Posse

It's mad and bad. It's angrier than a dozen rap artists, and more politically correct than Sinead O'Connor.

It's Posse, the new Hip Hop Western directed by and starring Mario Van Peebles. It's also screwier than last year's election, though it does move a lot faster, and may prove to be more controversial.

But beneath its radical militancy, Posse mainly consists of grunge fashions and cool postures.

There are two ways to describe Posse:
1. It's a post-modernist deconstruction of the ruling-class ideological text of the tradi­tional Western, and a demystification of its oppressive racial legacy.
2. The script is a crazy quilt stitched together from about 40 other movies. A
large chunk of Posse is a mix of parts of The Magnificent Seven, Nevada Smith, Once Upon a Time in the West and Heaven's Gate.

Added to this stew are elements from some of the underground classics of the 1970s, including a wardrobe from El Topo, and a radical chic attitude inherited from Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song. The director of the latter was Melvin Van Peebles, Mario's father, which provides a sense of tradition (though little else).

Melvin is also in the cast, along with a large list of other oddly prominent figures who have almost no reason for being there. Isaac Hayes and Big Daddy Kane hang around just long enough to get blasted, while Pam Grier and Paul Bartel look as if they accidentally wandered in from another movie.

Posse has more cameos than the "We Are the World" video.

Not surprisingly, Posse is screamingly incoherent. It has high energy and lots of great visuals, but it just doesn't make sense. Van Peebles wants an over-the-top, mythic Western, but he mostly ends up with missed opportunities. He wants to celebrate the black cowboy, but ends up creating an allegorical apology for youth gangs.

The white man's West is repeatedly pre­sented as racist, decadent and crazy. When we arrive at the black Utopia of Freemanville, it has fallen into a state of apathy, decadence and decrepitude. In a West this rotten, it is amazing that the Posse gang doesn't just shoot everyone (actually, they almost do).

In his previous film, New Jack City, Mario Van Peebles came across as a strong and witty action film director. With Posse, however, he wields a heavy hand that lacks warmth or humor.

Even worse, his political pose smacks more of pop glitter than of heart-felt conviction. As the movie's hero, Van Peebles is out to avenge his peoples' degra­dation by redneck loonies, but he looks too much like he just sauntered off of Rodeo Drive to be believable.

Where's Jim Brown when you need him?

Angie

Martha Coolidge has served enough time in the Hollywood grind mill to apply for workers' comp. Despite her directorial debut with the con­troversial documentary Not A Pretty Picture, and the highly praised romantic comedy Valley Girl, Coolidge has spent nearly a decade trying to gain commercial footing. She did her time on TV with Sledge Hammer, and she barely survived directing several forgettable teenage flicks. Rambling Rose finally returned her to critical favor, and Lost in Yonkers made her bankable, Now, with Angie, Coolidge finally has found that magical mix of feminist concern and money-making mirth that will place her in Hollywood's front rank.

In many ways, Angie seesaws so wildly between orig­inality and cliche that it repeatedly threatens to implode into a sticky mess of predictable moments. It's littered with enough typical statements about Italian-American culture and slightly dumb male behavior to qualify as a talk show topic. Most of this material rings true, although we've seen it too many times before. But under Coolidge's direc­tion, Angie maneuvers some neat, sharp turns through this familiar landscape.

The story focuses on the lead character's (Geena Davis) discovery of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy — and, more impor­tantly, her realization that the circumstances offer an opportunity for her to finally understand both herself and her parents.

Which isn't easy. Angie's father refuses to say anything about his first wife — her mother — who fled the family when Angie was only three. But then, her father has the habit of not saying much about anything until it's too late to matter. Much the same is true of her boyfriends, Vinnie and Noel.

Davis successfully plays her part with a sure mix of innocent charm and well-placed despair. But it's Coolidge who should finally earn some popular recogni­tion, as a filmmaker who knows that being mainstream doesn't mean being brain dead, Angie is a delightful surprise.

The Ref

Personally, I always thought that Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was a very funny play. Apparently, so did the makers of The Ref. This new vehicle for the otherwise sputtering screen career of Denis Leary (Gunmen) takes an odd dive into play­wright Edward Albee's bumpy terrain of familial angst and cold-hearted spite. The Ref is ultimately too soft to pull it off, but, at times, it comes close to being a genuinely funny thrashing of dysfunctional living. Leary may have finally found a movie he can click in.

Leary is almost inci­dental to the plot of The Ref, yet, paradoxically, his character is the thread that finally binds the whole pack­age together. He plays a professional burglar who's come to the quaint town of Old Baybrook to pull off a major job that will set him up for life — if everything goes as planned. Instead, he runs into cat spray, a massive alarm system and a dog named Can­nibal. So much for the early retirement plan.

His escape plan works no better. A pre­maturely hasty retreat by his getaway driver leaves Leary stranded and fending for him­self.

So he hijacks a couple —Judy Davis (Barton Fink) and Kevin Spacey (Henry and June) — in hopes of using their house as a hideaway. Leary quickly discovers that he should have stayed with Cannibal.

Davis and Spacey turn out to be hostages from hell. Their marriage crashed three years ago, and apparently they stay together only because they're so good at making each other miserable. Davis is embittered by the emotional aloofness of her mother-dominated husband. Spacey is a passive/aggressive who can't forgive his wife for an affair she had, despite the fact that he was ignoring her needs at the time she had it. They both want Leary to take their side. He just want them to shut up.

Instead, Leary becomes their de facto marriage counselor. He's got the qualifica­tions: he's seen a lot of Oprah and he's pack­ing a 9mm. Besides, the police have the town sealed tight, and he's not going any­where.

Little in The Ref is original. It possesses the crass crudeness of Ruthless People, mixed with a mellowed version of The War of the Roses. The movie's brittle tone and bitter potshots are actually softer than they sound, and it spends its concluding moments skat­ing around a false sentimentality that it manages to avoid by only the slimmest of margins.

Nevertheless, The Ref is funny, thanks in large part to the solid acting jobs done by Davis and Spacey, as well as Leary's fast-paced sense of angry humor and straight-to-the-bone absurdity. He's mad as hell, but he knows that he's going to have to take it — over and over again.

And that quality is what makes The Ref a primal howl of comedy.

What's Eating Gilbert Grape

There was an incredible overload of movies lined up for release last sum­mer. So many, in fact, that the studios are still releasing them. What's Eating Gilbert Grape has been stewing in the limbo that exists between limited screenings and the video store since last June. It has only now gained wide-release sta­tus, due to the surprise Oscar nomination of Leonardo DiCaprio for best supporting actor. Otherwise, these grapes would be rot­ting on a shelf at Blockbuster.

The long wait to see this movie has been less than worth it, however. This pastoral tale about small-town, dead-end melancho­lia take forever to deliver a Generation X variation on The Last Picture Show, minus Ben Johnson and the movie theater setting. What it does offer is a rural family with a fruity name, a missing father, a humongous mother, a sampling of mild-mannered but confused youths and some great shots of Texas standing in for Iowa.

Johnny Depp brings his usual blankness to the character of Gilbert Grape, who's the sole source of support for his odd family. His mother has slid completely into a fat-laden depression as a result of father Grape's desertion, and his two sisters have become a Jekyll-and-Hyde pairing of bitterness and nurturing. Then there's his younger brother Arnie (DiCaprio), a severely retarded boy with an unexplained obsession for climbing water towers.

Gilbert also has romantic problems. He's grown disinterested in his affair with the local lust-driven, middle-aged housewife (Mary Steenburgen) and finds himself slow­ly (very slowly) becoming involved with a young girl (Juliette Lewis) who's traveling with her grandmother in a camper.

The whole film plays like a college grad­uate's first novel, and Lasse Hallstrom's direction lingers way too long on every minor point. Only the excellent photogra­phy by Sven Nykvist ultimately maintains one's interest.

