The Sydney Morning Herald from Sydney, New South Wales, Australia • Page 16

The Sydney Morning Herald, Thursday, December 11, 1986 JPS IMS) 4 fl iyj.ftj&yu,y!avi a Fwr to the clmh (D)(Q) 9 5 Page 16 vrjrir mm. iiilil I it Weaver) and Lord Bulbeck (Michael Caine) a dangerous relationship. My favourites were the little knight, Sir Didymus, a fox-terrier who talks like Bertie Wooster and rides into battle on a big English sheep dog; and Ludo, a huge sad-eyed hairy thing who could have come from the union of a Wookie and the big blue monster from The Muppet Show. Labyrinth is itself a hybrid, a mixture of themes from myth and legend, folk and fairytale. It's overlong and lacking in pace, but it's often funny.

Terry Jones, one of the original Monty Pythons, wrote the script and it's full of his nonsensical humour. The worst fate in the movie is to fall into the Bog of Eternal Stench, a place that bubbles and blurts with noxious noises and odours a joke to delight every 12-year-old boy or girl. Labyrinth is set in familiar territory, both physically and emotionally. The sets come from the pages of fantastic children's art, and the story is about a girl's transition. Sarah, the young heroine, is on the cusp between childhood and adulthood, fighting with her parents and annoyed with everything, especially her squawking baby brother Toby.

When she is left to babysit, she wishes him away, using magic words. A platoon of nasty, gnarled goblins oblige, delivering him to their boss, Jareth (David Bowie). Sarah must find her way through the labyrinth leading to Jareth's castle to rescue Toby. She's a modern-day Alice or Dorothy, retreating into fantasy rather than face the challenges of maturity. The obstacles are in her imagination, the shards of childhood.

Unlike those earlier girls, she's more physically mature. Jennifer Connelly as Sarah has dark, lustrous colouring and knowing eyes. She's raunchier than Dorothy or Alice, which brings the theme of sex, ever-present in this type of story, closer to the surface. If it's latent in her, it's blatant in Jareth, played with a lecherous air by Bowie, clad in anatomically-revealing tights. easier to start with, but not smart enough to see what's coming.

Not so the audience. We know that her affair with the politician Lord Bulbeck (played with aplomb by Michael Caine) is dangerous from the start and we can guess what's coming, so the movie loses an edge of tension. It hardly matters, because it's ultimately a more human story than the average thriller. The relationship between Weaver and Caine is well handled, veering between reckless passion and carefulness. Caine lends her humour and he has a sort of glistening melancholic quality in his eyes, as the older man who can't believe how beautiful and exciting this woman is.

Bob Swaim has been, for about the past 20 years, an American in Paris, working on documentaries, shorts, and lately features. His big success came in 1982 with La Balance, a policier, which won best film of the year in France. In Half Moon Street. Swaim's first English language film, he shows his ability as a story-teller, with economic, unpretentious direction. The performances from Weaver (even with her un relaxed physicality) and especially Michael Caine, a consummate film actor, are a big help.

Babysitting with goblins LflDYIUNTIl Directed by Jim Henson. Written by Terry Jones. Rated Hoyts IJH? fOU HAVE to giggle at a movie which has David Bowie pranc-tJ ing around as a goblin king, with a wig borrowed from Tina Turner and eye make-up by Leonard Nimoy. In Labyrinth. Bowie gets back into the forced strangeness of his early persona, Ziggy Stardust, but the funniest thing is that he is upstaged here by a cast of weird critters from the imagination of Jim Henson, the Muppet-man.

IJJLLT MOON STREET Directed by Bob Swaim. Written by Swaim and Edward Behr. Rated Roma, Stanmore Twin Reviews by PAUL BYRNES WE'VE seen a lot of Sigour-ney Weaver lately. She is back in Aliens, battling with the beasts in space, and in One Woman or Two. an alleged French' farce, battling to maintain some dignity from a truly awful movie.

Now, we see her in Half Moon Street, a British thriller about sex, international politics and murder, based on Doctor Slaughter, a novel by Paul Theroux. Regular readers of this page may remember me describing One Woman Or Two as the movie in which Sigourney Weaver took her clothes off. That was partly true, but I got the movies mixed up. Half Moon Street is the one where we really see her, again and again and again, but the effect is disquieting. She plays Lauren Slaughter, a very bright, independent, but poor American living in London.

