Blue Chips

William Friedkin continues his downward plunge as a filmmaker with another ill-conceived and poorly made movie. Nick Nolte plays a tightly strung college basketball coach who's shocked to discover that great players are bought, not recruited. Ed O'Neill is the sports reporter who starts riding him about the scandal. (That's right, Bobby Knight gets nailed by Al Bundy. And this flick isn't even a comedy.) J.T. Walsh plays the satanic director of the alumni association with a constant emphasis on overstatement. Only Shaquille O'Neal acts as if he knows what he's doing, both on and off the court. Even the basketball scenes (and there are only a few) are so badly shot that they're impossible to follow. Let's face it, this movie is so bad that it makes OSU's current season look good.

I'll Do Anything

Ever have one of those spooky experiences at the movies where you become convinced that an evil projectionist has spliced two totally different films together? James L. Brooks' new movie, I'll Do Anything, gives you that weird sensation. And no wonder — it started off last year as a musical, but was re cut into a straight comedy after a disastrous test screening. What remains is an erratic, slightly incoherent mix. Parts of I'll Do Anything drag with the dead weight of its confused editing. But when it works, it's brilliant.

Nick Nolte plays an aging actor whose career hasn't been quite successful enough to qualify him for the status of washed-up-has-been. He's still humping his chops through the audition mill in hopes of landing any part he can. All he gets, however, is the dubious honor of driving a megalomaniac producer (Albert Brooks) around town. Presumably, there's the faint possibility that if he drives well enough, he might get the lead in a remake of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town.

What Nolte also lands is custody of his obnoxious six-year-old daughter (Whittni Wright). He hasn't seen the girl in years, but is now stuck with her because his ex-wife (Tracey Ullman) is going up the river due to her romantic involvement with a businessman whose deals were less than legal. Thanks to his wife's departure, he's trying to raise a kid who drives him nuts, especially after she gains a major part in a TV series.

The script for I'll Do Anything rambles, as if director Brooks couldn't decide whether he was making a retread of Terms of Endearment or a film industry version of Broadcast News.

But the Hollywood insider sections of the movie are great. Albert Brooks' yapping, vulgar producer is a hysterically accurate parody of Joel Silver, the manic maestro of such mindless action films as the Lethal Weapon series. Paired with Brooks is Julie Kavner, as his compulsively truthful lover and audience opinion researcher. Her innate honesty is a handicap in both jobs, which results in Kavner (who also does the voice for cartoon character Marge Simpson) getting to deliver some of the funniest lines of any movie in the past several years.

Mix in odd cameos by Rosie O'Donnell, Woody Harrelson and Ian McKellen, and parts of I'll Do Anything begin to resemble an updated version of Day of the Locust. Unfortunately, the other half of the movie could have been retitled Bachelor Stage Mother. The two plots never mesh, and the result plays like a head-on collision between a Mercedes and a Yugo.

But there's so much good material in I'll Do Anything that it's hard to dislike. Half of it's some of the best stuff that James L. Brooks has ever directed — it's the follow-through that backfires.

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.