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ACE Weekly March 15, 2007

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Deja Vu all over again

Here’s a ‘premonition’—you’ll want your

time and money back

By MaryAnn Johanson

Y

ou know those “In a world where…"

movie trailers. Well, Premonition’s would

start out: “In a world where no one has

ever seen Groundhog Day…or Memento." It’s not

that unusual that characters in a film seem to be

unaware of pop culture—no one in movies

seems to spend any time engaging in that great

American pastime of watching TV—but

Premonition does that one better: it assumes the

audience has never seen Groundhog Day or any of

the myriad other similarly themed explorations

of this precise idea. (It assumes they haven’t

even seen Sandra Bullock herself in The Lake

House, which also unsuccessfully played with

time—at least that’s a safer bet, since the box

office suggested no one did see it.)

Premonition feels more like a rejected con-

cept for an episode of Medium. Maybe every-

one involved in producing Premonition is just

hoping, “if we pretend hard enough, and aim

our little movie at people who don’t go to

movies and don’t watch TV, no one will notice

how desperately unoriginal all of this is."

Aiming a movie at people who don’t

consume media seems like a chancy proposi-

tion, but hey, it’s March—it’s this or Wild

Hogs. Maybe Sandra Bullock fans aren’t the

pickiest lot to start with, so they won’t care

that they could see this all done way better

every week for free at home, even if it meant

having to watch Patricia Arquette instead.

What happens is this: Sandra, an

intensely retro housewife who has nothing in

her life but her husband, kids, the laundry,

and dusting, gets word that said hubby has

been killed in a car wreck while on a business

trip. And the shock of that news so discom-

bobulates her that she becomes disconnected

in time and spontaneously finds herself hop-

ping around the week of his death, living it

out of sequence: you know, she awakens one

day and it’s Wednesday, then the next day

it’s the previous Sunday, then the next is the

following Friday, and so on.

Actually, that’s probably giving this

absurd flick more credit than it deserves—it

does not appear to have awareness of any

psychology more complex than that you

might find on a discounted greeting card.

(“Every day we’re alive can be a miracle,"

one character actually says.)

There’s very little complex about

Premonition, in fact: forget movies and TV, no

one here seems to have ever heard of the concept

of ESP before, either. So more than half the run-

ning time—97 minutes that feels like three

hours—is spent with Sandra completely

unaware of the fact that something supernatural

might be at work, that she’s having visions of

the future and might be able to change things.

The audience—most of us, anyway—are

so far ahead of her in figuring out what the

heck is going on that she never catches up to us.

But the movie is relentless in its clueless-

ness, in assuming that it exists in a pop-cul-

ture vacuum, and while we’re waiting for

Sandra to finally figure out the very, very

obvious, the script, by Bill Kelly, so overex-

plains everything about this “new" time-trav-

el/ESP idea that it digs itself into holes it can

never get out of. Do the events that Sandra

experiences happen according to her out-of-

order sense of time, or are they happening

according on an ordinary schedule. If Sandra

does something on Thursday and then, on

her “next" day, three days earlier, does some-

thing that alters the future, will it still be in

play when she eventually arrives at Friday.

Or does the first version of Thursday count.

This sort of thing is played out consistent-

ly and painstakingly in even the worst screen

adaptations of a basic Philip K. Dick novel.

Premonition hasn’t even considered itself

this shallowly, and has no answer for itself,

or for us, and tries to have it both ways: Yes,

of course people remember Thursday on

Friday; no, wait, they don’t.

If I could wake up tomorrow and find

it’s the day before I wasted a precious mira-

cle day on Premonition, I’d do everything I

could to stop myself from making the same

mistake twice. ¦

W

ifely Duties

Rock and a Hard Place

By MaryAnn Johanson

S

ingle people aren’t allowed to offer

commentary on marriage, goes a recur-

ring joke in I Think I Love My Wife, even

the couples’ therapist Chris Rock and his

spouse see to deal with the problems in their

marriage. On the other hand, Chris Rock’s

buddy and office mate may offer advice—

and what’s more, advice that turns out to be

smart and prescient—because even though

he’s a serial adulterer, he is married. He’s one

of the inmates at the asylum.

