10 - The Michigan Daily - Tuesday, October 12, 2004 ARTS 0 Berg matures under the 'Lights' By Zac Peskowitz Daily Film Editor Far above the 50-yard line at Ford Field, comfortably ensconced in a luxury suite with a Detroit Lions cap pulled snugly over his head, director Peter Berg expands on his new film "Friday Night Lights." Berg, who has appeared in "Collateral" and "Cop Land," is making the difficult transi- tion from acting to directing, and "Friday Night Lights" is his biggest film behind the camera so far. To capture the reality of high school football, Berg took a crash course in athletic cinema. " I saw every football movie you could think of. From 'North Dallas 40' to 'The Longest Yard' to 'Any Given Sunday' to 'The Waterboy.' But the mov- ies I liked the best were one film called 'The Last Game,' that was a documentary about a school in Pennsylvania, and another called 'Go Tigers,' which was a documentary about a high school team in Ohio. It was the documentaries that I thought were the most intense and got my heart pounding." As Berg slouches in his chair and mentions the great Texas film "Dazed and Confused," H.G. Bissinger, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "Friday Night Lights" and a cousin of Berg, pipes in with his own comments from across the table. "Was Ben Affleck in that?" Berg counters, "No, that was 'Clerks,' that was Kevin Smith." Still unconvinced at his cousin's answer, Bissinger continues prodding away and insists that Affleck appeared in the Richard Linklater film. Eventually, one of the editors of "Friday Night Lights" definitively settles the dispute when he reveals that Affleck did in fact appear in "Dazed and Confused." After the amicable resolution of this familial dispute, Bissinger launches into a discussion on allowing his cousin to film his book. "We sort of did grow up together. Pete grew up in Westchester County outside of New York and I grew up in New York City. My parents are very close to his parents. We saw each other at family gatherings. The book came out in 1990 and Pete was just starting out on his film career. Pete's very brash and very confident and said 'I'm going to make this one day.' I thought that was the most ridiculous thing I'd ever heard, we didn't know where Pete Faster and more intense... Tunde Adebimpe bellows during Saturday's performance. Trio opens to mixed response By Forest Casey Daily Arts Writer was making a living. He kept at it and kept at it and he's hav- ing a great acting career and then a great directing career. He directs with a lot of intensity and style." When asked about the challenges of working with a young cast, Berg tartly responds, "Pain in the ass. They're chasing girls and trying to get in the bars. I'd steal their girls and drink their beer. They were great kids. I think the best part was I like movies where you really forget you're watching a movie. And when it's a movie star, unless it's a really good movie star, I tend to never forget. There's Tom Cruise or there's Brad Pitt or whatever. For me, to have guys like Tim McGraw and some of these young kids that nobody really knows as an actor, it's cool because you can just forget that you're watching a movie. That's something that's hard to do." Before the trio is forced to depart for an appearance on "The Mitch Albom Show," Berg jostles to get in the last word. "I love acting, but now that I'm an old man I don't want to have to go out there and take the hits every day. It's fun to be creatively in charge." 4 New York-based TV on the Radio's musical style is decidedly experimental. They balance distorted guitar rhythms and throbbing electronic beats with lead singer Tunde Adebimpe's barbershop quartet hymns. To say that they are differ- ent from the band they opened for on SaturdayThe Faint, TV on the would be an under- Radio statement. They are At the innovative, creative Majestic Theatre and, unfortunately, that's the opposite of what the Majestic's gothic crowd want- ed to hear. It would have been a tall order for any opening band. Adebimpe strolled on stage late, amid the grumbling of the crowd, humming banging his tambourine in what would be a jangling three-minute introduction to TV on the Radio's most impressive song, "Young Liars." No more than a minute into the body of the song, Adebimpe was already pouring sweat. Guitarist Kyp Malone was jumping up and down, his large afro bouncing along, and guitarist David Andrew Sitek was kneeling down in front of one of the amplifiers, strum- ming the major chords with a drumstick. Adebimpe's singing style took him all over the stage; he moaned, covered his forehead with his hands as if about to faint and writhed like a contortion- ist, gathering the notes from somewhere beneath the stage. After the thundering applause for "Young Liars," the band Superman actor Reeves dies at 52 Kyp Malone strums his guitar. launches into the too-long "Dreams" and the too-confident "Unknown Country," effectively losing the crowd. But, as if he already knew that the audi- ence would begin cheering when they announced their last song, Adebimpe removed his glasses and shut his eyes, lunging into the sporadic "Staring At The Sun." At this point, the crowd had waited too long for The Faint and began to sit down in large numbers. The impatient audience looked like a refugee camp, but Adebimpe just smiled, saying that the last time they played in Detroit, they saw a man, bleeding from his head, walk past a hospital without stopping. "That's when I knew that Detroit was tough," he said with a laugh. The crowd did cheer when TV on the Radio announced their final song. "Satel- lite" is already loud and fast, but, just like The Ramones, the band seemed deter- mined to play it louder and faster. Sitek's hands became a blur and the whole band started jumping, punishing the crowd for their disrespectful camping. Adebimpe started shouting his lyrics - loud, gut- teral shouts that pierced through the wall of guitar, and the band walked