Week of March 21, 2007, Issue #596
FILM
Premonition has all the time in the world
JONATHAN BUSCH / jonathan@vueweekly.com
A few months ago, I spent an afternoon watching YouTube clips that document the firing of Star Jones on The View, but I discovered them completely out of sync. First, I saw Barbara declaring the first episode without Star, followed by Star’s tell-all interview on Larry King, and finally ended with Star’s initial announcement that she would be leaving. Now everytime I turn it on, it feels like Slaughterhouse-Five; I can’t tell my ass from Elisabeth Hasselbeck’s elbow.
Premonition is kind of like what I’m trying to describe. Alright, it’s a lot like it. Sandra Bullock stars as Linda, a View-accessible middle-class wife and mother who is told at the film’s beginning that her husband Jim (Nip/Tuck’s Julian McMahon) has died in a horrible car accident. The next morning, she wakes up to find the fine hunk of man eating cereal in her kitchen; he isn’t dead after all. But as the days pass, he’s dead, then alive, then dead again.
She figures out that each day of the week is occurring at mysterious random; her life has become how most people recall their first viewing of Pulp Fiction. No shit.
It’s up to Linda to piece together the events and try her damndest not to appear crazy. Plus, we get to help; it’s important that you whisper out loud exactly what you think is going on while the film is running. It made the experience much more fulfilling for everyone sitting around me in the theatre.
The good side is that Premonition is more than entertaining, or merely entertaining, depending on your bent. Either way, it unfolds with a good heart. Bullock is an identifiable screen queen—that’s why so many white girls in their early 20s love her movies. They idolize her, and then invite their boyfriends out to see her movies, trying to give them an idea who their potential wife imagines herself becoming in 10 years.
However, Premonition was even more disorienting once I realized the multiple angles it might be imagined from; throughout the film, Linda embarks on a discovery of some of the hidden truths in her archetypically domestic life.
Her husband can be a real bastard sometimes, her best friend (Nia Long) is rather self-involved, and her kids are a little clumsy (seriously, one of them runs into a plate-glass window). All the while, she learns about the power of love, sweet love.
Somewhere along the way, I figured out that the movie was trying to tell me something, though I’m pretty sure I’ve heard this one before. It’s like a really suspenseful self-help book that I might pick up on my sister’s toilet tank; it helps pass the time.
Maintaining suspense is one of the film’s primary concerns, but director Mennan Yapo never devolves into preachy preachiness. Nobody visits heaven, talks to God or misquotes 19th century literature; that’s certainly a one-up on dinner with the extended family. V
Now playing
Premonition
Directed by Mennan Yapo
Written by Bill Kelly
Starring Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon,
Shyann McClure, Courtney Taylor Burness