Clear and Present Danger

Harrison Ford is back as Jack Ryan, the world's oldest boy scout, in Clear and Present Danger, the latest movie adaptation of a Tom Clancy bestseller. As loyal as Clancy's legion of technolo­gy-obsessed fans are, howev­er, the movie may not earn top classification with them — it's thrown out most of the novel's techno-babble and underplayed Clancy's right-wing politics. In some ways, Clear and Present Danger is sur­prisingly dove-like, especially in its presentation of a vicious Colombian drug lord who comes across as a more sym­pathetic character than mem­bers of the U.S. government.

Wall-to-wall hypocrisy is the linchpin to Clear and Present Danger, with Ford play­ing the only honest man within an intelligence system that's so busy selling every­one out that the CIA could open a stall on Wall Street. Ford's high-level investiga­tion into the murder of a friend of the president (Don­ald Moffat) leads him to Bo­gota and promptly sets him up as the fall guy for a clan­destine war being conducted by his own people in the jun­gles of Colombia. Granted, it seems odd that such a sea­soned spy could be caught off guard by the notion that the president is capable of lying. Maybe he didn't work for the Company during the Nixon years.

In some ways, Clear and Present Danger is the best of the Jack Ryan movies. Its plot logistics aren't as confusing as those in Hunt for Red October, and unlike Patriot Games, this film offers some real thrills. Unfortunately, it's way too long and during its last third, the story falls apart at the seams.

The Mask

Jim Carrey is hot. So hot that you can almost feel your ears burning from the Hollywood buzz currently swarming around his career. Ace Ventura: Pete Detective was an incredibly dumb movie, but it reaped an equally incredible pile of loot at the box office. Carrey's lat­est movie, The Mask, proba­bly also will be a smashing success. Which isn't bad for a guy who's simply a '90s ver­sion of Jerry Lewis, and whose new movie is basically a revamping of The Nutty Professor.

In The Mask, Carrey plays Stanley Ipkiss, your average Everyman with a rubber face. Ipkiss spends his days slaving as an underpaid bank clerk and his nights as the world's greatest loser at love. Natural­ly, we feel for him — he's more pathetic looking than his dog.

That is, until he discovers the mask of Loki (one of those Norse gods who hang out in comic books). As soon as he slips it on, he becomes a super-human horny guy. Af­ter this point, Carrey spends most of the movie stealing sight gags from old Warner Brothers' cartoons while chasing women. He's not the world's most impressive su­perhero.

Along he way, Carrey takes off with the girlfriend of a mobster (Cameron Diaz) and the guy's money. Mean­while, Carrey's alter ego is be­ing doggedly pursued by a cop (Peter Riegert) and a re­porter (Amy Yasbeck). The only thing he really has to fear, however, is a plagiarism suit from Bugs Bunny's lawyers.

The computer animation in The Mask is great, but the plot falls flat when it deals with anything that wasn't worked out on a storyboard. Most of the jokes are stale, the script is virtually nonexis­tent and watching Carrey be­gins to grate on your nerves — even worse than seeing Jerry do his Labor Day telethon.

The Return of the Genuine Imitation Superstar

When he first appeared on the screen, you knew that he was big. Too big, in fact. His entire body was a large, tense bulge and his long unruly hair accentuated the wide and wolfish sneer of his face. His brief appearance was a non-speaking part, so he didn't have to worry about his flawed English or his improbable accent that sounded like a bad Prussian gag. All he had to do was remove his shirt and glare. He managed to do both on cue.

It was 1973 and a body builder was desperately trying to gain a foothold in Hollywood. The film was Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye and, despite its more recent critical acclaim, it barely sold popcorn during its original release. The actor with ham hocks for muscles was listed as Arnold Strong. It was the second time he had gone nowhere under that name and he was about to drop the way too literal moniker. If he did succeed in his quest, they would have to build marquees large enough to spell the name Schwarzenegger. He was determined to be a superstar.

Things have changed since '73. He took a crash course in acting and spent intensive hours learning dictation, though his voice still wavers between a Teutonic bark and a lederhosen drawl. He searched for film projects in which his marginal thespian talents and imposing bulk would be an asset rather than a deficit. After a few disastrous run-ins with the press, he quickly learned how to evade and manipulate the media with a near seductive sense of charm. He began training for the role of film star with the grunting persistence of a long distance runner. Everything in his life was increasingly focused on the far off prize called stardom. “No pain, no fame” could have been his motto.

It's twenty years later and his visage hovers over Times Square in the form of a gigantic balloon, looking like a violent stray from the Thanksgiving parade. After the bomb blast at the World Trade Center, it was deemed wise to remove the gun from his helium filled mitt. Now he's holding a large, inflated badge. Arnie's new film, Last Action Hero, is preparing to open and the studio's publicity mill is not about to let any terrorists rain debris on their display.

Floating like a blimp over the Babylon of the New World would seem like an unusual destiny for a man who grew up in one of Austria's most backwater regions. Schwarzenegger was the youngest son of a local police chief who was either a stern disciplinarian or a brute, depending upon one's interpretation of Schwarzenegger's various biographies. His father was also a Nazi, though his party membership is not believed to have amounted to much.

Schwarzenegger and his father were not close. He didn't even go to his father's funeral, fudging an evasive excuse that he later admitted was false. But then, he also didn't go to his brother's funeral. Neither death nor family bonds could stake a claim on Arnie. His attention was elsewhere. And there were many else wheres.

First there were the movies he escaped to as a young boy. In the early 1960s, Europe was inundated with Hercules and countless other Italian-made strong man epics. Steve Reeves, Reg Park, and other lesser known muscle men flexed their way through cloak-and-sandal exploits in which the chest measurements were longer than the plots. As a young teenager, Schwarzenegger was irresistibly drawn to these films. He watched them repeatedly. He singled out Reg Park as the star who most appealed to him as a model. He decided to become a body builder.

The cloak-and-sandal flicks have a single, simple theme. All adversity can be overcome by great physical strength. The stronger the body, the greater the power.

This had to be a heady brew for an adolescent male whose knowledge of the world was most likely composed of a mixture of testosterone and small town provincialism. Though barely a teenager, Schwarzenegger began to devote himself with single minded fervor to the quizzical sport of body building. It didn't matter that he was pushing his body past various, painful thresholds. He was unconcerned about the possible side effects from the steroids he was taking. It wasn't even important that the gym was sometimes closed when he wanted to work out. He would simply break in.

Body building is a strange sport, based as much on aesthetics as on athletics. More posing than grunting takes place during competition and the simmering sweatiness of the contestants' bodies is largely an applied mix of mineral water and oils, a final cosmetic touch to highlight the muscular spectacle. There is a show business quality to a body building competition and the judging process can be notoriously subjective.

There is also plenty of lead way for a determined contestant to undermine his opponent through psychological game playing, false information, and borderline deceit. Arnie quickly became a master of backstage oneupmanship. He had a good intuition for locating the weak links in his opponent's mental armor and he would relentlessly hammer at them with crude efficiency. He came the master of psychological warfare while skirting round the loose rules of competition. When possible, he would have himself assigned to share a room with his chief rival so that he could spend the night tearing into his opponent's deficiencies. Repeatedly, he would trick, humiliate, and crush other competitors and then berate them for what he insisted was their own stupidity.

Long before Conan the Barbarian, Arnie was an advocate of strength uber alles. He was both exploitive and intolerant of any sign of weakness, especially the weakness of trusting him. He would convince people that he was on a water diet, advise them to do the same, and then relish an easy victory over the water-logged hulks he had conned. Occasionally, he would advise both competitors and fans to follow a salt diet, despite the health risk posed by combining massive salt intake with strenuous exercise. Arnie's god-like stature in the body building world was enough to convince some people to try it, and years later he would still regale friends with tales of how sick he made the dieters. Austrian boys like to have fun.

