White Noise
Opening to mixed reviews, White Noise stars
pooch-lipped Michael Keaton as a bereaved widower who learns his dead darling is
trying to contact him via EVP – electronic voice phenomena – and ITC, which
stands for something we can’t remember – but you know in Poltergeist, when the
hand reaches out of the television and Carol Ann says, “They’re here?” That’s
ITC on acid.
Keaton plays Jonathan Rivers, who’s newly wed to suddenly dead internationally-known novelist Ann Rivers. And that’s where the problems begin for the viewers.1
Rivers problems begin when he gets all OCD about EVP and ITC and starts communicating with his departed wife. . . or is he? We saw it and we don’t know, so we decided to get out our equipment and call upon a movie expert. Here, Gene Siskel returns for a special EVP review of White Noise with Two on the Margin.
Here is the transcript of TM’s session with the departed reviewer:
TM: What did you think of White Noise, Gene?
GS: (unintelligible) Go Now!
TM: To see the movie?
GS: No! (unintelligible) Don’t (unintelligible) now!
TM: We don’t understand what you’re trying to tell us!
GS: You won’t understand the …(unintelligible)
TM: What? What won’t we understand?
GS: White Noise is unintelligible (unintelligible) crap!
TM: So we shouldn’t see it?
GS: Piece of (unintelligible). . .
TM: What?
GS: Ecto-thumb down! Get out! Get out! GO NOW!
(At this point, something screamed, denting Tamara and Melanie’s eardrums. Then another voice starting yelling what sounded like “Toga! Toga! Toga!” then a voice which an expert has identified as that of the late Stanley Kubrick repeated in a high falsetto, “Red rum! Red rum! Red rum! Roger isn’t here any more, Mr. Siskel! Red rum!”
Then, Two on the Margin’s television set switched from a rerun of Proof Positive to static and three dark figures tried to reach out of the screen and grab your intrepidly marginal reviewers. However, they’d seen Poltergiest half a dozen times and immediately took drastic action, trading in the television for a new 78” LCD screen. (LCD screens have been certified2 to be useless as venues for evil ITC shadow people and/or MIBS.)
Footnotes:
1 Two on the Margin’s problems with the movie began here too: We want to know: Does Ann Rivers Siddons know about this? And why is a novelist who’s been successful for years known as “Ann Rivers” when she married this Jonathan Rivers guy very recently? Maybe she was psychic and knew she’d marry him one day, so used Rivers as a pen name? Maybe it was one of those Tom Cruise/Penelope Cruz coincidences, only even better? Maybe they’re cousins? Maybe it was a really dumb-ass plotting error? We demand an explanation!
2 Certified by Two on the Margin because they really wanted that new digital LCD television set. . .