Daily Press from Newport News, Virginia • Page 30

Movies Daily Press, Saturday, Feb. 9, 1991 D2. Sorting out love in the city of make-believe 13 i in i 4 4 If' Sarah Jessica Parker) who fitted him for slacks. The LA. of this movie is like an open-air fun-house.

It's an infatuated tableau, with no urban grungi-ness allowed to intrude upon the pop landscape of Tail o' the Pups and Venice beach murals and New Wave bistros. It is a landscape that would seem to be supremely hospitable to romance just because it's so eye-popping and swoony. And yet, despite the film's antic, hallucinatory shimmer, there's something heartfelt and substantial at its core. The filmmakers are posing a real question: In a city, a world, where everything is charged with make-believe, how do you sort out real love from infatuation and hype? Martin has often played characters like the Depression-era dreamer in "Pennies From Heaven" or the fire-chief Cyrano in "Roxanne" who are transfixed by their own ardent dreams. In "LA.

Story," Martin is attempting to scrunch all of his comic personas into one. There are lickety-split visual and verbal references not only to those two films, but also to "The Jerk" and "All of Me" and "The Lonely Guy" and "The Man With Two Brains." By placing Los Angeles at the center of his new movie, Martin is saying that the city encourages people to act out their own most eccentric selves. He lays out all of his own selves for us here, and, miraculously, they synthesize. The film's anything-goes scenario occasionally turns in on itself. There are wayward gags, like Sara's penchant for tuba-playing, or a freeway shootout, that don't quite work.

And even the film's freeway sign motif becomes wearying: It's in the "2001" and "Field of Dreams" mode, and it's too spooky-inspirational a conceit for this wingding. Even though Martin has written a beauty of a role for himself, my ideal Steve Martin movie would allow for a lot more of his physical comedy. Tennant brings a patrician silliness to her role that matches up well with Martin's bandy-legged finesse and rapt goofiness, but her role isn't filled out enough. The romance between Harris and Sara is more successful on a visual than an emotional level. Their mutual entrancement is conveyed in a maelstrom of set-pieces, like the storm that closes the film, or the enchanted moment when they walk through a garden and suddenly become children.

Steve Martin stars in odd comedy By PETER RAINER Los Angeles Times HOLLYWOOD The new Steve Martin movie "LA. Story" has a completely original spirit It's wiggy yet deeply, helplessly romantic. It's a movie about infatuation with women, with Los Angeles, with comedy. Mick Jackson, the Britisher who directed from Martin's script, offers up a whirligig of familiar Los Angeles locales, but they are transformed by the film makers' ardor. The imagery has a spin to it, as if we too were being enswooned by it all.

Martin's Harris K. Telemacher has been a TV weatherman for seven years and, in Los Angeles, being a weatherman means being a clown. How else can you relieve the sameness of the nightly reports? Harris is miserable in his job he even takes to pre-taping his predictions but he also keys into the nuttiness that his producers expect from him. He's a clown who won't admit to being a clown. Off-screen, he does wacky, harebrained things, like zipping his car across lawns and down concrete staircases to avoid rush-hour traffic, or skating unauthorized through the galleries of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art while a friend points a video camera at him.

But Harris is too "driven" to find any humor in these escapades. The museum stunt, for example, he calls "performance art." In the film's terms, Harris has the LA. disease: He's trying to pin down the whirligig and find true love, but the city's pop nuttiness keeps getting in the way. Harris is frantic, all right, but he's drifting in space, waiting for a signal to come down. The signal comes in the form of a freeway sign's digital readout.

Throughout the movie, the sign's traffic condition report periodically gives way to a series of gnomic, mystical messages about Harris' impending love life. He is captivated by Sara (Victoria Tennant), a reporter from the London Times newly arrived in Los Angeles to do a series on the city. But it takes him most of the movie to own up to the passion. Even when he wriggles free of a bad relationship with a martinet girlfriend (Marilu Hen-ner), he finds himself frolicking with the stunning, air-brained salesgirl (the unquenchably frisky A role reversal i You want funny? Ghost' murderer is your man By BRUCE CHADWICK New York Daily News ATLANTIC CITY, NJ. There -is nothing funny about deranged murderer Willie Lopez, played by" Rick Aviles in the film "Ghost." Nothing funny at all.

