The Orlando Sentinel from Orlando, Florida • Page 33

The Orlando Sentinel WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 13, 1997 Gadget Guru, E-2 A rundown on the next generation of home satellite TV equipment. Cyberscene, E-7 IT iLivimg 'South Park' Martha-haters are an envious crowd exceeds limits (tjif.flKiHiilili!l of wackiness Poor Martha Stewart. She's blond, beautiful, rich and successful, and everybody hates her. Or so we're led to believe by Jerry Oppenheimer, the author of her unauthorized biography, Just Desserts, which has Martha-haters hissing from coast to coast. immm A dead child is funny? The twisted Comedy Central series lives up to its promotional material unfortunately.

MM 0 0 amwm I confess, I was dissing Martha Stewart long before it became the national pastime. In 1982, when her first book, Entertaining, hit the book stands, I was a food writer in California. In Flaming flatulence, inappropriate love songs and mutilated cows set tonight's South Park premiere apart from other animated series. The Simpsons and King of the Hill might be subversive, but they don't have profane third-graders, a 10 p.m. time slot or a TV-MA rating Filmmakers say the trend reflects our uncertainty about the millennium and SENTINEL COLUMNIST scientific advances, plus we just hate bugs.

By Bernard Weinraub NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE (for mature audiences). The Comedy Central series has all of those features, as well as a cruel outlook. It's as if Charlie Brown wandered into Twin Peaks. Forget political correctness. As depicted here, HOLLYWOOD Blame it on the millennium.

Blame it on fears about cloning. Blame it on an overload of studio alien films or just plain creative exhaustion among executives and screenwriters. But bugs teeny ones and monsters, happy little critters who sing and fearsome ones who 33Sv TELEVISION ETp mm LnlJ kill are overrunning Hollywood studios. A number of scripts involving insects are in various stages of development and production, turning the creatures into formidable screen competitors of dinosaurs and aliens. The last wave of insect films took place in the post-Atomic Age, exemplified by Them, the 1954 classic about giant ants run ning wild in the Southwest after an atomic test.

"There was an undercurrent of fear after the atomic bomb, like what have we wrought, how South Park is a Colorado mountain town with oddball children, perverse adults and frequent extraterrestrial visits. Comedy Central's own promotional material dubs the show "sick and twisted." You bet it is. It's also sophomoric, gross and unfunny. It's great that a comedy wants to take chances many sitcoms don't but the adult-aimed South Park goes too far. Especially galling is the show's treatment of young Kenny.

In tonight's premiere, a spaceship fires at the boy and knocks him down. Stampeding cows run over him, a police car strikes him, and his corpse is left to deteriorate. A child's death is inappropriate material for comedy, yet Kenny dies in each episode. (So much for logic.) In other episodes, an assassin mistakenly shoots the boy and volcan my weekly column, I regularly used Martha as my whipping woman. I despised her.

Why? Because she was 1 perfect. And I was shallow, petty and catty. I've matured. Today, I'm on Martha's side. The book, which promised to reveal the "real" Martha as anything but Little Miss Perfect, gives new meaning to exhausting the insignificant.

The assault on Martha reveals more about us than about her. The success of such mean-spirited books, meanwhile, is symptomatic of what we've become. We're an envious, greedy lot, hellbent on destroying anyone who seems to be making it better than we. Presumably, Oppenheimer's revelations are supposed to make us feel better about ourselves by making Waspy, white-bread Martha look bad. She wasn't the sweet homemaker she made herself out to be, according to some 400 so-called friends and relatives interviewed by Oppenheimer.

She was ambitious, determined, exact-: ing and sometimes cold. So? Would we have liked her better had she scratched her crotch in front of a stadium crowd, as Roseanne did a few years ago? America loves Roseanne but hates Martha, which pretty much sums us up. Roseanne told the world her father sexually molested her. Martha told stories of a loving family and home life in which the aroma of freshly baked biscuits wafted through gingham-draped windows. We don't know whether Roseanne's story is true, but Oppenheimer and his chorus of nay-sayers claim Martha's recollections constitute revisionist history.

