th - i The Michigan Daily I michigandaily.com ( Thursday, Nc The Daily Arts guide to the best upcoming events - it's everywhere you should be this weekend and why. ON STAGE Groove, a 30-member percussion ensemble, boasts that its members can draw frantic beats using sticks, trashcans and whatever else they can get their hands on. The group returns for its fifth major event with a set at The Michigan Theater Friday. Tickets are $5 with student 1D. AT THE ARK Nominated for a Grammy for his 2006 album Workbench Songs, Guy Clark will croon at The Ark Saturday, bringing with him a smoky voice, his guitar and deep- seated blues, folk and Americana influences. Tickets are $30. Sean Brennan of Ann Arbor prepares to clean a cask at the Jolly Pumpkin Brewery in Dexter. The Jolly Pumpkin uses oak casks to mature its beer. A little of the big city in A 2 By ANNIE LEVENE Daily Arts Writer Walk through the glass doors and down the wooden paneled stairway, grab a seat at the bar, chill in the lounge or settle into a 7-foot-tall booth tucked into the wall of the main dining room. It seems like a dining experience typi- cal of any large city, but Melange Bistro and Wine Bar is a few blocks away ftom Central Campus, a big-city restaurant in downtown Ann Arbor. The restaurant, which opened a little more than a year ago, is managed by Terry Martin. It's the 10th restaurant Martin has opened in the metropolitan area, but Melange, he said, is "hipper (and) sleeker." With the support of the owners, Martin takes more chances with the restaurant, like adding sushi to the already different, contemporary, subterranean-based menu. Martin said the opportunity to work with "a hope- fully pretty cool regular menu and then sushi as well - in the same building - is pretty fun for me." The addition of sushi to M6lange's menu came with the arrival of Sam Ness, a chef who once worked for New York City's Nobu, the celebrity-infested Japanese restaurant and sushi bar cre- ated in part by the chef Nobu Matsuhi- sa and the actor Robert De Niro. Ness, who Martin declared "a tremendously talented man," was recruited by one of M6lange's owners to serve as a tempo- rary executive chef before becoming more of a consultant for the restaurant. Ann Arbor's food scene is home to several popular food blogs (check out kitchenchick.com), and wine-tast- ing events have become commonplace at many restaurants like Vinology on Main Street. But Martin sees M61ange as a restaurant that encourages further experimentation of different styles and flavors of foods, aiming to be "just a lit- See MELANGE, Page 4B S f i%1L${ b i k _. ON SCREEN The Iranian Society Series is screening "Infidels and The Wind Will Carry Us," an Iranian documentary about its Animism-believing gypsy minority and this group's forced conversion to Islam during the Iranian Revolution. The film will be shown at the Rackham Amphitheater Sunday. The event is free. It's existential. You just don't know that. Want to shock? Let them live Warning: This article discusses key plotpoints ofseveral recentfilms. By JEFFREY BLOOMER Managing Editor in the final moments of Frank Darabont's "The Mist," the "Shaw- shank" director's bid at a Stephen King-fueled redemption of his own,there seems tobe some solace in store for the characters. After a days-long assault from a host of prehistoric monsters in a tiny Maine supermarket (among them pterodactyls, a scorpion the size of a jet and Marcia Gay Harden), our dutiful hero and his shrinking band of sane-minded survivors rush away from the store. With a fleeting sense of hope, they drive south into the milky white cloud that gives the film its title. Up until that point, the movie had freely killed characters typi- cally off limits, including a sweet grocery clerk who dies suddenly from a sting that makes her throat look like a watermelon. But now the survivors drive through the mist, away from that, and they fisally seem at peace. Then it begins. David Day- ton, played stolidly by Thomas Jane, trolls up the driveway of his quaint lakeside home and finds his wife wrapped in a spider web. He mutters to himself, and after obligatory point-and-shoot looks of grief, the group drives on, intent to go as far as it can. It's not long before the old truck chugs its final drop of gas. The mist still surrounds them. There's no sign of anyone else. The ticks of ravenous monsters begin to close in. David pulls out a pistol. "There are only four bullets left," he says. But there are five people in the car, besides him an old woman, an old man, a pretty teacher and David's grade-school son, who begins to awake from a nap. The old man says they gave it their best shot - "no one can say we didn't," he reassures nobody in particular - and with that, as the boy's eyes open with just enough time to see his father point the pistol in the direction of his head, the camera cuts to the outside of the truck. There are four gun- shots that make it clear David has shot everyone but himself. And right then, afterssuggestive sounds from the blurry wilder- ness that surrounds him, a mili- tary force emerges from the mist. It's a quarantine team collecting survivors and exterminating the last of the creatures. David has killed his only child for nothing. Roll credits. Get it? It's daring! It's existen- tial! It's ... meaningless. I sat on this for a while, because unlike many others (including the Dai- ly's critic, who said the movie "stalls in a succession of mud puddles"), I found the better part of "The Mist" an inspired slate of creature-feature horrors. If not useful as a moral exercise, it is as a play on a classic genre clich6 - sic monsters on townsfolk! - and it works as a simple, progressively nasty thriller. Better yet, "The Mist" know- ingly tempers its allegorical ambi- tion so that it doesn't undercut the value of the spectacle (even when the resident religious fanatic takes over, her inevitable human sacrifice quickly becomes mon- ster food), at least until the cruel, greedy conclusion. Darabont is so desperate to make us sick with apocalyptic anxiety that le wakes the little boy just before his father shoots him so we kw he saw what was coming to him. The zeal with which Darabssst esters the military saviors ciretly after immediately gives hues awscy: This is a stunt. Itbetrays the characters See HORROR. Page 4B AT THE PODIUM The University Art Museum presents "A Day With(out) Art" Saturday, a day of commemoration to raise awareness about the effects of AIDS, especially on artistic communities. Guest, speaker and renowned poet Robert Hass will be reading at the Rackham Ampitheatre at 4 p.m. The event is free.