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 .... .. .. i..e , = x h .