[he Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com Wednesday, November 17, 2010 - 5A he Michigan Daily - michigandailycom Wednesday, November17, 2010 - 5A Rihanna gets 'Loud' Unidentified flying crap By KAVI SHEKHAR PANDEY Daily Film Editor Monster hits and 1 massive duds fill pop star's latest By JOE DIMUZIO Daily Arts Writer Rihanna is such a tease. From 'Pon De Replay" to "Disturbia," her ingles pop. She ommands her ameos, how- ever brief. The Rihanna abloids never et her go. Pre- Loud iew snippets for Def Jam ated R had mes- age boards convinced she would become the queen of dubstep. She's made Jay-Z look silly, twice. Your perfect pop diva, Rihanna is sexy and malleable. But when you step down from the highs of songs like "Umbrella" and "Rude Boy," there's not much footing for a long- term relationship. it's just too tough to figure out what she really wants. Loud is her fifth frustrating release, built on towering singles, promising misfires and a couple duds. Following Rated R, an album hyped more by her Chris Brown backstory than the music itself, Loud finds her comfortably upbeat again, with variety, pomp and red hair. Because it's loud, get it? This sort of cheap role play pre- vents Rihanna from owning some of the tunes here. on ballads like "Fading" and the Taylor Swiftian "California King Bed," she steers hard into middle-of-the-road ter- ritory. opener and third single "S&M" is a slick, efficient pal- ette swap of David Guetta's "Sexy Chick," with a 4/4 Euro stomp and HI-NRG backing vocals. But it aims for sexy and comes across as Hot Topic. With "Sex in the air / I don't care / I love the smell of it / sticks and stones may break my bones / but whips and chains excite me," she sounds like she's faking it. :OURTESY OF DEF JAM Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's plastic surgery. Rihanna's best moments are her most natural, and when it comes to massive singles and the occasional embrace of her Caribbean side, she nails it. Second single "What's My Name?" features Drake, serv- ing the same purpose Jay-Z did on "Umbrella," turning in a limp intro and unintentionally lending Rihanna's entrance heavenly pro- portions. It's a slick StarGate pro- duction built on tense snare and a chorus whose parts sum up beauti- fully. "Only Girl (In the World)" is Max Martin-huge, with a stop-and- start chorus that takes three whole turns of the ignition to drop the beat, at once torturous and indel- ible. Here, "Want you to make me feel / Like I'm the only girl in the world / Like I'm the only one that you've ever loved" is a declaration, not a request. Then there are furious moments of promise. "Raining Men" has a schizo-speed freak verse from Nicki Minaj, sub-bass, lightning hi-hats and a Beyonca-light vocal turn by Rihanna, with nowhere else to go. "Man Down," the most distinct but undercooked cut on the album, offers a Reggaeton murder ballad evoking Grace Jones drama and fall- ing short. On "Love the Way You Lie (Part II)" Rihanna tries admirably to recapture the song for herself and misfires, leaving Eminem, still refusing to work with a beat, clum- sily talkin-loud-and-saying-nothing, sounding absolutely terrible. In a BBC interview, Rihanna propped up Loud; "I wanted songs that were all Rihanna songs, that nobody else could do. ... I wanted a song, or songs ... that had that little West Indian vibe to it, had that cer- tain tone, a certain sass and a cer- tain energy." That "certain energy" is exactly what can take Rihanna higher: the fleeting moments when she marries her character with shiny, defiant pop gloss. But her promise is still just promise, and for now the engagement is indefinite. Low-budget alien invasion mov- ies shot with handheld cameras have been all the rage over the past few years. In fact, Skyline their path can be compared to the At Quality16 life of a phoenix. and Rave Since it's "Harry Universal Potter" week, let's use Fawkes, Dumbledore's little firebird. In 2008, "Cloverfield" was the begin- ning of the life cycle - Fawkes as a baby - a wonderful idea that set "Fuck my life." the stage for the future but was too infantile to be great. Fawkes soon characters hiding out in a high-rise matured and at his peak was a mag- condominium, watching aliens and nificent, highly cognizant speci- UFOs from a distance. They sit and men, suddenly appearing to save debate whether to stay or escape, Harry's tuchas against the Basilisk. decide to run for it, fail, return to This is analogous to last year's out- the condo and wait around until rageously good "District 9," which the aliens arrive to suck everyone's came out of nowhere to earn an brains out. This is the furthest thing Oscar nomination for Best Picture possible from epic - "Skyline" is and essentially perfect the genre. just the cinematic equivalent of a But after old age, Fawkes burst bottle episode. into flames and fell into a pile The single location could have of ashes - the tragic, charred been used to the film's advantage, remains of something that was creating a stifling, claustrophobic once glorious. This is "Skyline." environment with aliens breathing "Skyline" isn't just stupendous- down the necks of our heroes. But ly awful - though it definitely it just becomes pathetic;it's obvious ranks among the Seven Wonders that the filmmakers were trying of Terrible Filmmaking - it's a to minimize production costs and despicable case of studios manip- didn't have enough money to stage ulating audiences to make a quick a sequence outside of the condo. profit on a knowingly terrible There's a handful of impressive product. The budget for the movie effects, like a brief battle between was supposedly only $10 mil- military fighter jets and UFOs, but lion, but it's clear that the studio it's laughable to say they justify stuffed a Z-list cast into a rancid watching even a second of the rest plot, spending most of that bud- of the film, especially with its horri- get on visual effects. They then ble cast spouting horrible dialogue. used the better-looking effects It's not as if the actors in "Clo- to string together a pretty cool verfield" were especially talented, teaser