The Baltimore Sun from Baltimore, Maryland • Page 45

ide: Director Peter Bogdanovich talks on 'The Mare Steiner Show' Compliments don't turn Uma Thurman's head THEJSfcSUN May 28, 1997 Section 5 UDAY Wednesday Dancing around the music is 1 'i 1 n.imr -iy niniMinVf'ifiiK ----V Reviews times, U2 seems like a band in search of itself as it re-invents its sound and slides farther awagfrom its past And speaking of sound, can it come up with abetter sound system? 1 i i i 1 1 -V. Mi i V- By J.D. Considine SUN POP MUSIC CRITIC American Film Institute honors Martin Scorsese The director of such highly regarded movies as "Taxi and "Raging Bull" gets the full salute on CBS. Page 4e More Inside Ann Landers: The family's good name is no reason to keep quiet about molestation. Page2E Almanac: The Dionne quintuplets were born on this day In 1934.

Page 5e Index Comics 6e Crossword 7e Horoscope 8b Jumble 6b Movies 3b Television 8b SunSpot The Sun on the Internet: http:www.sunspot.net There was a telling moment toward the end of U2's set at RFK Stadium on Monday night. After dedicating "Please" to Native American activist Leonard Peltier, the band proceeded to bend the song slowly out of shape, stretching the music like Silly Putty as it moved from a dub-inflected bass groove to what could best be described as rock-oriented ambient. Then, as Bono rallied through the final, pleading verse, drummer Larry Mullen Jr. waded in with a distinctly martial cadence. As the band rallied around him, that beat sounded more and more like the opening to "Sunday, Bloody Sunday." Anticipating a segue, the crowd rose to its feet only to find that Bono and the boys were just playing around with the.

arrangement. Naturally, the fans cheered, anyway. But their disappointment was palpable. That pretty much summed the "Popmart" tour experience. Even though U2's current concert extravaganza was as solid a show as can be found on the road today, it was neither the all-embracing spectacle the band promised nor the faith-affirming experience for which fans pray.

Instead, it was mainly a picture of a band in transition and an awkward transition at that. As recent interviews have made plain, the members of U2 believe that dance music specifically the cocktail of techno, house, ambient and dub the music press has been calling "electronlca" Is the future of rock and roll. And Popmart found the foursome putting its money where its mouth is literally. From the booming bass of the club music spun by a DJ before the show to the beat-augmented re-arrangements of recent songs, U2 put a definite dance-music spin on the show. Not only were anthemic rockers from the "Joshua Tree" era few and far between, but it sometimes seemed as if the band had difficulty getting Into its old groove.

Take the opening sequence, for example. The members of U2 were led Into the stadium like prizefighters, trotting through the crowd In a knot of bodyguards while M's "Pop Muzik" blared on the PA From there, the band leapt Immediately into "Mofo," attack- See U2, 8e CLIFF MAUTNER SPECIAL TO THE SUN Taking Elaine Showalter peers around an ivy-covered corner at Princeton University, where she teaches. Elaine Showalter believes that Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Guff War Syndrome and other current maladies are not significantly different from the Salem witch hysteria r- r'n' or the spurt in reports of it 1 1 alien abductions mumu Veai aJ ILmI Talk about a 'Lost' weekend Box office: Dinosaurs rule the Earth again as Spielberg's movie lakes in million over the holiday period. By Bernard Weinraub NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE By Richard O'Mara BUN STAFF sued by tired people. 1 I VJ Fj I i i JI i by tired people.

WASHINGTON laine Showalter Is pursued She began to suspect she had a serious problem after an appearance on a Wash 5 1 5 Vf 4' UV energetic when someone disagrees with them on the nature of their illness. Since that incident, In mid-April, Showalter has been threatened more than once. Her book slgnings have been disrupted In Washington and New York. It started even before she went on tour, with epithets on the Internet. "They called me a Nazi.

They suggested a conspiracy. Some were very obscene. One message had a lot of language about blood transfusions. They hoped I would get sick and they would give me a transfusion" presumably so she would contract the ill ness herself. Showalter Is a large woman, an active feminist, an intellectual duelist.

