The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 12

12 The Sydney Morning Herald Thursday, August 17, 1989 Arts D(D0G r'N JDSDTlOGTlg MM mk'-S-- neat piece of casting), and the gloomy old graveyard itself. But though a sense of unease never lets up, the film doesn't get around to doing its job to maximum efficiency, mainly because King, who adapted the screenplay from his book of the same name, is unable to discipline himself when deciding what he wants to scare us with. In movies based on King stories to date we've had, among other nasties, girls with strange powers (Carrie, Firestarter), a dog (Cujo), even an evil car (the marvellously funny Christine). Pet Sematary hurls at us a pet cat (which, hardly surprisingly, never realises much horror potential), moves on to the family's boy toddler and, for good measure, throws in the ghost of a dead sister and an accident victim with pizza for brains. And, though the latter turns out to be a "good this merely illustrates the movie's problem: elements introduced purely for shock value that merely end up muddying the story.

At the climax, gruesomeness appears on cue with the inevitability of sauce on a meat pie obviously what they like out in slasher-land, where Pet Sematary is rapidly headed. Karate not much chop THE KARATE KID 3 Directed by John Avildsen Written by Robert Mark Kamen Rated PG Hoyts THE Karate Kid. in which an American boy took up with a wise old karate master after running up against a gang of bullies, had a certain charm and wit about it but, several years down the track, its young star, Ralph Macchio, has become an unattractively pudgy teenager and his creators seem at a loss for something for him to do. Familiarity with the equally tedious Karate Kid 2 is taken for granted, so if you missed it, the opening sequences of this won't make much sense at all. A group of bad guys try to forcibly persuade karate-kid Daniel to enter the annual competition so they can win his prize title from him, while the philosophical side is taken care of with a sub-plot concerning the acquisition of a bonsai tree (exciting stuff, this) for teacher Mr Miyagi's new shop.

It's all so sluggish that it's hard to see the children at which the film is aimed holding out much patience. Tour hits the right note DISTANT HARMONY! PAVAROTTI IN CHINA Directed by Dewitt Sage Rated Pitt Centre HAT is it about the medium of film that can open a door on WW to a form of music that has previously been kept under lock and key? Coming out of Diva and Man of Flowers in a trance, I would mutter something to the effect that I hated opera, but the wonderful opera used in the film that was different1. Similar feelings surfaced in subsequent films based upon or featuring opera Carmen (the Rosi version), Amadeus, Aria only it was becoming increasingly obvious that the old prejudices and platitudes would no longer do. I did like opera. I'd just needed to be told.

Those films must have sparked off similar epiphanies in audiences right across the world. This well-made documentary of Luciano Pavarotti's 1986 tour of China will have a more limited impact, though buffs will doubtless find it a delight. For the first half, at least, I found myself complaining that there was an insufficiency of the great Italian tenor, though chunks of his teaching, rehearsals and performance in a staging of La Boheme (as well as arias from other operas) take up a progressively larger slice of the proceedings as the film progresses. Pavarotti was the first Italian opera-singer to visit modern China and, since everybody concerned seems to have been extraordinarily keen to make the tour a success, the social atmosphere tends towards the ingratiating. Unfortunately, this seems to have infected the film's makers, who never waste an opportunity to capture the never-ending round of grins, smiles, delighted claps of the hands, etc.

There's little in the way of off-camera asides or unguarded moments here. This is close to an official tour record. What the film does have are fascinating glimpses of Chinese culture traditional music, amazing displays of stick fighting, etc revealed in special performances put on for the Italian giant And, of course, it features Pavarotti's vocal splendour, greeted by the Chinese with extraordinary enthusiasm. ti a nice piece of casting. The first drawback is the otherwise quiet road which allows life-threatening, articulated trucks to come thundering past their door.

So many animals are killed by these vehicles that a spooky pet cemetary or, as the sign reads, sematary has been set up in the woods. And, as any decent horror buff knows, graveyards spell life after death. In the opening scenes, director Mary Lambert, who previously made the independent Siesta, skilfully creates a sense of menace from simple and sometimes innocuous ingredients: the stomach-churning view seen from a child's swing, monster-like trucks that scream into the bucolic tranquillity as if from nowhere, the path twisting mysteriously into the woods, the neighbourly but graven-faced oldtimer (Fred Gwynne, formerly Herman Munster, a 111! scriptwriter of Fatal Attraction. It contains all the ingredients appropriate to the "classy British a middle-class, art-house look, period costumes and a decent (or apparently decent) English chap in the shape of the faintly aristocratic Charles Dance. It also enjoys the advantage of a highly unusual and visually stimulating historical and geographical setting, an island in the Aegean under the crumbling rule of the Ottoman Empire in 1908.