The naked truth: Her mother was cold, her father strict, and Martha's childhood barren and oppressive. So the woman exaggerated. So she chose t' to "fantasize" her home life, as one have we upset the balance of nature and is this nature's revenge of us," said David Vogel, president of Walt Disney Pictures, which recently paid a writer, Ron Kasdan, $850,000 for the rights and screenplay adaptation for his new novel, Instinct. It's about a toxic chemical spill in Mexico that unleashes a swarm of killer bugs headed for Texas. "Right now we're in a similar time," said Vogel, who was echoing the views of several other executives and producers.

"Every week we seem to be reading about cloning and biological engineering and new discoveries of war on planets. Science is altering our sense of the familiar. And these movies are tap- BUG MOVIES IN THE WORKS Mimic, about a cockroach hybrid, a combination praying mantis and termite, due Aug. 22. Starship Troopers, about a war between humans and giant alien ants, due Nov.

7. Ante, an animated film, with the voice of Woody Allen as the lead bug. No release date scheduled. Dust, about the extinction of insects potentially dooming the planet. No release date scheduled.

ping into that." ic material consumes him. Tonight's opening sequence establishes the abrasive, tasteless tone: Little Kyle uses his baby brother to whack a pal and kicks the infant into mailboxes and through closed bus windows. The hefty Cart-man tells a strange and ugly dream about COMEDY CENTRAL Among the bug movies looming are Paul Verhoeven's Star-ship Troopers, about a war between humans and giant alien ants, to be released by Tri-Star on Nov. Antz, an animated film (with the voice of Woody Allen as the lead bug) to be made by Dreamworks; Dust, a Warner Bros, movie based on a novel by Charles Pellegrino about the extinction of insects potentially dooming the planet; and a Pixar film for Disney called A Bug's Life. In another bug film, Mimic, to be released this month by Miramax, Mira Sorvino is menaced by a cockroach hybrid, a combination praying mantis and ter EVERETT COLLECTION 'South Stan and Kyle are 2 of the twisted tots in Comedy Central series.

Pesky ant-agonists. The 1954 classic features giant ants running wild in the Southwest after an atomic test. president of production at New Line. It all very biblical. Beyond this, and on a purely practical level, studios are find ing that the uses of increasingly sophisticated computer techniques make insects far easier to animate than aliens or dinosaurs, "Bugs are relatively easy to ani mm mate because they have sharp lines and hard surfaces and a uniform color, and don't have the II facial expressions and recogniza mite.

The film's director, Guu-lermo del Toro, who made Cronos, the 1993 award-winning terror film, has spent a lot of time thinking about bugs and spoke almost mystically about them. "What's appealing for filmmakers is that these things are real," he said during a telephone interview from Los Angeles. "They share the same planet. You don't have to make them up. We see them every day.

Yet bugs are creatures with a nightmarish perfection. We have little in with them. They have six legs, multiple eyes, no heart, no lungs and are unstoppable. Mammals are soft, fleshy, vulnerable, while bugs are covered by an armored plate. They can be single-minded and ruthless! They are grotesque.

They are God's nightmare." Similarly, Wes Craven, anoth ble human qualities that you need in dinosaurs or aliens," said Mike Simpson, co-head of the motion picture department at the William Morris talent agency. aliens visiting him. The little boys speak a salty vernacular. The adults are no better. Mr.

Garrison, their deranged teacher, garbles history and uses the hand puppet Mr. Hat to tell one boy to go to hell. The Chef (voice by Isaac Hayes) sings an explicit love song in front.of the children. A lot of this material is bound to make viewers as queasy as the fourth little boy, Stan, who throws up whenever he sees Wendy, the girl he loves. The first episode makes such a bad impression that it's hard to get on the show's strange wavelength.

Later installments are stronger, but that's not a recommendation. In next week's show, Cartman wins a national essay contest through plagiarism and starts taking a weight-gaining product that makes him humongous. Prodded by his hand puppet, Mr. Garrison plots to kill longtime nemesis Kathie Lee Gifford, who comes to town to present Cartman's award. Kathie Lee travels in a bubble like the pope, and she's aghast when the Chef sings her a suggestive love song.

