Monday April 17, 2006 arts.rmichigandaily. com artspage@michigandaily.com E , CRTSC [QFl 9A 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. 1 . "4 7/' "7 4 44' / XUAN ~u' ~ ~u~i ~ ~ 7'~K7~ '~ ~ ~~WVA~~t ~.i wuuu~ wivn ~ui'~ / ~ 4 / / /