trailer and some TV spots, but their relative anonymity great- selling audiences on an epic alien ly assisted the film's attempts at invasion extravaganza. realism. The same doesn't hold for Man, thatshitis effingridiculous the distracting cast of "Skyline," - it's absolutely deplorable market- a mishmash of random television ing, as most of the film consists of actors including the guy from "24" with the gross facial hair (Eric Balfour), Angel Batista from "Dexter" (David Zayas), Turk from "Scrubs" (Donald Faison) and . Mac's transsexual ex-girl- friend from "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" (Brittany Daniel). And they are all terrible. "Skyline" is a supreme embar- rassment. of course, not every movie has to be "District 9," but "Skyline" wouldn't even fly as a SyFy original movie. The Univer- Worse than 'District 69.' sal executives are probably patting themselves on the back for already making a return on their invest- ment (thanks to a $12 million open- ing Weekend), but they deserve to be smacked for selling such a defective product to the world. The phoenix always rises from the ashes, and the low-budget alien invasion movie should reclaim its splendor next year with "Battle: Los Angeles" (which has a fantas- tic trailer) and the J.J. Abrams- directed "Super 8." One can only hope. 1 I UMS welcomes Stew and The Negro Problem I r By STEPHEN OSTROWSKI DailyArts Writer Ann Arborites will receive a playful dose of wit and irrever- ence when indie-rock musician Stew and his band The Negro Problem come to town for Stewand Thursday, Fri- day and Sat- The Negro urday evening Problem sets, presented T by the Universi- Tomorrowand ty Musical Soci- Friday at 8 ety. p.m., Saturday The Negro at 7:30 and Problem is 10:30 p.m. anchored by 523S. Main Street the guitars and $45 vocals of char- ismatic front man Stew (Mark Stewart) and the bass and vocals of collaborator Heidi Rode- wald. Though his discography dates back to The Negro Prob- lem's 1997 effort Post Minstrel Syndrome, Stew - who has also released albums just as "Stew" - may be best recognized as the creative force behind the 2008 Tony award-winning "Passing Strange," a musical profiling a young man's search for the "real." Director Spike Lee ("Do the Right Thing") adapted the show's closing performances into a well received 2009 Sundance film of the same name, which the Uni- versity of Michigan Museum Of Art screened this past Sunday. Paul Farber, a Ph.D. candidate in the University's American Cul- ture department who will mod- erate a "public conversation" with Stew on Thursday evening, praised Stew's theatrical efforts. "I've taught 'Passing Strange' in two courses at the University of Michigan, and I see how in each class the musical gave stu- dents the creative license to push their own limits and knowledge," Farber wrote in an e-mail inter- view with the Daily. Despite the musical's positive press, Stew insisted in a recent interview with the Daily his com- mitment to music, saying "I don't feel like a playwright." Stew also expressed enthusiasm for the band's Ann Arbor stop. "It's one of those oases, you know?" Stew said. "Sort of the classic kind of American, you know, college town that feels somehow different than the rest of America that surrounds it." Ann Arbor - just one of a handful of stops on the group's first national tour in six years - may prove the optimal audience to field Stew's clever lyricism. Songs range from drug-bender ballads to poignant character sketches of Don Quixote-like mysticism. Take the ode "Giselle" on 2002's solo effort The Naked Dutch Painter ... and Other Songs, in which Stew croons: "Her rab- bit won't pose for Hef /She wears leather, whatever the weather." Stew defines The Negro Prob- lem as "more busy baroque" music than his individual work with Rodewald. Stew's prowess as a wordsmith doesn't go unnoticed. "Stew is one of the most inno- vative musicians and storytell- ers in the culture today," Farber wrote. Though his lyrical trove is expansive, Stew acknowledges a common thread to his music and mission as an artist. "I think the constant guiding me is I've always wanted to sort of subvert this idea of whatever the expected is," Stew said. "(What) you've expected of me as a man, you've expected of me as a black man, you know, they expected of us as a band." Stew added, "The actual topics aren't as interesting to me as the perspective on the topics." According to Stew, the seed of "subversion" planted itself when he was a child in the 1960s, a decade host to an eclectic, hardly homogenous music scene. While a selection from a song like "Giselle" might highlight Stew's more comical musings, it's obvious that his music scrapes mature, important issues. For instance, the public conversa- Tne search for the 'real' gets subversive. tion between Stew and Farber, as detailed on the University's Alumni Association website, will include "ideas about race and identity." "Stew is the kind of performer who helps us confront together, and not shy away from separately, the most pressing issues facing our society, including race," Far- ber wrote. This goal comes to light in the band's potentially polarizing name. Stew explained that The Negro Problem, while an "old political phrase," alludes to the joint vision shared by himself and Rodewald - to have fun creating music. "I think laughter is actually the most subversive thing you can do," Stew said. "It's just hav- ing fun. It's just music, you know - it's not politics." Ae GET YOUR SENIOR PORTRAIT TAKEN November 10-12 and 15-19 in the Sophia B. Jones room of the Michigan Union North Campus November 18-19 in Valley room of Pierpont The sittingfee is just $15! This price includes your portraitfeatured in the 2011 Michignensian Yearbook Sign up online by visiting www.OurYear com and entering School Code: 87156 Phone 734.418.4115 ext. 247 E-mail ensian.uma)umich.edu wPCA Bring in this ad and receive $2 offthe sitting fee. Michiganensian Y E A R B O O K cOURTESY OF MARK STEWART Stew and Heidi Rodewald worked together on the Tony-winning "Passing Strange." He defines his style of music with The Negro Problem as "busy baroque."