Monday
April 17, 2006
arts.rmichigandaily. com
artspage@michigandaily.com
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Rolling the credits ...
r
The melancholy tones of a main-
stream emo rocker rise in the
background - she's waiting and
he's late. He rushes through the traffic,
determined to tell her that which he's
only just discovered himself, beating his
hands against the steering wheel as his
tires screech to a stop at the red lights
and reckless skateboarders. At the last
moment, he reaches the air-
port and screams her name.
She turns. She's the one.
We know that real life
isn't like the movies. In
real life, the happy couple
might divorce over infi-
delity or diverging career
paths, or maybe the stress '
of a mortgage payment
and dissipating passion. In
film, they're frozen forever AM
in that final kiss. ANT
We love those happy
endings.
I've been covering movies with the
Daily for half my college career, first
as a film critic, then as a film reporter,
a columnist and finally an editor. I say
that I write movie reviews and people
light up: What was the last movie
I saw? What's "good" right now?
What's the best movie of all time?
And what, oh my gosh, what is up
with Angelina Jolie?
Maybe it's because movies offer us
the streamlined narrative we never get in
real life; maybe it's those gorgeous peo-
ple solving life's greatest puzzles in less
than two hours; maybe it's the very fact
of a finite theme - the ending itself.
But if there's one thing I've learned
in my tenure at the Daily, it's that maybe
rational speculation will only get you
so far. Movies are art; they can be
politically explosive, socially incendiary,
they can stir and provoke imagination
to the wildest heights of fantasy. They
also make great first dates and a good
air-conditioned space on a hot day. The
multitude of reasons we love movies
varies with the person, with the day and
with the movie itself.
But now, for me, one phase of my love
affair with movies is ending. Reading
spt reports and celebrity gossip, eagerly
awaiting Sunday box-office projections
and debating "Final Destination 3" for
hours at a time - these are now my
pathetic hobbies and not my job. I'm
graduating.
And with that I have to confess that
years of film geekdom don't die easy.
I can't stop wondering where my emo
rockers are. I can't imagine an end with-
out a lesson before and credits behind
it. Stripped of ceremonial cinema trap-
pings, I can't quite fathom the ending
of my college career. But I know it's
the end, and despite the lack of a proper
Hollywood send-off, I also know it's
going to be an appropriately happy one.
The happy ending is the fact that we,
of the class of 2006, studied hard. We
endured our upper level writing require-
ment (hey, I did mine three times), our
race and ethnicity, our quantitative
A
D)
reasoning and we got every last one of
our natural science credits. That's right,
underclassmen, we're done. Enjoy your
oceanography.
The happy ending is that we're doing
amazing things: We're going to med
school and law school, we think we're
getting our Ph.D.s. We're going into cor-
porate finance and nonprofits in Guate-
mala. We don't know what
we're doing, we're thinking
of getting a job somewhere
and hanging out for a while.
The happy ending is that
we partied at least one year
longer than you.
The happy ending is that
we get to leave this Univer-
sity as fundamentally dif-
ferent human beings than
LNDA who we were as we entered
RADE it. We learned postmod-
ernism and beer pong, we
learned to cry harder and love deeper
than we thought we could take.
The happy ending is that we came in
as slightly cool, slightly smart students
from some town in some state. We're
leaving as ourselves.
The happy ending is that we were
inspired - by a political rally, by a
professor, by a homeless man shout,
ing quantum physics on the corner of
State Street and Liberty Street. We
found something to shake us from
complacency.
The happy ending is for the break-
ups - the boyfriends and the ex-
friends. You all suck now, but once,
we had something worth having, so
we carry that.
The happy ending is for our friends,
who talked us down from the emotional
disasters of bad grades and bad dates,
who talked us up to everyone else. You
were miraculous to endure our whining,
you were stalwart bedrock even as we
strayed from you. We love you so much.
The happy ending is for everything.
