WHITE NOISE Forget all that talk about dead people: I see dead careers, beginning with those of actor Michael Keaton and director Geoffrey Sax (a TV vet making his feature film bow). White Noise asks viewers to accept Electronic Voice Phenomenon (EVP) -- the method by which the dead communicate with the living through household devices like televisions and radios -- as cold, hard fact. It then proceeds to spin a fantasy yarn that flubs its own narrative constraints. Keaton headlines as Jonathan Rivers, a successful architect whose pregnant wife (Chandra West) dies in a car accident. It's not long before a fuzzy figure starts appearing through the snowy static on Jonathan's TV set, but rather than assume (as most of us would) that he's illegally receiving HBO or Cinemax without a converter box, he's led to believe by a portly stranger (Ian MacNeice) that it's actually his deceased wife trying to communicate with him. As Jonathan becomes increasingly obsessed with trying to decipher messages through all the static, he finds that he's being stalked by three shadowy figures that are meant to be malevolent spirits but which, truth be told, look exactly like the Sean Penn-Tim Robbins-Kevin Bacon silhouettes that graced the poster for Mystic River. It's a coin toss whether this shameless movie cribs mostly from Poltergeist, The Ring or The Sixth Sense; in any case, its inconsistencies prove to be the primary culprit, as this silly movie never plays fair even within the parameters of its own supernatural milieu. 
1/2
CURRENT RELEASES
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