She Is also a professor of English and American literature at Princeton University. She has additional expertise In the history of psychiatry. But now, In the lobby of an Embassy Row hotel, she Is subdued. Under her page boy haircut, her brow Is knit; she tries to choose her words carefully. Threats can have that effect.

Showalter never expected her book, "Hystories: Hysterical Epidemics and Modern Media," to spark such anger and passion. Books See Showalter, 5e ington television station. A doctor she had debated on an Interview show caught her on the way out, told her she hoped her life would be ruined, her career wrecked, then added: "We're going to rip you to shreds." The physician had come on the show to argue the medical validity of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome which Is to say, that It has a biological cause. One of the points of Showalter's new book, "Hys-tories," Is that it doesn't, that It is a form of hysteria. It was the first signal to Showalter that chronically fatigued people, the perpetually tired, can get alarmingly DOUO KAPUSTIN SUN STAFF No rattle and hum: ursAdam Clayton (left) and Bono perform Monday at RFK.

Australian sets forth his visions of America Steven Spielberg thought he was moving too fast. Several months ago, he told David Koepp, the screenwriter for "The Lost World: Jurassic Park," which Spielberg was making, that such sequels should wait at least four years, and possibly far longer, before even beginning production. "You have to let the audience's appetite build," Spielberg told Koepp, admitting it made him nervous that his new film was following so closely behind "Jurassic Park," released in 1993. By Monday morning, Spielberg was no longer nervous; the audience's appetite turned out to be gargantuan. "The Lost World," which opened a summer movie season marked by at least a dozen big-budget films, broke virtually every box office record, including, according to the Associated Press, the most any movie has made in a single day, for the $25.6 million it grossed on Sunday.

Nikkl Rocco, president for distribution at Universal Pictures, which released the movie, said the film's estimated box office for the weekend, starting Thursday at 10 p.m. when "The Lost World" began playing at many theaters around the country, was a record $92.7 million. Within the next two weeks, Universal is expected to recover just about all the $100 million, including marketing and promotion, it spent on the film. "It's blown away any record that's existed, and I'm being conservative," Rocco said. The movie, based on a novel by Michael Crichton, opened to mixed reviews, with some critics saying both the film and the book had weak story lines and were one-dimensional.

(In Hollywood terms, the film, like many action adventures, Is known as review-proof.) The film takes place mostly on an island on which dinosaurs run free, See Lost8E Art Crilicllobert Hughes leaves almost no medium untapped as lie takes on lite history of art of Ids adopted nation. Preview: Some decades mag go missing, bid in his eight-part 'American Visions, 'starting tonight on PBS, Robert Hughes paints his view of this country in swift, atd masterful brush strokes. By JohnDorsey SUN ART CRITIC A 71 upan i. niiiinnmBiiiwf i I 7 1-' i pi 1 'i' Y.r By John Dorsey SUN ART CRITIC In 27 years of plain-spoken opinion written for Time magazine, Robert Hughes of Australia has become America's most famous art critic. He will become even better known through his latest project: an eight-part television series, "American Visions," that debuts tonight on PBS.

The series Is accompanied by a hefty book Visions: The Epic History of Art in that sells for $65 and an issue of Time entirely written by Hughes Hughes peppers "American Visions" with his trenchant opinions! which provide One man's views: Robert Hughes casts a critic's eye on 300 years of American art. quotable quotes on everything from Thomas Jefferson (loves him) to today's multicultural, Identity-based art (hates it). "I don't think there's such a thing as a dominant American style," Hughes said In a recent telephone interview from San Francisco. "But one of American art's great glories is the hard-headed empirical realism, which you find from John Singleton Copley to See Kughes, 3e In his television series "American Visions," Robert Hughes has taken on a huge task no less than to tell the story of more than three centuries of American art In eight hours. Amazingly enough, he has done even more than that.

In eight beautifully photographed episodes shot at more than 100 locations across the country, he has, in effect, told the story of American history and shown how American art parallels It. He takes us from the Spanish settlement of the Southwest and the Puritan settlement of the Northeast in the 17th century up to the age of anxiety following the fiasco of Vietnam. And at virtually every point, he explains how the art of the period had See Art, 3e Outside In: Edward Hopper used his paintings this is "Room in New York" to show that "the American man ofaction was replaced by the solitary watcher..