To supplement her meagre earnings as a fellow at an international research institute, she joins an escort agency, working as a high-class whore, so it's not surprising that she is often undressed. Early on. Bob Swaim, the director, shows her in the bath in her dingy Highgate rooms, unperturbed by the presence of her jolly West Indian caretaker, Lindsay, who can't get the plumbing right. I suppose this is meant to characterise her as uninhibited, but it has the opposite effect because Weaver doesn't look at ease. There is no complicity between her and the camera, no trust.

You feel like the water is cold and her nonchalance is forced, and that makes her less credible. Of course, she's not supposed to be a hooker with a heart of gold. She's ambitious for money and power, not sex, but by selling it, she is able to get both and control her life. Still, the lack of inhibition need not contradict that. Sexual precocity and political naivete should be combined in the character, but they don't abide well here.

The movie, like the book, is primarily about the relationship between power and sex. She exploits one for the other, and is in turn exploited the same way. In that sense it's a cautionary moral tale, a metaphor for the betrayal inherent in personal and international relations. At a stuffy party, Lauren is fascinated by a banker who tells her, after she has said that China's population is approaching one billion, that she is wrong. "There are only 5,000 people in the world," says Van Arkady (Keith Buckley), meaning the ones with power.

"And there are only two -in Lauren has two ways into the club of 5,000 through her intellect, her work as an'Arabist, or through her body. She's clever enough to know which is r4yw Lauren (Sigourney Jareth is a charming tempter like Shakespeare's Oberon, potentially evil but softened by his longing for both the baby andor his sister. The beasts in the movie are the main attraction: a collection of fantastic uglies, with bulbous noses, huge feet and tough leathery skin. They dress in rustic styles, a mixture of Viking, Saxon, Norman and whatever else, and their features and movements are very expressive. Once again, Jim Henson, who directed The Dark Crystal, proves his superiority in making creatures of cloth and wire become human, but he's not as successful with the real flesh-and-blood cast.

Sarah is somewhat brattish and cold, lacking real innocence. Alongside a creature like Hoggle, the runtish, cowardly gnome who loves plastic jewellery, she is humourless and drab. Bowie too seems unanimated. His garish presence is not strong enough to compete with a horde of rowdy, ill-mannered goblins, and his characterisation suffers because he constantly breaks into song. He wrote the songs for the movie, and performs most of them, including his current hit Underground, but they are gratingly rocky.

They destroy the momentum in an attempt to satisfy the conventional wisdom that youth movies have to have rock-clips. Labyrinth has the same strengths and weaknesses as Return to Oz and Legend, two recent attempts to revitalise the sub-genre of children's fantasy-land. Instead of starting with a great story and characters and building in the effects, they begin at the other end. The effects, the sets and the visual trickery are used to mask conventional stories and hollow characters, which under-esti mates the audience's ability to spot a fake. The only difference with Labyrinth is that it has more of a sense of humour than the others.

More of that tea, please Directed by Arthur Joffe. Written by Joffe and Thomas Rayfiel. Rated Village Cinema City I INCE talkies began, film-makers i have been trying to get rid of talk, hoping to say more with less. In Harem, Arthur Joffe', a young French director, succeeds only in saying less with less. Ben Kingsley and Nastassja Kinski wander around Alexandre Trauner's gorgeous Arabian sets, exchanging piercing glances and nothing much else.

The pregnant pauses are just poses. It's an empty vessel, with banal ideas and a pretentious style, the type of concoction that gives art movies a bad name, based on the quaint idea that a sophisticated young New York woman would fall in love with an Arab prince who kidnaps her for his harem. One minute Nastassja is crossing the water from Manhattan to Ellis Island, drinking a cup of tea, and the next she wakes up in a cool, dark chamber of Prince Ben Kingsley's desert fortress, groggy from the doped tea. A huge, flabby black eunuch (Dennis Goldson) guides her to a sexagonal indoor pool, where lots of dark women in various stages of undress are bathing, combing, and chatting. No-one bothers to tell her what's going on, but she soon perceives her captivity.