Even during the early years of body building, Schwarzenegger was vocal about his ambition to become a movie star. He was hungry for money and fame and despite his enormous success as a body builder, the money was limited and he was only a celebrity within a narrow, even marginal, arena. He entered numerous business ventures, everything from mail order distribution to real estate, and he even began to seriously study the more engagingly cut throat world of finance. He wanted, however, something more. His talents were meager and his appetite was huge. He was a natural for the merging Hollywood of the 1980s.

It is inconceivable that Schwarzenegger could have become a major film star at any other time in Hollywood history. His lack of acting skills were not, in itself, a particular disadvantage. There have been plenty of stars who had no real talents beyond that of good looks and a pleasing screen personality. Schwarzenegger was amply capable of charm. His looks were a problem. The imposing bulk that made him a champion body builder was a stumbling block to becoming a leading man. He looked like a mutant cartoon character brought to life by some renegade animator.

There were the occasional jobs, like the walk-on in The Long Goodbye. There was the opportunity for major embarrassment in the grade-zilch flick Hercules Goes Bananas. His dubbed voice was almost as ludicrous as the film's hasty plot line that managed to combine Ancient Greece with modern day New York in a time travel tale best noted for its delirious cheapness.

There would even be a significant stab at real acting in Stay Hungry, a poorly received but audacious work in which Schwarzenegger did a surprisingly good turn at playing a character much like himself. Few people saw the film, but those who did were impressed by his unique form of casual brashness. Even more important would be the documentary Pumping Iron which was fashioned as a feature-length advertisement for Arnie. It garnered good critical notices and a limited art-house release.

But Arnie wasn't looking for a retinue of espresso sipping art-house buffs. He wanted to be a movie star, and movies play to a pack, popcorn chomping house. But it was also the 1970s and the American cinema was undergoing a brief but vital burst of serious creative energy. The decade belonged to Altman, Scorsese, and Coppola. It was a period of drama and realism. Arnie was mismatched, like a large man in a cheap, tight suit. Then he lucked out. The American cinema went to hell in a handbag.

The '70s began with a restless youthful spirit and ended in a quagmire of arrested adolescence. The urban theater gave way to the suburban multiplex, directors gave way to producers, and everybody gave way to the special effects unit. Fantasy was king and everything had to be big, if not bigger than big. Lots of things had to blow up in huge, heaping explosions while the leading man mows down two thousand stunt men in Hollywood's courageous fight against the dreaded Vietnam War Syndrome.

The world was ready for Arnie. He was big enough, tough enough, and, most importantly, transparent enough. He could occupy the screen and not conflict with the special effects. He could kill countless men and still look boyish; he could hold an audience's attention for two hours and not elicit a single emotional response. He could act naturally and not really mean it. He became the ideal superstar of the '80s: a hi-tech automaton thriving on the culture's basest dreams.

Some of the the dreams were even brilliantly daffy. Schwarzenegger went to audition for the lead role of a low-budget production called The Terminator. It had an unknown director whose last film had barely played the drive-in circuit and a screwy script that had been stitched together from several Outer Limits teleplays by Harlan Ellison (an initially disputed point that ended quietly in a settlement and a credit reference). Arnie was under consideration to be the hero, but he took a liking to the villain instead. As the killer android, he got to blow away lots of people without having to mangle his way through too much dialog. His build would do the talking. Besides, he already had the hard, glacier-like profile of a robot. As an artificial man, he was a natural.

For once, Schwarzenegger's instincts were right. The high energy of The Terminator more than compensated for the ponderous presence he had previously cut in Conan the Barbarian. Likewise, the film's strange mix of right-wing politics and feminist posturing made it a perfect complement to the already rambling Age of Reagan. More importantly, it was a hit. A huge hit. Arnie's name was now firmly linked to a runaway box office sensation.

Not that there weren't still problems. His attempt to play a more conventional role in the thriller Raw Deal was a minor misstep. There was simply no way to explain a muscle-bound undercover cop with a German accent. Commando was a little too close to the sloppier side of the drive-in venue for some viewers taste. The same could be said about The Running Man, though its futuristic attack on mass media had an endearing sense of audacity. Not many films can successfully pander to its audience while simultaneously chastising them for their low standards.

Despite the contradictions, Schwarzenegger became the cinematic phenomenon of the 1980s. Granted, he was often celebrated for doing things that mere mortals did every day. He walked and, increasingly, talked! He even began to smile in his films and in Raw Deal he almost has sex. In fact, the contradictions fueled Arnie's career. Schwarzenegger has long been notorious for his reactionary politics and public musings about the need for the special few to lead the ignorant multitude. Many of his films, however, have been careful to surround him with enough politically correct references to defuse any possible suspicion that there might be an icy arrogance at his core. By his own admission, Arnie primarily believes in power. Not surprisingly, he wants to direct. His first feature-length effort as a director was the cable TV remake of Christmas In Connecticut. Suddenly, he wants to do romantic comedy. Like the decade that bore him, none of it really makes any sense.

Though his career was the result of a series of well-made yet inexpensive action flicks, Arnie has become the king of the budget-busting epic. Both Total Recall and Terminator 2 shot past the $100 million mark during their productions. Studio accounting is as flexible as the theory of relativity, but its highly unlikely that either film has yet to recover their costs. For his new film, Last Action Hero, Columbia Pictures wants to launch a rocket into space. It is appropriate. Arnie's too big for a mere planet like Earth. He needs the universe to conquer.

1. Butler, George: Arnold Schwarzenegger: A Portrait, New York,NY
Simon & Schuster, 1990.
2. Green, Tom: Arnold!, New York, NY; St. Martin's Press, 1987.
3. Leigh, Wendy: Arnold: An Unauthorized Biography, Chicago, IL., Congdon
& Weed, Inc., 1990.

Needful Things

Like any movie villain worth his salt, the devil always has more fun than any hero. In his numerous screen appearances, the big evil dude usually gets the best lines, the best clothes and the finest ironies. The good guys usually had the dubious honor of being morally upright, excruciatingly noble and totally boring.

That's why Mick Jagger never wrote a song about them.

Unfortunately, Needful Things dutifully follows this predictable path. ( So Mick probably won't do a song about it, either.) The strongest thing the movie has in its favor is Max von Sydow as a flippant Satan. His clothes are a bit shabby, but he drives an antique Mercedes. He even gets the girl, in a manner of speaking.

What von Sydow lacks is a film to go with his performance. He misses out on that one.

In Needful Things, the devil comes to Castle Rock, Maine posing as an antiques dealer. The town looks like it's stacked to the rafters with antiques, but the locals dash to his shop anyway. (Hey, he's the devil. He could sell ice to Eskimos.) With each pur­chase, the buyer is lured into a subtle pact that will pit neighbor against neighbor, hus­bands against wives and winos against their bartenders. (I don't know about Maine, but where I come from, this is business as usual.)

The town erupts into social anarchy, and a lot of characters we've never seen go smashing into each other with their pickup trucks. The only thing that stands between Castle Rock and the fiery pit is the town's sheriff (Ed Harris).

The sheriff is pure, noble and slightly dense. He's also apt to climb onto a soap box and set the town straight with a good tongue-lashing. In the end, though, he gets the girl too (but not quite in the manner he expected).

The funniest part of Needful Things is its coming attractions trailer. Virtually all of von Sydow's best lines are used in it, and it was edited with a better sense of pacing than the movie, which drags.

Needful Things wastes the talents of its scriptwriter, W.D. Richter, as well as those of von Sydow and Harris.

