10A - The Michigan Daily - Thursday, January 5, 2006 ARTS Courtesy of Columbia Man, I hope that's not dandruff ... or Peruvian flake. High-concept visuals elevate adaptation Courtesy of RCA Totally the hippest arboretum EVER. By David R. Eicke Daily Arts Writer It is said that a true Rob Marshall film can stop a man in his tracks with a single look. Or was that a geisha? Something like that. Either way, "Memoirs of a Geisha" is as elegant and STROKES' LATEST ALBUM SHOWS WORTHWHILE GROWING PAINS By Aaron Kaczander Daily Arts Writer On the morning after Dec. 31, somewhere in a grimy East Village dive's bathroom - the kind with indie rock stick-_...........__ ers adorning the inside of The Strokes the urinals - any of the five Strokes might lay in a cor- First Impressions ner, clutching an empty Red of Earth Stripe bottle, celebrating the RCA highly anticipated release of First Impressions of Earth with a broken pair of 2006 eye glasses crooked across their face. Like that swelling New Year's Day hangover, Impressions hits hard and without remorse. It feels like an eternity since fans and the press were assured that the boys were here to stay with 2003's Room On Fire, and Impressions yearns to further cement Julian Casablancas and com- pany at the top of the dignified young graduat- ing class of vintage-rock revivalists. Sure, what The Strokes bring to the table is authentic, but they sure as hell aren't perfect. Impressions is no traditional Strokes album. The songs are meatier, the fast tunes are more urgent, the slow tunes more relaxed, the lyrics more telling. The album sprawls to a whopping 53 minutes. That's 17 more minutes of angular rock than Is This It? and 21 more than the methodical Room On Fire. This is a Strokes album, so the lack of the wine-'em-and-dine-'em, quick-punch attitude that made their first two efforts so easy and downright fun to listen to is a shock. The Strokes work hard here to change. Of course, evolution isn't always pleasant. You can't really blame them though for trying to mix things up. Take the down-tempo balladry of "Ask Me Anything." It is, by far, the slowest Strokes tune to date, but it reveals a new side of Casablancas. He's finally comfortable enough to shamelessly channel his inner Lou Reed pen- siveness: "I would fight to survive /I got nothin' to hide / Wish I wasn't so shy." He's immortalized Iggy Pop in the past, but now he does it more than ever, with city- scape love affairs and coarse yelling in the first single. Wary Strokes fanatics may have been scared by the resemblance of "Juicebox" to a Jet song when it leaked, but Nikolai Fraiture's raunchy bass line grows until you're screaming right along. Drummer Fabrizio Moretti's manic hi hat hits blaze the verses with a new fury. The instrumental innovation, however, doesn't make up for the album's shortcomings. The back half is what slows down and ulti- mately stops Impressions from adding another near-perfect imprint in the Strokes' impressive, young catalog. The final four tunes come off as rehashed older material - see the "Evening Sun" vocal inflection as an old bridge or the "Red Light" Cars-esque guitars like a photo- copy of "12:51." "Ize of the World," the album's weakest track, is just plain bloated and boring. Suppose these four tracks were made B-sides to true gems like "Razorblade" or the stunning album opener "You Only Live Once." If that were the case, Impressions might be a classic. There's no doubting guitarists Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond Jr. can duel with perfectly slighted rhythm. Valensi is shaping up to be one of rock's most detectable and contemporary players. His screaming breakdown in "Heart in a Cage" or hummable shredding on "Razorblade" are integral to what ultimately makes Strokes songs so damn addictive. First Impressions of Earth was tracked by a strategic leak of songs earlier in the year. But only the choice cuts from the record made it out. Mere coincidence? Their instruments may speak like incarna- tions of rock gods of yore and their public persona rpay offer a masturbatory image of con- temporary stardom, but Impressions ultimately shows that The Strokes do have human flaws. Bring in 2006 with this album and mind those mature imperfections. First impressions aren't everything. visually stunning as its kimono-clad characters. Mar- shall, the acclaimed director of "Chica- go," has framed and colored each scene with the passion and Memoirs of a Geisha At the Showcase and Quality 16 Columbia precision of a slightly deranged oil painter wielding a very tiny brush. But while the film and its geisha characters share the same exotic pulchritude, they do not share the same gift for movement: Tragically, the movie's flourish comes far too soon. Swept one day from her modest home in a Japanese fishing village, our narra- tor and memoirist, Chiyo (Ziyi Zhang, "Hero"), is taken to the big city to be trained as a geisha - sort of a traditional combination of model, actor, dancer and hostess. At first it seems she will spend her life in servitude