off stage to exploding applause. Whether this applause was from a theater full of new TV on the Radio converts or Faint fans excited about the inevitability of their favorite band was inconsequential to Adebimpe. MOUNT KISCO, N.Y. (AP) - "Superman" actor Christopher Reeve, who turned personal tragedy into a public crusade and from his wheel- chair became the nation's most rec- ognizable spokesman for spinal cord research, has died. He was 52. Reeve went into cardiac arrest Sat- urday while at his Pound Ridge home, then fell into a coma and died Sunday at a hospital surrounded by his family, his publicist said. His advocacy for stem cell research helped it emerge as a major campaign issue between President Bush and his Democratic opponent, John Kerry. His name was even mentioned by Kerry during the second presidential debate Friday evening. In the last week Reeve had devel- oped a serious systemic infection from a pressure wound, a common compli- cation for people living with paralysis. He entered the hospital Saturday. Dana Reeve thanked her husband's personal staff of nurses and aides, "as well as the millions of fans from around the world." Before the 1995 accident, his ath- letic, 6-foot-4-inch frame and love of adventure made him a natural, if largely unknown, choice for the title role in the first "Superman" movie in 1978. He insisted on performing his own stunts. "Look, I've flown, I've become evil, loved, stopped and turned the world backward, I've faced my peers, I've befriended children and small ani- mals and I've rescued cats from trees," Reeve told the Los Angeles Times in 1983, just before the release of the third "Superman" movie. "What else is there left for Superman to do that hasn't been done?" Though he owed his fame to it, Reeve made a concerted effort to, as he often put it, "escape the cape." He played an embittered, crippled Vietnam veteran in the 1980 Broad- way play "Fifth of July," a lovestruck time-traveler in the 1980 movie "Somewhere in Time," and an aspir- ing playwright in the 1982 suspense thriller "Deathtrap." More recent films included John Carpenter's "Village of the Damned," and the HBO movies "Above Suspi- cion" and "In the Gloaming," which he directed. Among his other film credits are "The Remains of the Day," "The Aviator," and "Morning Glory." Reeve's life changed completely after he broke his neck in May 1995 when he was thrown from his horse during an equestrian competition in Culpeper, Va. Enduring months of therapy to allow him to breathe for longer and longer periods without a respirator, Reeve emerged to lobby Congress for bet- ter insurance protection against cata- strophic injury. He moved an Academy Award audience to tears with a call for more films about social issues. "Hollywood needs to do more, he said in the 1996 Oscar awards appearance. "Let's continue to take risks. Let's tackle the issues. In many ways our film community can do it better than anyone else." No plans for a funeral were imme- diately announced. a UPN's 'Mars' fills the teen drama void in primetime I By Amanda McAllister For the Daily Welcome to the O.C., - er, welcome to Neptune High. Neptune, California, a town with no middle class, serves as the setting for the new teen crime drama "Veronica Mars." High school student by day, detective by night, the trials and tribulations of title character Mars (Kristen Bell) as a not-so-normal teenager are the focus of this witty, solid show. In the year since her best friend Lily's murder, Veronica Mars Tuesdays at 9 p.m. UPN ing characters. Her father, Keith (Enri- co Colantoni, "Just Shoot Me"), is the most complex of the lot as the formerly beloved, now belittled sheriff of Nep- tune, who still obsesses over the debacle of a case that ended his career. The case, incidentally, was that of Lily's murder. While less complicated, the rest of the cast is entertaining and all fulfill their predetermined, stereotypical roles with enough grace to make viewers forget they're pretty stock characters. Duncan is the rich boy with a heart, while his best friend Logan (Jason Dohring) is the obligatory psychotic jackass. Mars's friends come in the form of the new guy, Wallace (Percy Daggs III) and Weevil (Francis Capra), the head of the local motorcycle gang. Various smaller roles round out Mars's foes and provide a glimpse of the bitterness the Mars fam- ily faces in the elitist Neptune. Like many of its teen drama prede- cessors, "Veronica Mars" is riddled with fresh, intelligent writing; banter between the characters, particularly Veronica and Keith or Veronica and Weevil, seems effortless and unscripted. Mars's monologue, which propels the audience through the exposition needed to catch up with the events preceding the pilot, is a mixture of sarcasm and confusion that fleshes out the title character perfectly. The script glides easily between sharp Latex and gasoline: The new line of fragrances from the Paris Hilton collection. Veronica Mars's life has been turned upside down. Besides mourning, Mars has to adjust to her breakup with Lily's brother Duncan (Teddy Dunn) and subsequent removal from the popu- lar crowd, which he leads. She must also cope with her mother's desertion and accept her role in her father's new career as a private investigator. Once a happy-go-lucky teenager, Mars is now a social outcast, struggling to make sense of her life. While Mars is the focus of the series, it features a solid ensemble of support- wit and tension, while avoiding both arrogance and melodrama - some- thing difficult to achieve, especially in a teen show. The pilot sets up some ambi- tious goals for the plotlines to explore - Lily's murder and the question of Veronica's mother all remain, and the seeds of character feuds and alliances are planted. While it's not scandalous or groundbreaking, "Veronica Mars" is intelligent and quirky, and will likely become one of the guilty pleasure shows of the season. 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