Richter is one of the wittiest fantasy writers in Hollywood, but you wouldn't know it from this movie. All of his best stuff is in the trailer, too. Maybe they'll bring the previews back.

No Escape

Many years ago, the movie Escape From New York became the target of cheap ridicule. Too bad. It's actually a fairly good film. Compared to a clone production like No Escape, the John Carpenter original looks like a master­piece.

No Escape borrows from everyone, but it has no idea what to do with all of the material that it's shamelessly stolen. Along with pieces of Escape From New York, you get a dash of Lord of the Flies, huge heapings of stuff from all of the Mad Max movies and a bit of Robinson Crusoe on the side. This flick didn't have a screenplay, it had a collage.

Ray Liotta (Good Fellas) plays a Special Forces officer in the year 2022, who has a slight problem with accepting authority. Presumably, that's why he kills his commanding officer, He's sentenced for life to the island penal colony of Absalom (whoa, some symbolism here). The island is divided between the primitive and vio­lent Outsiders and the civilized and peaceful Insiders, the latter of whom are led by a benevolent figure called Father (get Freud on the phone right now).

No Escape has enough violence for 10 movies, but it's surprisingly dull, nonetheless. Casting choices don't improve the situation any: B-movie bad guy Lance Hendriksen is an odd choice for Father, while Stuart Wilson (Lethal Weapon III)plays the evil chief of the Outsiders as if he shops for clothes at a Klingon boutique. Incidentally, even the wardrobe in this movie is derived from somewhere else.

PCU

Someone once said that nothing fails as noticeably than comedy. Who­ever said it must have had an advance look at this movie. PCU doesn't simply bomb, it implodes. Keep as far as you can from the screen. The vortex created by this disintegrating mess threatens to pull you into its black hole of total stupidity.

PCU (which stands for "politically cor­rect university")is essentially a '90s version of Animal House, updated in order to take broad swipes at contemporary' activism. The boys and girls of the ex-frat house named The Pit (who are definitely not activists) are convinced that nobody else on campas can take a joke. That's especially true of the university president (Jessica Walter), who's on the verge of shutting down their house. {Not surprisingly, a beer-blast of a party saves them.)

But the real issue here isn't that social activists lack a sense of humor. The real issue is that these characters simply aren't funny. Arrogant, yes. Obnoxious, you bet. Funny? Hell no. By comparison, Animal House is a work of sophisticated, insightful satire.

Beyond the irrefutable fact that it's terrible, two other things are notable about PCU. The script was written by Adam Leff and Zak Penn, alleged authors of Last Action Hero. Amazingly, they've been allowed to keep working. Secondly, PCU marks the directorial debut of Hart Bochner. Bochner is an actor who's probably best known for playing the yuppie slick-talker in Die Hard - the one who inadvertently negotiates his way into a quick execution. Now we know why Alan Rickman shot him.

I Love Trouble

Nick Nolte and Julia Roberts aren't exactly the pair you think of for a
romantic-comedy-thriller that wants to be a mix of The Front Page, The Thin Man and Die Hard. (For that matter, those films aren't what you'd think of in terms of a mix.) The whole concept of I Love Trouble, Nolte and Roberts' new film, is pure gibber­ish, and it takes a rollercoaster ride through every cliche imaginable.

Amazingly, it still comes up a win­ner.

Admittedly, the makers of I Love Trouble seem to be convinced that all hard-hitting newspaper reporters wear expensive designer clothes as they poke around disaster sites and grill witnesses. (In truth, nobody wears high heels to major train derailments anymore. Local reporters wear them only to murder scenes.)

I Love Trouble moves at a surreal, lighting-fast pace that wears almost as well as the expensive trench coats sport­ed by Nolte. (If this review is starting to sound as if it's about wardrobes, that will give you some idea of how fashion-starved some newspaper people really are.)

Nolte plays Peter Brackett, an inves­tigative reporter-turned-columnist for the Chicago Chronicle (read: Tribune). He's so busy promoting his first novel that he doesn't have time to do his work, and is caught trying to recycle an old piece from '85. His brash laziness so impresses his editor, that he sticks Nolte with covering a train wreck. The assignment is cut-and-dried, until Nolte discovers that there's a new scribbler in town who's capable of out-scooping him.

That's Julia Roberts, the hot new talent working for the rival Chica­go Globe (read: Sun-Times). The two quickly find that they have aggres­sive instincts and a total loathing for each other in common. Nolte is a suave, but chauvinistic, newsman who would lie to a woman before he would his bookie. Roberts plays an abrasive macho femme who's accustomed to matching the boys shot for shot. (She also has an uncanny ability to uncover clues in the bottom of bird cages. Nolte's style is more traditional — he rifles through the trash.)

The train wreck story that brought them together turns into a crazed race between the two of them, as they each build a case of drunken negligence by a railroad employee. But the Exxon Valdez takes a sudden turn toward Watergate as it becomes obvious that something more is going on. (After all, stewed railroad workers don't normally hire South American hitmen to take shots at you.)

The plot in I Love Trouble is a decent one, but what really works are the performances by Nolte and Roberts. On paper, their pairing sounds like a bad plate of raw beef and runny ice cream, but the fact that they click so well is a tribute to the routinely underestimated talents of Nolte and the developing skills of Roberts. It's as if they've met onscreen at the exact right moment in each of their careers.

Nolte has traded in his bleary-eyed look for a sleeker self, and displays a sense of comedic timing that his previ­ous roles rarely hinted at. Likewise, Roberts shows a hard-edged spark that successfully breaks from her soft and vulnerable screen past. They're not exactly Tracy and Hepburn, but they're not bad, either.

Though I Love Trouble has a weak habit of parading its thugs as if it were a B flick, it also has the good grace to give the audience a good time by pro­viding some genuine thrills and two engaging characters.

As for the designer clothes, well, we all wear them at this paper.

Thumbelina

Sometimes you just have to pay the devil his due. When it comes to feature length, family-oriented animated movies, Disney Studios has the formula under a virtual copyright. That especially becomes obvious when watching a copycat rival production like Thumbelina.

It has many of the same elements as such Disney movies as Beauty and the Beast and The Little Mermaid, but some­thing is missing. The whole movie comes across more as hard work than fun, and is lacking any endearing charm.

Not that Thumbelina doesn't try to charm. But the movie gets real sweaty in making the effort. Everything is just a little too coy and too cute, and the movie is stuffed full of one too many moments when the viewer is supposed to be emotionally touched. That, combined with nearly a dozen songs by Barry Manilow, threatens the audience with a one-two punch of blandness and sugar overdose.

Admittedly, the flat script to Thumbelina doesn't help. Vaguely adapted from the classic Hans Christian Andersen tale (always be wary of any movie that puts the author's name up front), Thumbe­lina stumbles through a series of minor incidents that has a spookily odd resem­blance to the old adult novel Candy (minus the sex, natural­ly). Everywhere that Thumbelina goes in the movie, there's a man who wants to marry her. Her heart belongs to the Fairy Prince, but he's a bit of a dip who can't get his act together to rescue her for most of the film. Instead, Thum­belina spends her time being pursued by a randy toad who speaks with a really bad Mexican accent.

The animation work in Thumbelina is actually quite good, including some impressive three-dimensional effects. The designs, however, have been largely culled from two very divergent sources: Walt Disney and the Fleischer Brothers. Considering the degree to which Disney and the Fleischer Brothers worked in opposition to each other, it's not surprising that their mix of styles results in an uneven — and slightly schizoid — look. The drawings are well done, but the material doesn't exactly come together.

Thumbelina is a production of Don Bluth, who also created An American Tail. Years ago, when Bluth and his fellow ani­mators originally bolted from the Mouse Factory, he was very vocal about the declining quality of animation at the Disney Studios. It may be time for Bluth to rethink this notion.