We'll miss this place, we'll miss these
people. We'll miss being at this strange
and wonderful juncture between child-
hood and the real world - full of free-
dom, absent of responsibility.
But the happiest thing about this
happy ending is that, despite everything,
we still know that real life isn't like a
movie. There's no soundtrack, no dim-
ming lights. There are, in fact, no end-
ings - not even this cataclysmic ordeal
we call graduation. We love movies, but
we don't live in them.
So maybe I was wrong. The happy
ending is that for the class of 2006, this
is just our beginning.
- Andrade is happy she got the
chance to be poorly paid for work
she'd have done for free. She'll miss
the writing, the Arts room and even
the angry Opinion kids. She wishes
all continuing and future film writers
the very best of luck. Thanks to Jeff,
Bernie, Evan, all her fellow sub-
editors and even those Daily groupies.
E-mail her at aandrade@umich.edu.
Courtesy of Weinstein
You think the kid Is scary, check out that turtleneck!
SCARY'
AFFAIR
UNNECESSARY, BARELY-THERE SEQUEL REEKS OF INFAMY
By Christina Choi
Daily Arts Writer
To the devout fans of "Scary Movie" - rabid
lovers of slapstick humor and the occasional pre-
teen able to bribe the theater cashier with a Kit
Kat for a ticket - the fourth addition to a line of
watery parodies will likely be
mildly satisfying. But unlike a
chocolate delight, this is not a Scary
film to savor. Movie 4
Using a tried and some- At the Showcase
what true formula, "Scary and Quality 16
Movie 4" mocks blockbusters Weinstein
such as "War of the Worlds,"
"The Village" and "The
Grudge" as it follows the adventures of Cindy
Campbell (Anna Faris, "Brokeback Mountain
") and Tom Ryan (Craig Bierko, "Cinderella
Man") in their attempt to save the world from
a bunch of computer-generated aliens dubbed
"Tr-iPods." These cold machines delight in
vaporizing people and leaving only their clothes
behind. Who knew that nudist colonies had
extraterrestrials on their side?
Aside from the abundance of convenient
nudity jokes, the film excels at imitating its own
legacy of stupendously bad cinema. Faithful to
prior sequels, star cameos, crude humor and
groan-inducing one-liners such as "We'll build
our own Tr-iPods. Ours will have four legs" are
plentiful. Leslie Nielsen returns as a bumbling
president who happens to be incapable of real-
izing his country is in chaos. Meanwhile, Sha-
quille O'Neal revives his quarrels with Kobe
Bryant while ineptly making fun of his own
paltry ability to shoot free throws. And if these
vignettes aren't compelling enough, the scene
where Dr. Phil has a heart-to-heart with Shaq
is sure to put anyone in therapy just to escape
his abominable attempts at humor. If only he'd
sawed off our ears instead of his foot.
The film relentlessly spews gag after gag at the
audience on the supposition that, after watching a
cloud fart lightning for the third time, it's bound
to be funny. Yet too often, physical humor - like
when Tom shoots himself in the pants, for instance
- misses the mark completely. Like a Looney
Tunes cartoon brought to life, these painful scenes
barely warrant a chuckle at best. At their worst,
the film revels in using guns and other weapons as
gleefully appealing tools of destruction.
Although we can ignore cheap physical gags, the
drug-like dependence on offensive stereotypical
fallbacks is needlessly grating. Are gay cowboys
still really that funny? Does every Chinese man
have to wear whitey-tighties and sport the standard,
chipper yet downright unrealistic "Asian" accent?
Or worse, does stringing foreign car names together
really give a good sense of how Japanese sounds to
a PG-13 audience? Even as a Michigan-bred Kore-
an-American, maybe me don't understand Ameri-
can culture that well, but it's hard not to recognize
how prejudice continues to exist in a country with a
such a reductive film.
In fact, the only thing that may slightly jus-
tify the appalling amount of money this film
will gross is watching one of the main charac-
ters gratuitously punch Oprah in the face. Ah,
sweet catharsis.
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