And just to emphasise its claim to quality, it even stars Ben Kingsley, not to mention the always dependable Helen Mirren as an artist who falls for the Englishman. But all of this is insufficient to" prevent the film from being a rather tedious experience. Kingsley plays Basil Pascali, a wily Greek who offers to be a translator for a newly arrived English archaeologist, Anthony Bowles (Dance), who claims he wants to dig up some government land in a search for ancient treasures. But there is more to Bowles than meets the eye as Pascali soon discovers after throwing in his lot with the man. The atmosphere on the island, with its occupying Turkish troops and tetchy, intolerant rulers, is theoretically meant to be tense and, with both Kingsley and Dance playing untrustworthy opportunists who are continually feeling each other out, we should by rights be wriggling all over our seats.

Yet the direction is so casual that it's hard to care one way or another. Kingsley makes Pascali a thoroughly believable individual, a ferret of a man with darting eyes and a nervously inscrutable manner, while Dance displays just the right degree of impassive English arrogance, yet somehow the pair never seem to react against each other; it's as if they're acting in separate rooms. Mirren, meanwhile, is wasted, with little to do apart from having the odd frolic with Dance or making an occasional daub with the paintbrush. Pascali's Island isn't a bad tale per se, but it's one that would have been better suited to an hour-long TV drama FILM LYNDEN BARBER THE FRUIT MACHINE Directed by Philip Saville Written by Frank Clarke Rated Academy Twin IS with considerable irony that cinemagoers should declare their gratitude to Margaret Thatcher. Ideological revulsion for the 1 Thatcher revolution has helDed inspire a golden age of British film and, on the evidence of Mike Leigh's High Hopes, and now The Fruit Machine, penned by Letter To Brezhnev writer Frank Clarke, it's a current that is continuing gloriously.

Like My Beautiful Laundrette, Fruit Machine runs headlong against the anti-gay climate reportedly encouraged by Clause 28, the Conservative law outlawing the "promotion" of homosexuality, and does so with lashings of verve and wit. Directed by Philip Saville, whose credits include the TV drama, Boys From The Blackstuff, and also set (at least, partly) in Liverpool, it is a highly original tale, equal parts thriller, surrealist fable and comedy, concerning two 16-year-old boys on the run. Eddie, played with touching innocence by Emile Charles, is a sensitive boy who loves opera and enjoys watching glamorous old Hollywood movies with his mother (who is white). All of which makes him a "poor in the eyes of his traditional, working-class black father. Fed up with being browbeaten, Eddie runs off with his best friend, the streetwise Michael (Tony Forsyth).

A fruit machine, in Britain, is a poker machine, though the camp pun on the word "fruit" needs little explanation. The Fruit Machine of the title is, however, a local- gay disco where the boys enjoy an evening before making a rapid exit after they have witnessed a gangland slaying. This film's special beauty is the way it Fred Gwynne in Pet Sematary Heading for slasher-land PET SEMATARY Directed by Mary Lambert Written by Stephen King Rated Greater Union fWS ET Sematary, the latest in a long I wJ line of films based on Stephen King stories, begins with great promise before throwing in its lot with the slice'n'dice merchants. Dr Creed and his family have just moved into an old house in what they think is the peaceful Maine countryside when they discover things aren't quite what they seem. THEATRE BOB EVANS weaves between the boys divergent world views.

Eddie lives in a romantic dreamworld; he's not unlike a child version of the William Hurt character in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and in his scenes the film takes on a magical tone, suffused with bright yellows and blues. Yet often without realising it, his fortunes are hitched to Michael's "real" world the mean streets inhabited by gangsters, aging and rough trade. Michael represents the strictly unofficial side of the Look-After-Number-One ethic encouraged in Mrs Thatcher's Britain. He lives by the law of the jungle, taking opportunities as they arise petty theft, blackmail, but chiefly, prostitution. As a homeless, unemployed adolescent, he's the living embodiment of Tory self-reliance.

