Monday, May 14, 2007
The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com
FILM IN BRIEF
Zombies and
Americans
"28 Weeks Later"
At Quality 16 and Showcase
Fox Atomic
"28 Weeks Later" is the sequel
to "28 Days Later" and is almost
as good, but in a very different
respect.
Months after the events of "28
Days," the "rage virus" has been
almost completely eliminated. Lon-
don is a quarantined community,
offering great amenity and military
protection for the few that choose
to re-enter. Everything seems fine
until some very unfortunate cir-
cumstances bring the virus back.
From there, everything and
everyone goes bat shit, and it
couldn't be a more harrowingly
grandiose panic show. The military
and infected ultimately spar in a
way that begs the question of which
side is worse? Ultimately, having
one's eyes gouged out is just as bad
as being sniped through the head.
Juan Carlos Fresnadillo ("Intac-
to") helms with polished scare tac-
tics, building anticipation in almost
masterful fashion. Low lighting,
sporadic attacks and the great art of
implication add to the film's scares.
BLAKE GOBLE
David Lynch:
Here we go again
"Inland Empire"
At the Michigan Theater
Studio Canal
"Inland Empire" is the most
intense narcotic currently on the
market, and at its best, it's a pretty
flooring high. Avant-garde mae-
stro David Lynch's most experi-
mental film in at least a decade is
a dark tapestry jammed with sav-
age images and adjacent plots, its
implacable menace harnessed and
redoubled by the exalted star turn
by Laura Dern ("Happy Endings").
The actress, who appears in nearly
every scene of this unwieldy 172-
minute movie, is lost somewhere
deep in Lynch's ecstatic, frighten-
ing vision, for the first time ren-
dered on his newly beloved digital
video.
The story concerns an actress
(Dern) who lands a big part in a
movie she soon learns is a remake
of an unfinished film from Poland.
This being a David Lynch movie,
the early mention of a curse on
the feature materializes in every
aspect of the actors' lives, the line
between the movie in production
and real life becoming irrevocably
blurred.
Is this a movie-within-the-
movie, a hallucination, a dream?
Who the hell knows? There are
man-sized rabbits cut with omi-
nous laugh tracks, ravenous hus-
bands, a bug-eyed old hag and some
impossibly claustrophobic framing.
And that's just in the first half hour.
Since the movie goes on for nearly
six times that long, there are dry
spells, long periods in which even
the most bluntly provocative imag-
es can't distract from the frustra-
tion a film this oblique inspires.
It comes together in the end
because there is a unity of narra-
tive vision centered on Dern, whose
wayward and somehow profound
journey is the key to the film's
mysteries. The movie is coarse and
unrelenting, grotesque and fiend-
ishly hilarious, but it's eventually
the purveyor of an almost spiritual
experience that hits the viewer as
handily as it does the characters.
JEFFREY BLOOMER
Lohan, Huffman
and Fonda
don't 'Rule'
"Georgia Rule"
At Quality 16 and Showcase
Universal
There's little about "Georgia
Rule" to either love or hate. That's
quite the problem for this parable
of family crises thatcplucks chords
of every emotion imaginable and
piles on the sap by the gross.
Lindsay Lohan ("Just My
Luck") plays a troubled adoles-
cent named Rachel, a character
much like her real-life self. Bit-
ter, destructive, rude and out of
control, Rachel is sent away by
her mother (Felicity Huffman,
TV's "Desperate Housewives")
to rural Idaho to suffer her stern
grandmother (Jane Fonda, "Mon-
ster-in-Law") and maybe learn a
thing or two about life.
Alarming, even heart-break-
ing secrets are revealed about
the pasts of all three women, but
the raw materials for a poignant
drama are never hashed down
with a coherent sense of purpose.
The narrative swerves in various
directions - characters weep,
rage and break, but all the audi-
ence is able to feel is confusion.
Simply put, a film of the emo-
tional devastation that "Georgia
Rule" deals with cannot work with
the usual modes of cinematic exe-
cution. The film's inability to go
beyondthe usualbits of sentimental
dialogue and music to explore the
full gravity of its weighty themes
is the reason it fails to do much of
anything.
That's a shame because Huff-
man, Lohan and Fonda all deliver
spectacularly in roles that seem
built for them. Given a stronger
driving force behind the madness,
this film could have been some-
thing special.
IMRAN SYED
It's not you, it's
Zach Braff
"The Ex"
At Quality 16 and Showcase
Weinstein
Even after the lengthy delay
that "The Ex" took to make it to
the big screen, something still
doesn't taste right.
Normal guy Tom Reilly (Zach
Braff, TV's "Scrubs"), his doc-
ile wife Sophia (Amanda Peet,
"Syriana") and their tiny new-
born relocate to Ohio to start a
Serving
Ann Arbor
since 1980
peaceful life in the suburbs. Tom
also lands a job at Sunburst, the
eccentric ad agency that his even
more eccentric father-in-law
works at.
Trouble appears in the wheel-
chair-bound form of Chip Sanders
(Jason Bateman, TV's "Arrested
Development"), the diabolical ex-
cheerleader with a not-so-secret
undying flame for Sophia.
Aside from a few chuckle-wor-
thy stunts, "The Ex" boils down to
a cast of ho-hum characters who
play hopscotch over the fine line
between amusement and annoy-
ance. While Braff manages to play
off of the constant accusations of
insensitivity against Tom, his own
seasoned comedy fizzles against
Bateman's too-serious rendition of
the office bully. This hostile atmo-
sphere makes the gaffes painfully
awkward.
Perhaps the biggest strength of
"The Ex" is that it doesn't possess
enough plot elements for its flaky
characters to drag down. Instead,
a spotty mix of workplace anxiety
and male competition culminates
in an ending that is appropri-
ately happy but blatantly thrown
together.
CHRISTINA CHOI
PJs
RECORDS &
USED CDS
617 Packard
Upstairs from
Subway
Paying $4 to $6
for top CD's in
top condition.
Also buying
premium LP's
and cassettes.
Open 7 days
663-3441
The selection is
ENDLESS
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