Let's face it, there's no zip to his Thumbelina's zip-a-dee-doo-dah.

D2: The Mighty Ducks

Some members of our staff salivate at the mere mention of hockey, arguing that it is the working-man's version of ballet. Personally, I don't get it. Hockey has always struck me as being a bunch of guys on skates beating the crap out of each other with big sticks. As for ballet — I wouldn't mind seeing Swan Lake performed this way.

Hopefully, this will explain why I feel a little under­whelmed by D2: The Mighty Ducks, the sequel to one of the few recent Disney films that actually made a clear profit. The movie is primarily aimed at 12-year-old boys who believe in the Rocky text. Let us now turn to the Gospel according to St. Stallone, sequels II through IV.

Having suffered an injury on an NHL farm team, Emilio Estevez goes back to coaching the Mighty Ducks for the Junior Goodwill Games (Carl Weathers, Rocky IV). Joined by a collection of new players, the Mighty Ducks become Team USA and enter the decadent world of big-time, Pee Wee hockey (Rocky III). A team of foreign upstarts from Iceland mops the rink with them (Rocky IV) and they have to go back to the streets to regain a competitive edge (Rocky II). By the movie's climax, the world is watching as Team USA and Iceland prepare for a rematch that will determine the fate of Mighty Ducks III.

Aside from the fact that it's a little hard to get very worked up about Iceland as a villain, D2 is not too bad of a flick for younger viewers. Its core lesson is that kids should have fun with sports. Unfortunately, D2 also spends a lot of time making product endorsements in a cynical pitch to its young audience.

China Moon

Sex and murder are being stirred together in South Florida again. It's as if the high humidity from the Gulf so thoroughly steams a man's brains that he can't think straight two seconds after meeting an attractive, lethal-mind­ed woman. Years ago, it was William Hurt being played for a sap by Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. Now it's Ed Harris getting the set-up treatment from Madeleine Stowe in China Moon. The main difference is that Harris is slightly smarter, Stowe is more sympathetic, and the plot is duller.

Harris is an efficient but arrogant homicide detective in a small Florida town. He can crack a case in two seconds flat and still have time to go cruising for women at the local bar. However, Stowe rebuffs him on his first try, a gesture that inexplicably hooks him. Before you know it, he's taking her out to dinner and showing off the snub-nosed .38 he wears in his sock.

It could be a promising relationship, except for Stowe's husband (Charles Dance). Hubby is a rich banker who likes to slap her around whenever Stowe asks too many questions about the evenings he spends with his mistress. But Stowe can't quite see her way to divorcing the jerk. Burying him, yeah. But no divorce.

As you can see, China Moon is hopelessly locked into a derived story that is a mishmash of Body Heat, Double Indem­nity and (for real old movie buffs) The File on Thelma Jordan. Beyond that, China Moon doesn't bring much to the party and its plot twists are sloppy and inconsistent. It's strictly a minor genre piece full of rainy nights and murky motives.

But, I'm a sucker for the genre and China Moon manages to deliver a few of the basics. Unfortunately, it doesn't do much else.

The Wedding Banquet

What's love got to do with it? That's one of the questions raised in the American-Chinese comedy The Wedding Banquet. It's an especially tough question to resolve when a man is willing to marry a woman he barely knows, in order to appease his conservative Chinese parents — while hiding from them the truth about his living arrangements with the guy he loves. Wai-Tung (Winston Chao) is one of those young, successful men who exist only in movies. He's a kind hearted real-estate entrepreneur who lives in a brown-stone in Manhattan with his lover Simon (Mitchell Lichtenstein).

It's a great life, except that his parents keep badgering him about marrying a nice Chinese girl. Fortunately, the folks live in Taiwan, and Wai-Tung has distracted them for years with sob stories about how he can't find the right woman. It's just a little white lie — and its consequences are about to hit him with the force of a speeding truck.

Wai-Tung's parents are preparing to visit New York. His father is in declining health and wants to see a grandchild before he dies. Wai-Tung, meanwhile, is between a rock and a hard place: he can't bear the thought of marriage or of telling his parents the truth.

When all seems hopeless, he discovers that one of his tenants is a Chinese artist who will do anything for a Green Card. As luck would have it, Wei-Wei (May Chin) has a habit of falling for handsome gay men. (She's also certain that she can convert Wai-Tung to the joys of heterosexuality.)

The Wedding Banquet is a comedy of manners. It tends to be slow, a little too studied in its delivery and overtly politi­cally correct. But when it works, it's both touching and hysterically funny.

The movie also surprises with a series of twists at the end. Many of Wai-Tung's assumptions about love and family are rather inaccurate, and it takes his wife, his lover and — to an odd degree — his father - to guide him to a compromise that's part Yin and part Yang.

The film is the American debut of Tai­wanese filmmaker Ang Lee, whose work possesses the droll, understated qualities characteristic of films by other New Wave Taiwanese directors such as Edward Yang and Hou Hsiao-hsien.

Like his countrymen, Ang Lee takes seriously the traditions of Chinese family life, even while satirizing them to the max.

The Age of Innocence

Martin Scorsese is one of America's best filmmakers. He's also one of its most limited. His intuitive feel for New York's Italian-American subculture is as hot and vivid as a couple of wise guys letting off steam in a Mafioso dive. Scorsese knows these people and he knows their language. He's the social poet of modern-day New York in all of its gritty, obscene glory.

So what the heck is he doing in the upper-class New York of the 1870s? That question is repeatedly provoked by his latest film, The Age of Innocence.

Based on the novel by Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence is an opulent and extremely leisurely tale of love lost, elusive happiness and life's major compromises. The film is highly stylized and great to look at. But it lacks warmth, and its manners are as stiff as the characters' period costumes.

Daniel Day-Lewis is Newland Archer, a respectable and socially prominent member of New York's early blue-blood society. He is engaged to Winona Ryder, the daughter of a family that's equal­ly prominent in the social registry. Day-Lewis is eager to marry, but Ryder prefers to wait. It's not until half-way through the movie that she finally confides her private doubts about her beau's emotional commitment.

And no wonder she has doubts. The moment Day-Lewis spots Michelle Pfeiffer, he's smitten (though he's too well-bred to fully admit his passion). Pfeiffer is his fiancee's cousin. She's also married (her hus­band is one of those decadent European counts whose excessive behavior sent Pfeif­fer scurrying back to the States) and the subject of much scandalous whispering herself.

The story's repressed emotions and psy­chological nuances are exquisitely expressed in the film's visual detail. Unfortunately, the performances in The Age of Innocence aren't nearly as vivid. Granted, the characters rep­resent a restrained and fastidiously polite age, but they lack an underlying spark. It's as if Scorsese simply hasn't a clue as to what makes these folks tick. So he buries himself in the film's decor.

The director does succeed, however, in making some great technical advances in The Age of Innocence. The matte shots, opti­cal dissolves and jump cuts in the editing are superb.

If only he were as adept at motivating his actors.

Blank Check

Rumor has it that mad scientists have taken control of Disney Pictures. According to these reports, they are stitching together the plot lines of old movies and attempting to artificially inject life into the gruesome monsters that they've creat­ed in their labs. The results are savage, lumbering beasts lacking both heart and soul.

After seeing Blank Check, I firmly believe these tales. It should also be noted that the twisted creatures from the mouse factory are also lacking a brain. Maybe that's why these dismal failures come lurching toward us every week in such blind ignorance of their inevitable demise.

And the scary part is that Blank Check isn't even the worst of the lot. It's god awful, but Disney has recently produced even worse flicks. The really horrible thing is that this wretched movie about greedy, dumb kids who one-up greedy, dumb adults just might score some greedy, dumb bucks at the box office. After all, it's a clone of Home Alone — minus the sentimentality of the original.

