes just as randomly as he appears. These incongruities attest to how poorly "Wicker Park" was made. The plot is simply incomprehen- sible and senseless. Not once does Hartnett pick up the phone and call Kruger or her dance company and nothing is explained in real-time. Instead, McGuigan opts to tell the bulk of the story in flashbacks. The cinematography relies on many hackneyed shots of long and dark corridors, accompanied by bad ambi- ent music, to set mood. Neither Byrne nor Kruger has any chemistry with Hartnett, and all three put in sub-par performances. Matthew Lillard, who plays Hartnett's friend, is the film's one saving grace, pro- viding decent comic relief throughout. At one point, he tells Hartnett that love "makes you more inarticu- late than usual," which should have been a clue for the filmmakers to abandon the project outright. make his stories seem oddly normal. Although his tales feature strong narrative voices, he always keeps a calm and dignified distance from the terrible events he relates. This rises from Doctorow's clean, matter-of-fact prose. Despite this straight forward manner, the author's voice still man- ages to shine through with compas- sion. Even as he describes unsettling events, he manages to write with a subtle, wry sense of humor. Adding to the intentional distance between reader and event, he never directly describes the darkest proceedings in his stories. The author simply sug- gests a terrifying action through care- fully selected details before describing their implications. Although his plots aren't always the most original, Doctorow's abil- ity to get inside the minds of the five distinct characters in his stories demonstrates a strong imagination as well as a superior understanding of human nature. He tells these charac- ters' stories with compassion, bring- ing out their most human traits. All of his characters struggle with the universal emotions and ambitions that haunt most of humanity. Doctorow specifically deals with the American dream of improving one's station in life, especially when a person's cir- cumstances force him to take drastic measures. Doctorow writes in a way that makes "Sweet Land Stories" an easy and pleasurable read. 4 who live on the outskirts of society. "A House on the Plains," for example, comes to life through one widow's dim-witted son. His mother routine- ly seduces and then kills men just for their money. In another story, a young woman wants a child so badly that she steals a baby from the hos- pital and convinces her boyfriend to pretend she is the true mother. The rest of the stories run the gamut from a young abused girl who ends up being too beautiful for her own good, to the warped logic behind a cult and the mysterious death of a 6-year-old child. Despite his dark plots and twisted characters, Doctorow manages to I I I Art-punk four-piece falls flat on third release 'Winchester Cathedral' By Alexandra Jones Daily Weekend Editor aficionado likes will, at some point in their careers, drop a record that's inex- cusably lame, superlatively mediocre It's a damn shame, but sometimes really good bands - bands that have gotten and deserved respect, awards, good record sales -make bad albums. It's happened to Bob Dylan, The Roll- ing Stones and Elvis Costello. So unless you're really into one-hit won- ders or a huge Beatles fanatic, just about any band the average music and/or unbearably boring. Clinic has its share of lame and mediocre traits, but their third album Win- Clinic Winchester Cathedral Domino two years later, utterly fails to inspire interest, feeling, anything with its moody, abstract lyrics, its post-rock/ electronic fusion or Ade Blackburn's guttural vocals. Opening track "Country Mile" starts with an annoying intro with high-pitched, accelerating beeps and clinky swirls from wind chimes, the worst percussion instrument ever. Velvet Underground-esque guitar leaps in to save the track, and for a minute or two, you're happy. But "Country Mile" just sort of sits there, Blackburn's desperate vocals singing mushy lyrics barely distinguishable from the song's bland, grayish sound- scape. "Falstaff' sticks out as the best song on the album, but that's not much of a distinction for a collection of sad, tired material like this. The next track, "Circle of Fifths," begins with a grooving acoustic piano hook, but soon falls into the same uninspired formula as its predecessor. This dull pattern goes on for pretty much the entire album. Winchester Cathedral is an entire album of filler, of throwaway tracks jumbled togeth- er and constructed without regard to larger shape. It's disappointing to hear a band with a distinct, powerful sound hit a slump like this. Their debut, Inter- nal Wrangler, is instantly affecting, more powerfully dark yet still musi- cally uplifting; in short, it's a fantas- tic album. The same basic elements that constructed Clinic's previous works make up Winchester, but a very important, numinous something is missing from its construction. Truth- chester Cathedral falls squarely into the latter category. Their formula, one that worked well on 2000's Inter- nal Wrangler and Walking with Thee fully, albums like Winchester Cathe- dral aren't really worth writing about except to dismiss them I I 4 15" Powerbook G4 U M C ,putrShiowcasa Michigan Union Ground Level (734) 64-SALES www.itcs.umich.edu/sales 4 www.apple.com/students Master writing with reference books From interpreting Shakespeare's sonnets to composing a killer paper, our selection of grammar books, thesauri, and dictionaries will help you write with style. Pierpont Commons Bookstore Pierpont Commons (North Campus) I m .mi