After the boys have been driven to Brighton by a lecherous opera singer and his female producer, Eddie takes to wandering around a brightly lit Dolphinarium. There's an excess of heavy-handed symbolism in the use of these freedom-loving animals in captivity, but the cinematography is so striking that one rapidly forgives. The ending is unfortunately corny without giving too much away, one expects a caption reading, "And with one bound he was free!" to pop up but this is a minor quibble. With its consistently strong performances, engagingly unusual plot and salty dialogue, Fruit is not to be missed. With an eye on quality PASCALI'S ISLAND Written and directed by James Dearden Based on novel by Barry Unsworth Rated Pitt Centre; Walker; Hoyts Bondi Junction first glimpse, there's a distinct touch of the Merchant-Ivorys about Pascali's Island, written and directed by James Dearden, the 1 $129 $239 1 $28 Sluggish dream backfires mm wmB Save up to 60 Get ready for your next adventure at the Mountain Designs CLEARANCE SALE.

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ALL MY SONS by Arthur Miller Director: Gale Edwards Designer: Stephen Curtis Cast: Robert Alexander, Benjamin Franklin, Melissa Jaffer, Dene Kermond, Alan David Lee, Heather Mitchell, Mark Pegler, Ben Pride, Carol Skinner, John Stanton and Karen Vickery Sydney Theatre Company, Wharf Theatre, August 15 DF All My Sons doesn't quite possess the absolute seamlessness of craft and art that distinguishes Arthur Miller's masterpiece, Death of a Salesman, it is nonetheless a compelling work of theatre, worthy of regard on its own merits and fascinating in the way it prefigures one of the greatest plays of this century. Miller, who was twice rejected for military service in World War II, conceived All My Sons during the war, inspired by the glaring discrepancy between battlefield heroics and hometown economics, between personal sacrifice and corporate profit. Miller sets the play in the heartland of the American Dream, the backyard of a comfortable home in middle-America, laying the ground for his exploration of the crucial thematic elements of the family and neighbourliness, where the practicalities of commerce conflict with the principles of the individual. It is here that Joe Keller and his wife, Kate, maintain a vigil for their son, Larry, missing in action for three-and-a-half years. It is August, the month of his birthday, also the month of the anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.

Joe has been released from jail, having successfully appealed against a conviction for supplying faulty aeroplane engine parts responsible for the deaths of 21 pilots. Joe's business partner and former neighbour remains in jail, a little man alone bearing the burden of guilt. Suddenly his daughter, Ann, who was Larry's girl, is invited to visit by Joe's younger son, Chris, and "the hand of the distant past reaches out of the In her first production for the STC, director Gale Edwards has ended up with an uneven production dogged by sluggish performances where the effort of achieving plausible accents seems to have robbed the actors of energy. The play staggers to its feet while the idiom and rhythm of Miller's language, which ought to prickle with concealed intentions and the mixed emotions of grief and guilt, simply sound muddy. The characters don't have any impact on each other and the first act plods by, only enlivened by the scenes between Ann and Chris, the tentative lovers, delicately played by Heather Mitchell and Alan David Lee, and the fleetingly vibrant appearances of Benjamin Franklin as the handyman neighbour, Frank, and Dene Kermond as young Bert.

The pivotal role of Joe Keller is not easy to apprehend and John Stanton struggles to encompass the man's stolid mind and brutish guile, although he and Melissa Jaffer (as Kate) find their feet in the later acts of the play, when the conflicts of commercial cynicism and parental love harden into action with the need to protect the dream and hold the line. A sign of the production's lack of definition and, perhaps, the compromises of the space, is that Stephen Curtis's set design gives the impression of the front of the house with its neat, white impenetrable weatherboards rather than a more vulnerable rear with an open porch. For example, the Telecom ISDN service can be utilised for a range of business applications, including LAN gateway, money market, group 4 fax, video and telemarketing Take the first step now. Contad" your Telecom account executive, or call 008 035 063, for full details of our Whatever the answer, one thing is certain. All these organisations have taken a decisive step forward by trialling or signing up for the Telecom ISDN MACROLLNK service.

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