Miguel Ferrer emasculates himself in the humiliating role of a stupid crook who accidentally hands a kid (Brian Bonsall) a blank check after backing over the tike's bike. Bonsall proceeds to clean out the million dollars that Ferrer has stashed away in a bank account. With so much dough burn­ing massive holes in his pockets, the little nipper goes on the biggest spending spree since Reagan trickled down the economy. Ferrer is furious. He was saving the money for a decent haircut.

I told you, these scientists are mad. They've actually created a movie that makes me nostalgic for The Parent Trap. Perhaps it's time for a band of torch-bearing peasants to attack the walls of the Magic Kingdom. Baron von FrankenDisney must be stopped.

The Last Days of Chez Nous

Gillian Armstrong is more than just a critically prominent woman film­maker. She's also a survivor of the New Australian cinema movement.

With her latest work, The Last Days of Chez Nous, Armstrong returns to her roots in both style and subject matter. She also returns to the basic points that made the New Australian cinema one of the more exciting film events of the late '70s: it's an intelligent film that wrestles with the pecu­liar contradictions of Australian society.

The Chez Nous of the tide is a small, ramshackle house in Sydney. Its peeling paint and barely functioning kitchen are the primary motifs in the film's leisurely tale of domestic collapse.

The overwhelming clutter indicates that no attention is being paid to basic caretaking of the house — and serves as metaphor for the lead characters' disintegrating marriage

At the center of Chez Nous is Beth (Lisa Harrow), a middle-aged writer who is emotionally blocked in her relationship with her French husband, J.P. (Bruno Ganz). He insists that she wants too much resolution, but Beth doesn't appear to be capable of resolving or coping with much of anything — especially the intrusive visit by her sister and her domineering father.

Beth knows that at certain, crucial levels, she simply is not in touch with her feelings. The core of her problem finally becomes apparent during a protracted, seemingly pointless drive through the Outback with her demeaning father. He's a man of few words, most of which take shape as nasty comments about what an idiot Beth is. The cruel commentary serves as a mask to hide his own possessive, nearly incestuous atti­tude toward her.

Meanwhile, back on the home front, J.P. begins an affair with Beth's sister.

There's more to Chez Nous than simple domestic melodrama and Aussie angst, however.

The film conveys a general sense of estrangement that belongs, particularly, to Australians. Like the rock formations in the Outback, Australian society often possesses a singularly impressive, but barren, look. As J.P. put it, while seeing a photo of an area visited by Beth and her father, "What a dreadful looking country."

The Last Days of Chez Nous is undoubt­edly Armstrong's best work since her first, and critically acclaimed, film, My Brilliant Career. It's also her finest statement yet about the psyche of her own country, which exists somewhere between families' confining homes and nature's empty space

Batman: Mask of the Phantasm

In the '60s, nerdy young couch potatoes watched Star Trek and Batman. As they matured, their tastes grew more sophisticated. Now, they watch...well, Star Trek and Batman. But in each case, the new shows are far superior to the originals.

The producers of Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, an animated movie extension of the Fox Network animated series (minus Robin), were wise enough to remain faith­ful to the TV version. In fact, this fidelity is the movies strongest asset. If you like the current TV show, you'll like the movie. If you don't like the show, why would you go see the film, anyway? (I'll lay my cards on the table: I like the TV show.)

The movie's main character, as is the boob tube version's, is Bruce Wayne. As most of the civilized world knows, Bruce leads a peculiar life. By day, he's a moody millionaire who's never quite recovered from the murder of his par­ents by street thugs. But at night, he's a dif­ferent guy altogether. Some would even say he's batty. (If they appreciate bad puns, that is.) But hey, lots of people like to get all dressed up and head downtown in a heavily armed vehicle. (It really is safer that way.)

In Mask of the Phantasm, Batman quickly discovers that he's not the only hooded hombre who's battling Gotham's worst citi­zens. A ghostly creature called the Phantasm is rubbing out the local gang bosses — and the killings are being blamed on the Bat. A corrupt DA orders the police to bag Bat­man dead. The mob takes a different approach. They hire The Joker to do the job.

This would put a damper on anyone's day, but Brucie baby has other problems, too. A lost love has re-entered his life, and we know that, somehow, she's involved in he killings. It's a dark night for the Caped Crusader when he confronts the ancient dilemma of costumed vigilantes: deciding between love and his quirky hobby.

Mask of the Phantasm, like the TV show, has a reasonably strong plot. Granted, it's written for 12-year-old boys, but at least there's an actual script involved (unlike Tim Burton's run-amok production of Batman Returns). This new animated movie is more serious than the satirical '60s series, and is closer in spirit to the original comics.

Mask of the Phantasm does have its weak­nesses, however. The story relies too heavily on flashbacks — nearly half the film is flash­back. It's as if the movies creators were try­ing to do a cartoon version of The Conformist.

The movie's greatest and least forgivable fault is the poor quality of the animation. The graphics are a great mix of film noir and Art Deco, but they're done on the cheap, and the animation is limited. Come on, it's a feature film — spend the money to do it right.

So the newest Batman isn't great, but it isn't all bad, either.

And, of course, The Joker gets all of the best lines. That's the real reason why he smiles so much.

On Deadly Ground

Steven Seagal doesn't like pollution. It makes him mad. So mad that he has to kick the stuffing out of six trillion bad guys and blow everything up.

Roughly speaking, that's the plot of On Deadly Ground, Seagal's message movie on environmentalism. As screwy as it sounds, the movie kinda works. In fact, I'm starting to like the mindless, PC action genre.

In the tradition of Kung Fu and Billy Jack, Seagal plays a sensitive guy who knows how to handle himself. Early on, he's forced to beat up a coupla dozen racist oil workers. After mopping the place up with them, he gives the boys a pep talk on how they need to get in touch with their sensitive side. His Tire Iron John approach must be effective — from the way they're moaning on the floor, they must be in touch with something sensitive.

Michael Caine plays a villain who doesn't have a sensitive side. He does, how­ever, have a virtual time bomb of an oil refinery and doesn't give a hoot about lay­ing waste to the Alaskan tundra. Unfortu­nately for Caine, he's the kind of movie baddie who employs only bungling hitmen. Seagal survives their attempts to kill him, then manages to meet an elderly shaman and his (obligatory) beautiful grand-daugh­ter (Joan Chen).

Seagal and the shaman have a brief debate about whether he's a bear or simply a mouse hiding from the hawks (remember, we're getting mystical and metaphoric here). Then he has a face-to-face with Mother Earth herself, who sends him on a spiritual quest to save the environment. But neither Seagal nor his fans are much for spiritual quests, so he champions Mother Earth with about 40 tons of (recyclable) bullets and (environmentally safe) high explosive, instead. He's one serious dude when it comes to fighting pollution.

The movie's final minutes are spent with Seagal lecturing the audience about the evils of environmental destruction. Let's give this boy the Smokey the Bear award.

P.S. Don't litter the bus stop with this paper — Seagal may be standing nearby.

Philadelphia

If you read nothing but the Village Voice, you'd think that Jonathan Demme was the only important filmmaker alive. That isn't, however, a universally shared opinion. Granted, the Academy game him virtually every award it could think of for Silence of the Lambs, but that doesn't mean he deserved them. Demme's tendencies toward social awareness are often more inter­esting than his cinematic execution.

But with his new film, Philadelphia, Demme pulls it off. In many ways, it's his finest film to date — and that has nothing to do with the hot-button story topic. Philadelphia is hardly the first movie to deal with the issues of homosexuality or AIDS. A gay lawyer may Be the most unique twist it brings to the screen, but, even there, L.A. Law beat Demme to the punch.