After days and days of waiting, she is finally dressed up in veils, her hands tattooed and eyes darkly ringed, and led to the Prince's chamber, but she's not expecting such a wimp. Prince Selim is another captive, a man who has inherited the traditions of a harem without wanting to nibble at its pleasures. He doesn't actually say he's a virgin, but when the maidens come to his room, they sleep alone. He's too sensitive, or something, or maybe he just likes white American women. I'm still trying to figure out his motives, not to mention her reason for seducing him.

Arthur Joffe' uses these two accomplished actors like mannequins. They hardly move, hardly speak, and we are supposed to see that a great deal is happening behind their eyes, which it isn't. Kinski wears a permanently painful, confused look, with her swollen lips slightly apart, and when she does break out into a screaming tantrum, her emotion is skin-deep, as she rakes her hands through her hair. It's the technique of amateur theatricals, a mannerism that a better director would not allow. The accompanying notes tell me it's a film about the passing of culture, the destruction of a tradition, the unlocking of a westerner's heart even.

It's none of these. It's a pointless load of old rubbish, that's what it is. Disney goes to a massacre DON'T CUV, IT'S OflLY THUNDER Directed by Peter Werner. Written by Paul Hensler. Rated The Roma 12 HERE is a baffling sensibility behind Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder, a movie which mixes cynicism, sentimentality and full-on splatter.

It means to be a warm, dribbly kind of film, the sort Mickey Rooney used to do, about love conquering cynicism, but it's full of dead bodies. T11IS WEEK HALF MOON STREET: Sexual and international politics merge in this above-average thriller about a call girl and a politician. With Sigourney Weaver and Michael Caine. Roma, Stanmore Twin. LABYRINTH: Overlong children's fantasy pic, with funny critters and David Bowie singing too often.

Hoyts. ft. -S- AS "'f' 1 Goblin king (David Bowie) potentially evil. WORTH SEEING If not for the blood and horrible wounds, it might have been a Disney Sunday night special, a soppy made-for-TV story with lots of overblown goodness. With the blood, it just seems weird and incongruously exploitative.

It's set in Saigon in 1968, the year of the Tet offensive. Dennis Christopher, the young actor who was so good as the bicycle-kid in Breaking Away, plays Brian Anderson, a medic who thinks only of himself. He's very gregarious, but he doesn't mind stealing drugs off the triage tables and selling them on the black market. When a dying friend asks him to take care of a little orphan girl, Brian is reluctant, but even he's not that callous. He finds Anh (Mai Thi Lien) and ends up helping two Vietnamese nuns to find a place for their collection of orphans.

That's where he wants his compassion to end, but Sister Marie (Lisa Lu) is an expert manipulator. He becomes their lifeline, stealing military supplies to keep them going. For his poor work in the wards, he is busted to the army mortuary, the worst job in Saigon. The director, James Werner, seems fascinated by these dead GIs. He fastens on the bent and broken bodies and the entrails with loving care, but it's all so pointless.

It only adds a sense of ugly disproportion. Susan Saint James, as a caring young army doctor, joins the haranguing mob and gangs up with the nuns to keep Brian working. Apart from her inability to act, she has to play the "love and that too is pointless. The script, by Paul Hensler, wanders around from catastrophe to mishap, becoming more and more grotesquely. sentimental.

It's the type of movie that makes you feel for a character, then kills them off. Don't Cry was filmed in the Philippines in 1980, with Don McAlpine, the Australian cinematographer, behind the lens. I'm not sure why it has taken six years to reach here, but it hasn't improved with the cellaring. iiil.HlllHLl.llii. II in ininnuimiipMui HAREM: Pointless, pretentious desert dreck, as Ben Kingsley abducts Nastassja Kinski for his harem.

Village Cinema City. DON'T CRY, IT'S ONLY THUNDER: Trashy, sentimental story of orphans and GIs in Saigon, with incongruous dead bodies everywhere. The Roma. Branch where a receipt Lotteries Head "Cloud iSTAfT LOTTERIES tLO 0002 mojo I ill IK MY BEAUTIFUL LAUNDRETTE: A fluent, adventurous, funny British movie about a young Anglo-Pakistani man who finds passion in the arms of a bovver-boy in South London. Highly recommended.