This time, the joke works. In another episode, the children go hunting as a volcano threatens the region. Foolish adults give guns to the 8-year-old boys, the town's dizzy mayor sputters and a mythological creature appears. More interesting than the show's humor is its offbeat style, a mix of construe- "Besides, there's the natural fear and hatred we all have for them." acquaintance put it. Do rose-colored glasses make her cakes any less tasty? In my book, Martha gets extra points for dressing up her parents' bare-bones existence, Such used to be called loyalty.

Meanwhile, Martha's maligned ambition was her ticket out of poverty. Hats off to a girl who makes her own prom dress, earns money as a child baking cakes for neighbors, makes high enough grades to enter a private college (Barnard) on scholarship. Do we really care that one of her childhood chums suspects Martha purposely gave her a cake recipe minus a key ingredient? Does it matter that Martha's favorite childhood television show was Father Knows Best? It was everyone's. Is it really "sadistic," as Oppenheimer claims, that Martha used to surprise friends on the ice by swiping their feet out from under them, causing them to tumble? Obnoxious and childish, yes, but not exactly sadistic. Her greatest sin may not have been her lack of humility as demonstrated by Martha's high school yearbook inscription "I do what I please, and I do it with ease" but her refusal to be one of us.

Come on, Martha, get with the program. Get some tattoos, pierce your tongue and seduce a lesbian cross-dressing welder. Then maybe we'll like you. Kathleen Parker's column is distributed by Tribune Media Services. She welcomes your views and suggestions.

Mail: The Orlando Sentinel, MP-6, PO. Box 2833. Orlando, Fla. 32802-2833. E-mail: Kparfcerl (a aol.com on the Internet.

Her columns are on America Online at Keyword: Oso Soundoff. Horror films have to some de EVERETT COLLECTION gree often reflected the fears and paranoia of popular culture. In Global bugfare. Giant locusts (above) munch on Chicago, while mutant scorpions (below) attack Mexico. the 1930s and '40s, the Franken stein films and their imitators tapped into fear about crazed scientists.

"Horror and sci-fi films have almost always been anti-science or very skeptical of it," said Welch Everman, author of Cult Horror Films (1993) and Cult Science Fiction Films (1995), both published by Citadel Press. er top horror filmmaker, says bugs are far more frightening than aliens. "We don't like them," he said. "They're symbols of corruption and filth. They share our space, and we know that they can really hurt us.

They stand for an element of nature that's voracious and ultimately sees us as food. And they're probably right." Of course, studio executives and agents view bugs as part of Hollywood's never-ending quest for newer and scarier villains. "We've had viruses, slugs, tornadoes, volcanoes and now, bugs," said Mike De Luca, "In earlier horror films," said Everman, an associate dean at the University of Maine, "this was personified by mad scientists. In the 1950s, this was changed to a skepticism about Please see INSECTS, E-4 the Black scorpion EVERETT COLLECTION PeaseseeTV, E-7 9 tips for helping your child become a master at taking tests NEW YORK TIMES SPECIAL FEATURES COMING UP IN LIVING Many children find tests to be a source of stress and fear. But tests are an essential part of the school ex homework, notes and other materials to study for tests, how to prioritize and so forth.

You'll need to talk your youngster through difficult math problems and drill her on spelling words. Your goal is to help her take over the responsibility of studying, organizing and preparing. But that's an ongoing process. Children learn good study and test-taking skills in small steps, with plenty of repetition. plications.

You can prepare your child to become a good student and capable test-taker as early as the preschool years, by reading to her, engaging her in imaginative conversation and fostering curiosity about daily life. But once your child begins elementary school, you'll want to offer more structured help. In the first few grades, she'll need guidance in learning how to organize What are those crucial steps? Here, from the experts, are some skills you can employ to help your young test-taker excel. Organization essentials: To head off those "I-need-to-know-the-times-table-by-tomorrow" blues, help your child set up a system for remembering when quizzes are scheduled. Keep in touch with the teacher about scheduling, Please see TESTS, E-4 terials differently to better reach students.

Tests can be instructive for children too, helping them look at a subject in an integrated way, check their level of knowledge and learn to be responsible for the material they need to work on. Moreover, test-taking skills from grade school will be useful throughout life, from high-school tests and college-entrance exams to drivers-license tests and job ap 1 Dress for More or Less consumer report on fall fashions. Thursday in Living. perience. Educators rely on tests to check their own work, indicating whether they need to present ma-.