at the slippered feet of the beautiful, cruel Hatsumomo (Gong Li, "2046"), but things look up for her when she is taken in by another geisha, Mam- eha (Michelle Yeoh, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"), and properly trained. Eventually she blossoms and is renamed Sayuri, the most highly praised and desired geisha in the land. But this is only the beginning of her troubles, as jealousy rears its ugly head and male attention is no longer "cute." No story would be complete, though, without a little romance. One day when Chiyo is still a little girl, she meets a hand- some, middle-aged chairman (Ken Wata- nabe, "The Last Samurai") on a bridge, and most of her subsequent decisions (including career choice) are based on her love and admiration for him. "Every step I have taken has been to bring myself closer to you," she admits. While some might find this idea romantic, others, understandably, might find it offensive, especially since it seems to contradict her earlier assertion, "I want a life that is mine." But this instance of dubious values doesn't spring from the film, but rather from the popular Arthur Golden book the film is based on. So perhaps Marshall isn't to blame; given the immense popu- larity of the novel, any filmmaker daring enough to change the story would find himself scrubbing egg yolks off his vinyl siding for months. Marshall's job here is simply to "imag- ine" a story that is already well known. He's done that, and has capitalized on the physical beauty of his actors, the grace of tradition and the breathtaking majesty of the Japanese landscape itself. Throughout, the detail of the set and the vibrant color- ing make the film pop with life. That said, the film makes one costly mistake: It reaches its dramatic pinnacle with 45 minutes left. It's a case of cine- matic dwarfing. If you put the biggest float in the middle of the parade, who's going to remember the second half? But of course, one wouldn't want to miss the entire spectacle because of a kink in its organization. The splendor and vibrancy of the film are still sights to behold. I 'Fantastic Four' limps to DVD; Alba still horrendous By Imran Syed Daily Arts Writer How much more can the poor superhero genre take? Revitalized by "Spider-Man" only to be decimated by "Dare- devil" and "Catwoman," it seemed to reach new heights Fantastic with "Batman Begins." Four But a mere two weeks later2 came "Fantastic Four," a 20th Century Fo film that is, in many ways, moviemaking at its worst. Expectations were high for the movie adaptation of Marvel's lon- gest-running series, but the film has about as much tact and depth as "Power Rangers," and may make studios hoping to profit off comic- book adaptations a little more wary. a comic book, but the film still goes too far The story of "Fantastic Four," conceived t mwn the road" of cheap laughs and Nickel- in 1961, represents - unwittingly, I'm sure - the hopes and fears of average Americans at the dawn of the space age. It centers on four scientists (with cool, alliterated names like Sue Storm and Reed Richards) who become exposed to unknown forces while on a research trip in space. After the exposure they develop superpowers like spontaneous combustibility and stretchiness. But there's trouble down at the plant when arch-nemesis Dr. Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon, TV's "Nip/Tuck") develops superpowers worthy of the Energizer bunny and wreaks havoc for unknown reasons. From the very beginning, "Fantastic Four" chooses to take its source material lightly, opting for laughs over well paced storytelling or thoughtful dialogue. Granted it's based on odeon-esque plot tools. At one point, Johnny "The Human Torch" Storm (Chris Evans, "The Perfect Score") spends a good 12 minutes try- ing to get Ben "The Thing" Grimm (Michael Chiklis, TV's "The Shield") to slap himself in the face with a handful of shaving cream. With moments like this, the film becomes a farce, making any subsequent attempt at seriousness all the more hilarious. As woefully miscast as nearly all the char- acters are, none is worse than Jessica Alba's Sue "The Invisible Woman" Storm. The thought of Alba as a rocket scientist is enough to make the film irrelevant, but "Fantastic Four" travels past mediocrity and toward dis- grace. The dialogue is so poorly written and so repulsively delivered that even fans of the comic will not be able to suppress laughter at the, haphazard amalgamation of scientific terms by the hapless actors. As far as extras, "Fantastic Four" is in famil- iar territory - that is, it's lacking. The three deleted scenes are trite and deserve no further discussion. The special featurette, "Fantastic Four Video Diary," is so pointless and banal that it may spark the outright censure of anyone involved with it, and rightfully so. Of the rest, only the special preview of the third "X-Men" movie, "X3," is worth a look, simply because it reminds us all that there is hope yet for comic- book adaptations. Film: * Picture/Sound: **** Special Features: * 0 'I