And maybe Chris Rock—who wrote and

directed this flick, so I think it’s safe to attrib-

ute some of this attitude to him and not just

to his fictional character—is right. Cuz I

don’t get it. I’m not married, never have

been, and don’t imagine that I ever will be.

Part of the real reason is that I cannot bear the

idea of giving up and giving in that seems to

characterize modern marriage, as represent-

ed both in reality and in pop culture, whether

it’s played for laughs or traged (as in: You

find someone who’ll just about do and you

get married quick before you end up a shriv-

eled old lonely husk, and then you do every-

thing you can to stay married, no matter how

miserable you are or how much of a mistake

you come to realize you’ve mad. Also, you’ll

never have sex again.)

Geez. And people think it’s pathetic to be

single. As David Spade puts it to married

friends in sitcom-land, “Yeah, I am a little bit

jealous, you’re right. Now if you’ll excuse me, I

have to go do whatever I feel like, all the time."

So I am not the audience for this flick. Wife

is, instead, a pat on the back, half consolation

and half approval, for everyone who did what

they were “supposed" to do. Just one more

example of Hollywood reinforcement of the

status quo. Mass societal conformity’s the goal.

The title says it all, with a kind of pathet-

ic grandeur: Chris Rock thinks he loves his

wife. He’s not sure, but it could be the case.

Rock’s investment banker Richard Cooper

comes to this glorious realization only at the

end of the film, after he’s been sorely and

long tempted by seductress Nikki (Kerry

Washington) into straying from his marriage

vows. His wife, Brenda (Gina Torres), is gor-

geous and smart and a great mother to their

two young children, but she won’t wear lacy

little panties and constantly turns him down

when he wants sex. A few nods are given to

the concept that both halves of this couple

are at fault for the boredom in their relation-

ship, but we don’t see him doing anything to

drive them apart and drive him to turn to

another woman for some attention: it’s all the

wife’s fault. But the underlying misogyny of

the film is only one of its problems.

Of course, men don’t come across too

well, either. Nikki is a child, a wheedling

manipulator in a push-up bra—she’s hot and

she’s needy. what man could resist. That

could have been comically sad, and yet for all

that this is allegedly a comedy, we’re not

even invited to laugh, even out of derision, at

how easily maneuvered Richard is. It’s no

newsflash that hot women get away with a

lot, but there’s little insight or depth into

what drives people of either gender to do

what they do here, beyond the desperate

desire to never, ever be alone.

But that’s the Hollywood way, too.

Which is why Rock has taken Eric Rohmer ’s

classic 70s French film Chloe in the Afternoon

and turned into a sitcom. This was his

intent—Rock’s “irreverent" job here was to

“transform this serious French story of

human foibles and moral dilemmas into a far

edgier American comedy" (or so the press

notes say). Rock’s idea of “edgy." Jokes

about boners, Viagra, and how nasty rap

music scares white people.

If you want to see Chris Rock turn loose

on marriage, check out Never Scared, or

Bigger and Blacker, or Bring the Pain. That’s

where you’ll find him making more salient

observations like, “A man is as faithful as

his options." That’s where he shines. If

Rock’s real-life wife has turned that particu-

lar tiger into the housecat that manufactures

dreck like this, then shame on her. And

shame on marriage. ¦

Aiming a movie at people who don’t

consume media seems like a chancy

proposition, but hey, it’s March—it’s

this or ‘Wild Hogs.’

As David Spade put it to married

friends in sitcom-land, “I am a little

bit jealous, you’re right. Now if you’ll

excuse me, I have to go do whatever I

feel like, all the time."