Tom Hanks plays an aggressive young attorney with a prestigious Philadelphia firm. He enjoys his new status. So much so, that he can barely keep from smirking when he upstages co-star Denzel Washington, a scrappy ambulance-chaser, in a zoning fight.

Hanks' career fast-track is blocked by several obstacles, however. He's a closeted gay who's working for a rigidly homophoic firm. He has AIDS. A lesion appears on his face the same day he's promoted. It isn't long before he's fired on a trumped-up charge of incompetence.

Hanks wants to sue, but no one's willing to touch the case. Not even Washington, who otherwise appears to be willing to do anything for a buck. In fact, Washington doesn't even want to be in the same room with Hanks — he despises gays and is frightened witless by AIDS. In a somewhat unlikely plot twist, these are the very factors than convince him that he's the ideal mouthpiece for Hanks' case.

Passing moments of implausibility are recurring minor flaws in Philadelphia. Another weakness is the film's extremely simplistic structure: there are good guys and bad guys, and no shades of gray in between. At one extreme, Washington quickly over­comes his deeply rooted prejudices as he fights the good fight. At the other extreme, the old men in Hanks' firm are totally immersed in unthinking bigotry (and don't mind saying so on the witness stand).

Luckily, Hanks and Washington are both able to act beyond the two-dimensional roles provided for them by the movie's script. It's with their performances that Philadelphia really kicks to life, as their legal odd couple zig zags a path through anger, pain and idealism. Washington is especially good as a sly shyster whose courtroom tac­tics combine street smarts with subtle but deadly jabs.

For once, Jonathan Demme lives up to his reputation. Philadelphia really is that good.

Heaven and Earth

Oliver Stone is an extremely impor­tant filmmaker. We know, because he keeps telling us so. Because he's such a major master of moviedom, he gets to make long films stuffed full of big, serious statements. In Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, Stone brilliantly argued that war is hell. In JFK, he convinced us that Kennedy is dead. With Heaven and Earth, Ollie returns to the battlefield.

Heaven and Earth is Stone's latest install­ment in his Vietnam lecture series. This time, however, he's telling us the Viet­namese side of the story. And from a woman's viewpoint, too. (Of course, this is from a director whose pomposity is equaled only by his chauvinism. But why complain? He cracked the Kennedy case, didn't he?)

In its favor, Heaven and Earth has the memoirs of Le Ly Hayslip (played by new­comer Hiep Thi Le), on which the story is based. Having survived the horrors and degrada­tions of the war, she's provided Americans with several accessible accounts of the expe­rience. In fact, you may want to read her books — they make more sense than the movie.

Presented in Stone's typical sledgeham­mer fashion, Le Ly's story becomes a numb­ing series of B-movie atrocities. Within the first 90 minutes of this long ride, her village is torched by the French, seized by the Viet Cong and finally leveled by the U.S. Army. Meanwhile, Le Ly is tortured by the South Vietnamese, raped by the VC and prostituted by the Americans. And it all happens so fast that she doesn't even have time to catch her breath.

Then she meets Tommy Lee Jones, the nice Marine who wants to marry her. He whisks her off to San Diego, where they live with his mommy (Debbie Reynolds). There, Le Ly discovers supermarkets, color TV and "Vietnam Vet" syndrome —Jones turns out to be a ticking time bomb of delayed stress.

In the hands of a better filmmaker, Heav­en and Earth might have been a powerful movie. But Stone is so busy beating the audience over the head with every obvious point that the story loses its emotional impact. What's more, the movie's chronolo­gy has a jagged feel to it, as if huge chunks of scenes were lopped out in a final edit. After a while, it's difficult to even keep track of which war is being fought.

But maybe you should see Heaven and Earth anyway. You never know — Prof. Stone may hit us up with a pop quiz.

Forrest Gump

Tom Hanks spends most of Forrest Gump sitting on a bus stop bench in Savannah, Georgia, spinning out the strange tale of his life to anyone who happens to pass by. It's a narrative device as lightweight as the floating feather that opens and closes the film, but the movie is a substantial — and very off-beat — journey through 30 years of American history. It's also a surprisingly effective and sentimental odyssey, as Hanks' character stumbles through a life that's an odd combo of destiny and luck.

Forrest Gump is born with strong legs, a bad back and an IQ that's considered slight­ly below normal, even in his home state of Alabama. The only thing he has in his favor is a mother (Sally Field) who's determined to do anything to get him into a proper school. Well, that and his own blank-faced sense of self-confidence, which is firmly rooted in an ability to quietly accept anything that hap­pens. All of Gump's life turns into an acci­dental success story, as he inadvertently becomes a football star, a war hero, a lead­ing speaker for the peace movement and a millionaire.

Despite rising to such pinnacles, the only thing Gump wants is to be married to his childhood sweetie (Robin Wright), even though he sees her only once a decade. His phenomenal luck with history doesn't do him any good where his heart is concerned, so Gump wanders through most of the major social events of the '60s in search of his fiancee.

Forrest Gump is an exceedingly weird movie, and it walks a dangerously thin line between grim farce and warped melodrama. But it works — albeit it in a strange way — by presenting a baby boomer guide to mod­ern history. The icons of the age make their dutiful appearance as Gump naively cruises in and out of celebrities' lives. He teaches Elvis how to dance, trades barbs with John Lennon, innocently moons Lyndon Johnson and helps to set Richard Nixon on the road to impeachment. But the only thing that registers in Gump's mind as he retells the stories is that most of the famous people he knew were "shot by some guy."

Forrest Gump is blessed with a superb performance by Hanks. After his dramatic success in Philadelphia, Hanks appears deter­mined to hold onto his new status as a seri­ous actor; certainly he's one of the few "stars" who could pull off such a quirky lead role.

Robert Zemeckis' unexpectedly intelli­gent direction is the real surprise in Forrest Gump. Best known for the Back to the Future trilogy and Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the filmmaker has rarely displayed the emotion­al skill or personal touches that run through Forrest Gump so strongly. It's as if he's been sitting on his own talent for years, and final­ly is cutting loose with a masterful and touching production.

Jason's Lyric

Some films have the power to make you rethink your atti­tude. That's certainly true of Jason's Lyric. It was while watching this mishmash of a Freudian gangster movie that I sud­denly found myself reconsidering Sugar Hill (Wesley Snipes' brooding gangster film). Like most critics, I gave Snipes movie a sound dissing for its half-baked existentialism that never got out of low gear. But it of­fered some memorable moments, and at least it had the guts to stick to its offbeat brand of loony sincerity. Jason's Lyric travels through some of the same turf, but Sugar Hill emerges as a masterpiece in com­parison to this tired exercise in frat­ricidal angst.

The distinctive feature of Jason's Lyric is its use of the ghettos and open countryside of Houston as a location for a minor tale about two brothers whose lives are doomed to violent explosion. Jason (Allen Payne) is the straight-laced older brother who's, chosen to pursue a clean life as a wage slave for an ap­pliance company. Bakeem Wood­bine plays Josh, the younger sibling, who's opted for the gangbanger road. Despite their differences, the two men are emotionally locked to­gether by the long-suppressed secret about which one of them acciden­tally killed their father (Forest Whitaker in a brief appearance that's almost too good for this movie).

Along for the ride is Jada Pinkett as Lyric, the nice girl whom Jason falls in love with. Unfortunately, the romantic side Of this movie is lifted, for the most part, from the weaker moments of Poetic Justice (another film that was better than many crit­ics gave it credit for being). Add to this an ending that borrows heavily from the old James Cagney picture Public Enemy, and you've got a movie that groans under the weight of its own unfulfilled pretensions

Blue Sky

Long before his death in 1991, director Tony Richardson's career had al­ready died. Thirty years ago, he was riding high on the cinematic waves of the British invasion with the enormous success of Tom Jones, as well as the dubious controversies sur­rounding his film version of The Loved One. Richardson was totally fab — for at least a whole 15 minutes. But there's an old saying that "all glory is but fleeting," and Richardson's fame had the fleetest feet imaginable. By the end of the 1970s, Richardson was a prime contender to be a question in "Trivial Pursuit."

