Wednesday, June 29, 2011 The Michigan Daily - michigandaily.com 'Beginners' asserts the solemn beauty of reality U2 impresses Michigan with more than just a rock concert By JENNIFER XU Daily Arts Writer Motion pictures promise an idealized version of life as we experience it - the words feel genu- **** ine but come out Beginners so much At the State more clever, Focus Features and the faces are prettier than could ever transpire out in the real world. It follows that film- making comes to be this constant push and pull between aesthetic and prag- matism. Too much style can collapse substance, but sub- stance without the window dressing is stale, unoriginal. At its onset, "Beginners" threatens to fall victim to the former. Characters with yuppie dinner party names: Oliver, Anna, a dog named Arthur. A meet cute at a Halloween party where the girl has laryngitis and has to communicate through a tiny notebook while dressed as Charlie Chaplin. A pul- sating voiceover by Ewan McGregor ("I Love You Phillip Morris"), which intonates things like "This is the sun in 1955. And the stars. And the President." And "This is what sadness looks like" (flash neon, hip- ster color on screen). These situations and lines, which seem to come out of your standard, precious story- book romance, feel a bit like free radicals bombarding the surface without much of a unifier - at least at first. That coveted unifier reveals itself as, of course, grief - the underlying story being that Oliver's recently- out father Hal (Christopher Plummer, "The Last Sta- tion") has just passed away, leaving his son forlorn, alone to deal with his own fractured emotions. Consider such a scene: A Jack Russell terrier recog- Arthur consults his owner, Oliver, for advice with his leading bitch. nizes the head of his recently deceased owner and joyous- ly bounds down the hallway to meet his master. For that sustained second, Oliver too believes that his father has come back from the dead, his face lighting up in antici- pation. But the man turns around, and it turns out to be just the old guy that lives across the hall. "Sorry about that," Oliver apologizes. He turns the key to his apart- ment. Once inside, he breaks down into a series of dry sobs. There are analogous tab- leaux peppering the film's many lovesick sequences. And once the film does let itself seethe a little before settling down into its own melancholic skin, it starts to breathe. We can admire M6lanie Laurent's ("Inglou- rious Basterds") darling little fishtail braid (which had me secretly plotting YouTube tutorial searches on the drive home), but what keeps us in the theater is the film's spirit, potent with truths of aging, deteriora- tion, fabrication and family values. In time, we realize that there's something gen- tly organic - special, even - about the film, a beating fist of a heart that contracts and expands with every new pulsation. Perhaps this derives from writer and director Mike Mills's ("Thumbsucker") true-to-life experience with death, having lost his own father to cancer a few years ago. It's unlikely though that the director has met any- body as uncannily lovely as the inimitable Laurent, who, in all her Manic Pixie Dream Girl glory, permeates with the freshness of hurt, aban- donment and youth. Mills's own doppelganger is played by the warm, crease-lined face of one Mr. McGregor, a face that breaks into a joyous grin at our scarcest expecta- tion beneath his insulated cocoon of loneliness. - The true goal of Mills's sophomore project was not to make a cute little film about falling in love at an unexpected time (though this does take center stage, especially toward the end), but to take a more synoptic viewofthehumancondition. Where "Beginners" suc- ceeds splendidly is in com- municating the complexities of living a life bracketed by tragedy and incomprehensi- ble happiness. Contentment, it tells us, can never be expe- rienced without a modicum of grief framing the corners. Life is not about burying oneself into numb apathy - it's about embracing these emotional extremes, to fully breathe in a style but also to drink deep from the sub- stance. By BETHANY BIRON and JOSEPH LICHTERMAN Editor in ChiefandDaily NewsEditor Anything less from U2 would've been a disappointment. Mixing timeless music with prodigious theatrics and their penchant for social action, U2 put on a soaring spectacle of a concert that only they were capable of pull- ing off. On a picture-perfect summer night last Sunday in East Lansing, almost a year to the date of their originally scheduled concert that was postponed due to lead singer Bono's