Dendy. TENUE DE SOIREE: Gerard Depardieu, Miou Miou and Michel Blanc switch partners, then switch clothes in this extraordinary black comedy about sex roles. Funny and black. Academy Twin. MOSQUITO COAST: Harrison Ford takes his family to the jungle to discover Utopia.

It falls short of grand tragedy, but it has some good moments. Peter Weir directed. Hoyts. THE MISSION: Grand, sumptuous but over-romanticised story of two priests in 18th-century South America, directed by Roland Joffe', of The Killing Fields. Jeremy Irons and Robert De Niro.

Pitt Centre and Village Double Bay. MALCOLM: A very good comedy about a couple of battlers and their adventures as techno-bank robbers. One of the best Australian movies of the year. Hoyts. ALIENS: Sigourney.

Weaver returns as the gutsy Lieutenant Ripley to fight the awful, slobbish thing in space. Extraordinary energy and tension. Hoyts and Stanmore Twin. N.S.W. LOTTERIES OFFICE PAYMENT OF INSTANT LOTTERY PRIZES Holders of winning tickets in Instant Lottery Game 11, "Cloud which ceased selling on 2nd February, 1986, are advised that as from 15th December, 1986 all prizes in that game will be payable only from the Head Office of State Lotteries, 14 Railway Parade, Burwood.

On the spot payment of prizes for "Cloud Nine" will cease on that date. Prize winners may post or take "Cloud Nine" tickets to the Lotteries Head Office at Burwood for payment. Alternatively, completed tickets may be TAVERNMOTOR INN SITE REGISTRATION OF INTEREST Registrations of interest are sought from Developers, Builders, Financiers and those associated with the TavernAccommodation Industry for the development of a 4977m2 site within the Macarthur Regional Centre at Campbelltown. Centrally located, the site adjoins the Macarthur Shopping Square, "Macarthur Place" Office Building, the Macarthur Railway Station and BusRail Interchange. Additionally, the Macarthur Institute of Higher Education and Campbelltown Technical College are within close proximity.

Th? Macarthur Regional Centre is currently undergoing major development expansion with the construction of a further of commercialretail space in the immediate surrounds. Additionally, a 1500 lot residential subdivision adjoins. The site has been identified in the growth plans for the development of the Macarthur Regional Centre as having the potential to contain a high standard tavern with associated conventionreception facilities. A liquor licence is attached to the site which covers 4977m2. As owner of the site, the Director of the Macarthur Growth Area (a Division of the Department of Industrial Development and Decentralisation) seeks registrations of interest for outright purchase of the site, however joint venture or long term lease arrangements could be considered.

Initially, registrations of interest should be in writing and should provide details of the registrant's background and experience. Preliminary enquiries should be directed to J. Goodchild, Commercial Marketing Manager, Macarthur Development Corporation on (046) 25 8055. All registrations should reach the General Manager, Macarthur Development Corporation, PO Box 88, Campbelltown. 2560, by no later than 5.00pm Friday.

23 December, 1986. ri MACARTHUR 1 SVUNEfSi.KUWTHrE.VTHE SYDNEY THEATRE COMPANY presents TB2E PHILADELPHIA taken to any Agency or will be issued and arrangements made for prizes to be paid from Office. Prizes in all games since Nine i.e. Silver Lining, Strike Me Lucky, Sky High Superdraw, Cars 'n Cash and Growing up in Australia ($6) The Herald in the Classroom, G.P.O. Box 506, Sydney 2001.

Phone 262 2164 or 232 3166. the current game, Christmas Gift remain payable in the "Herald In the Classroom" resource booklets provide you with exactly the information that you need to avoid frustrating hours of research. Please tick the box for the book(s) of your usual way. P. E.

GRANT DIRECTOR jH 'iSSffiftgSK. Payment of $. Name Address. choice. Adolescence ($6) The in-vitro fertilization debate ($6) Study skills for junior high ($6) A skills approach for general studies ($5) Apartheid ($6) Aspects of Australian culture ($6) DRAMA THEATRE Eve: Mon to Sat 8pm of the SYDNEY Mat: Sat 2pm OPERA HOUSE Bookings: 250 1777.

20525 Bass.