Remembering this rapid rise and fall is one of the few things that makes Blue Sky, Richardson's last film, almost worth watching. Filmed in 1991, before Richardson began to succumb to the effects of AIDS, Blue Sky stands as the inadvertent summation of a directing career that was often wasted on pop cultural conceits that were more short-lived than the Nehru jacket. Parts of Blue Sky play almost as if Richardson wanted to be a serious filmmaker again. But the effort was too little, too late, in a career that had stum­bled more often than a one-legged line dancer.

Blue Sky's main plot combines sex with nuclear politics. Set in the pre-test ban treaty days of 1962, the movie focuses on Tommy Lee Jones and Jessica Lange as an army couple whose lives are roughly divided be­tween atomic explosions and marital fall-out. Jones plays a military scientist whose job is to measure a re­gion's radiation levels after test bombs are detonated in it. But most­ly, he spends his time trying to keep up with his wife's numerous affairs. Lange is one of those fantasy wom­en favored by filmmakers, one part man-eating tigress and one part child-like bride. Unfortunately for Jones, his character is supposed to be attracted to both parts, which leaves him playing the sensitive sap role.

Especially when they arrive at his new base. Lange begins a fling with the base commander (Powers Boothe) almost immediately, while hubby is stuck at ground zero in Nevada. Unable to deal with Lange's affair, Jones tackles the se­crecy cloaking the army's nuclear contamination of the local civilian population.

Unfortunately, the thermody­namics of the two stories never mesh — and Richardson falters one last time.

Bitter Moon

Director Roman Polanski denies that his new film, Bitter Moon, contains any autobiographical elements. Apparently, it's just a coincidence that Peter Coyote's expatriate character comes across as a taller and slightly more demented version of Polanski. It's also just a coincidence that the role of Coyote's French wife, the ever-changing, often kinky Mimi, is played by Polanski s wife, Emmanuelle Seigner. And it's probably just happenstance that Coyote's character is as mentally stuck in Paris as Polanski was, for a while, legally marooned in France. (Is the LAPD still looking for him?)

But then, Bitter Moon has a story that's built as much upon accidents as it is on sex. And most of the film is about sex — good sex, bad sex, wild sex and really bizarre sex. Most of all, it's about two lovers whose mutual passion is based largely on their need to totally humiliate each other. If you're into degradation as a competitive sport, you'll love this movie. If not, you'll find that Bitter Moon is one long drag that (finally) reaches an obvious conclusion.

Hugh Grant and Kristin Scott-Thomas play an English couple who are sailing across the Black Sea on their way to India. They're celebrating their seventh anniver­sary, which is movieland's way of saying that they've become bored with each other. Coyote plays a crippled American who's traveling with his licentious wife, who spends most of her time ogling Grant and dancing to Peggy Lee records. (I can't believe that Polanski had the gall, and was so trite as, to use Fever.)

Coyote, we discover, can no longer satis­fy his wife, so he begins recruiting Grant for the job. His method of persuasion consists of telling Grant the long and windy tale of how their love devolved from passion, to S&M, to (finally) fear and loathing. The truth of Coyote's tale is debatable, but its sordid details are enough to snare Grant in the web of Coyote s obsessions.

It's hard to say "no" to a movie that con­tains such silly lines as, "I'm degrading myself by degrading you," but Bitter Moon is neither enthralling nor (strangely enough, considering the subject) particularly shock­ing. There are a few successful moments of humor, but most of the film plays like a series of boorish confessions

Backbeat

What a sense of deja vu — within a few weeks, Richard Nixon, the Beatles and Vietnam were all hot topics in the news. It felt like the '60s all over again. It wasn't really, of course. Nixon died; Vietnam is suffering a corporate, not military, takeover; and the Beatles are causing a stir courtesy of a new movie, Backbeat, about the Fab Four's early days.

Backbeat is a retelling of the Liverpool mop-tops' first tottering steps toward suc­cess. Set during the pre-Ringo days of 1960, the Fab Four are still the young and relatively inexperienced Fab Five, with Pete Best on drums and Stuart Sutcliffe playing bass. The boys should be experiencing their high-energy salad days in Hamburg, but Backbeat is packed with a 20/20 sense of hindsight that baths the film in the stark light of revisionism and deja vu.

Backbeat focuses pri­marily on Sutcliffe (Stephen Dorrf), a work­ing-class abstract painter and part-time rocker who bailed out of the group just before it began riding its first wave of fame. According to the movie, he's only hanging out with the boys because of his friendship with John Lennon (Ian Hart). John is portrayed as the sole creator of the Beatles (sorry, Paul), and Stu is presented as John's main source of inspiration. That's why the dynamics between the two turns sour when Stu falls in love with German avant-garde photogra­pher Astrid Kirchherr (Sheryl Lee deliver­ing a halfway decent performance, for a change). Before you can even mutter the name Yoko Ono, Stu goes artsy and begins ignoring the rock scene.

Lennon gets angry at this, but then, in Backbeat, he always appears angry. In fact, Lennon is presented as a remarkably charmless young punker whose anti-intellectualism is, suggestively, a cover for his confusion about his sexual orientation. Lennon keeps yelling that "Everything is about dicks," then looks wistfully at Stu. Stu, meanwhile, is beginning to discover Hamburg's artistic and sexual underground. He also discovers amphetamines, which he starts popping in order to make it through a vari­ety of hard days' nights.

Meanwhile, Paul McCartney (Gary Bakewell) is busy agitating for Stu's dismissal from the band. But since Paul and John barely get along (except when performing), Paul spends most of his time stewing (he probably senses that Yoko is only a few years away). George Harrison (Chris O'Neill) and Pete Best (Scot Williams), on the other hand, just keep quiet about the situation. Ringo makes his entrance when he's found passed out in one of the band's bunks.

The movie's weak spots are its character­izations (everyone is too simplistic) and its strained effort to make many obvious (and a few debatable) points. Where Backbeat works best is on stage. It does a great job of , recreating the sound and rocking vitality of the early Beatles.

It does have a beat, and once upon a time, it was the one many of us were danc­ing to.

Coming Out Under Fire

At the start of World War II, the United States Army moved in two opposing directions at once: new directives were passed that toughened the army's stand on homosexuality, classifying it as a form of mental illness made punishable by imprisonment. At the same time, however, the army needed every recruit it could muster, so the initial enforcement of the ban was nominal. Inductees were simply asked if they liked boys. Even when the answer was "Yes," as one speaker explains in the film Coming Out Under Fire, the draft board often just looked the other way.

This ironic history is the subject matter of this new doc­umentary, the award-winning film based on the book by Allan Berube. The movie presents the personal experiences of veterans of the so-called Good War, as they relate the unsettling contradictions of serving in a system that wouldn't admit that gays existed.

A gay former member of the military police describes how he used to vamp it up while on duty. A lesbian member of the Women's Army Corps explains how she fudged the test to enter the WACs by insisting that she didn't have sex with men because she was saving herself for marriage. Another vet notes that he faced the dual difficulties of being black and gay.

Despite all of the hassles they encoun­tered, however, virtually every speaker in Coming Out Under Fire felt at home in the army — it was the army that felt uncomfortable with them. As World War II drew to a close, the relaxed handling of the ban evolved into a purge mentality — no longer needed, the gay and lesbian officers and enlisted people suddenly became visible long enough to be identified and discharged.

Coming Out Under Fire is a well-made and enjoyable look at a peculiar mentality which decreed that a person's dedication, talent and skills were less important than their sexual habits.