back surgery, U2 brought their record break- ing, globetrotting 3600 Tour to Michigan. But before U2 burst into their set, the always whimsical Florence Welch, of Flor- ence + the Machine, kicked off the show, prancing around U2's masterpiece of a stage as if it were her own personal playground. Donned in an elegantly flowing magenta dress that paralleled the energy of her per- formance - not to mention her fiery red hair - she soulfully belted hits from her album Lungs, culminating with crowd-pleaser "Dog Days are Over." U2 hit the stage with an unexpected urgency, quickly tearing through the opener "Even Better Than The Real Thing." Despite the Irish quartet's unbounded energy, the nearly 70,000 in Spartan Stadium were slow to warm up to the band's manic pace through the sultry "Mysterious Ways" and "I Will Follow" - the sprawling single from their 1980 debut album Boy. The band was right at home on the four- legged stage, affectionately nicknamed "The Claw", that soared 170 feet over the field. They never seemed lost on the mas- sive structure - Bono and the gang paraded around the circular catwalk surrounding the stage and across bridges spanning the crowd. At times it seemed like more than just a rock concert. Bono used his pulpit to share his political views while images of the upris- ings in the Middle East flashed on video screens and The Edge played the thump- ing guitar intro to "Sunday Bloody Sunday." During "Walk On," a montage of Burmese democracy-advocate Aung San Suu Kyi praised her release from 20 years of house arrest. Although many bands would have been overwhelmed with the task of commanding a stadium, Bonn sought to build a relation- ship with the crowd and establish a more intimate feel. This was particularly evident during an acoustic rendition of "Stay (Far Way and So Close)" in which Bono emulated a performance at Dooley's, a club U2 played in East Lansing 20 years ago on one of their first world tours. The band seemed to relish playing on a college campus, revering the activism of col- lege students around the nation and honor- ing the 50th infirmary of the Peace Corps. "We never made it to university ourselves," Bono told the audience. "I think Edge made it two weeks and I made it a week. U2 became our university. Rolling Stone became our textbook." As dusk settled in Spartan Stadium, a light breeze blew the smell of marijuana over sec- tion 9 and the audience came alive singing the opening verses of "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For" all the while Bono stood on the edge of the stage with his arms spread wide allowing the thousands of voic- es, united as one, to flow over him. The vigor that quickly transferred from the band to the crowd was further acceler- ated as Bono became increasingly conversa- tional with the audience, even cheering "Go Green, Go White" (much to our dismay) and venerating the state's natural beauty. "What a magical landscape we got here," Bono told the crowd, before mentioning guitarist The Edge's desire to retire to a cabin on the shores of Lake Michigan, which was met by raucous applause. With a blue smoky haze hanging over the band, Bono leaned into the mic, delivering a poignant rendition of "Pride (In the Name of Love)" and invoking the middle-aged women in our section to turn to each other and sing along, "Free at last, they took your life/They could not take your pride." The otherworldly "Beautiful Day" fea- tured a video appearance by astronaut Mark Kelly, husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, singing along from the Interna- tional Space Station. "See the bird with the leaf in her mouth," Kelly said as Bono's eyes turned toward the heavens and joined in: "After the flood all the colors came out." The performance itself was interwoven with themes of time and space - notions the band itself seemed to transcend as they first entered the stadiumwith David Bowie's 1969 hit "Space Oddity" playing eerily in the background. The magic continued with hit after hit, integrating classic tunes like "Where the Streets Have No Name" with "Moment of Surrender", one of the few bright spots on U2's indifferently reviewed 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon. After ending the show with two encores and a tribute to saxophonist Clarence Clem- ons covering Springsteen's "Jungleland", Bono was clearly speechless. He was unable to articulate his appreciation for the thun- dering standing ovation he received from the audience. As the crowd filtered out of the stadium, U2 once again proved the steadfast timelessness oftheir music that has spanned generatios.