That's why-club regulars at Atlantic City's TropWorld are getting a big shock-this week during Aviles' ment there as a standup comic. This is actually role reversal. Aviles, from Manhattan, has been a standup comic all of his life, a good one. He was good enough to emcee the "It's Showtime at the Apollo" show on NBC-TV. In he was even voted "Comic of Year" at the Village Voice Street Festival.

If you want funny, Rick Aviles is your man. All of which does little to explain7 how this man who has worked so; hard at comedy has become known as a seething murderer. "It's a wild story," he said. Tim still not sure I understand why I got the part, and I'm still not sure, why a nice little movie but something no one was betting became one of the biggest gross- ing movies of all time." Aviles has been trying to turn himself into a dramatic actor for? years. His agent told him to audition for The agent told the -movie's director, Jerry Zucker, that he'd be perfect for the role.

The) director refused to talk to him. "So I went to the South of France for three months. The director finally agreed to see me when I got back and immediately did not-like me. Then we tried a third time7 and he said he just didn't like any- thing about me, but maybe he'd put up with me." The director had little use for; Aviles, but most of all he thought; he looked "too dark." "That's because I've been in, France suntanning myself for 12: weeks," Aviles told him. The director said the only way he could do the part was to hide in a room during the entire filming so he'd get" rid of his tan.

Then Aviles said the director didn't like the comic's short hair-and told him he'd have to wear long-haired wig. "So he finally lets me out of this" dark room I've been in for two months, sticks this wig on me and then he says he still doesn't like me. Says the answer is a two-week, growth of beard. So back I go into the dark room with the wig and. don't shave for two weeks.

That, whole summer, I saw no sun, no razor and no people. But it worked." It sure did. 'Ghost' was the biggest moneymaker of the grossing over $200 million, and the' scary Rick Aviles became a "hot" property. He was booked for an' HBO comedy special (a "One Night Stand," airing Feb. 15), landed the, role in a television series pilot, and, has been deluged with movie scripts comedy and drama.

Aviles would like to keep his two, lives one serious and one "I know that any kind of dra-; matic acting you get makes you a better comic. It isn't enough to just stand up there and throw out one liners. You have to act. This movie has made me a better comic. All of the comedy I do, in front of audi ences, has to make me a bettef actor," said Aviles.

Comedy has been getting more and more popular lately, with an all-comedy channel on cable telet vision, a proliferation of comedy clubs and film success for comics like Lily Tomlin and Robin Williams. "There were two golden ages of comedy in this country. The first was during the Depression and the second was just after World War II. Why? Because people wanted to escape the horror of the real world. Now, at the same time, you have a deep recession and war in the Persian Gulf.

People are going to want good comedy, lots of come dy, to escape from the nightmares around them," he said. And Aviles will be there to givq it to them. Tri-Star Pictures Los Angeles is the magical backdrop for a comedy starring Victoria Tennant and Steve Martin. a nod to Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast." Few comic artists would think to incorporate these kinds of references into their movies, and fewer still could do it without seeming pretentious. The reason it all works in "LA.

Story" is Martin and Jackson are on the same sophisticatedly childlike wavelength as those artists. They are on the lookout to be enchanted. And it's this ache for enchantment that unifies the film's crazy-quilt of styles and moods. It's a mystifyingly funny experience. But, in general, "LA.

Story" is most successful when it's taking risks when it jettisons the earthquake gags and the "new age" riffs and the freeway yocks and instead draws on the filmmakers' flabbergasted awe at the LA. fantasy land. "LA. Story" (rated PG-13 for mild sexual situations) draws on the visual styles of David Hockney and, in the ripe, verdant lustiness of that garden scene, the great 19th-century French primitive Henri Rousseau. There's a moment when flowers suddenly bloom and a stone lion turns his head that's probably Familiarity breeds i 4.

mm-- 1 7 AH REVIEW: "LA. Story" is rated PG-13. Newmarket Mall 4. The numerous jokes at the city's expense, while affectionate, are not always of the first freshness. By concentrating on trendy Los Angeles high spots, the movie leaves itself open to charges of social indifference; it would have been an even more daring comedy if it had attempted to incorporate more urban colors into its palette.

a winner in even the most predictable plot turns and unexpected humor in the grimmest situations. Only occasionally is he defeated by the script's machinations. Roberts' hasty disposal of her wedding ring is badly handled. And Ruben compounds the script's error with a lingering final shot of the same gold band. Roberts' strength of personality repels any damsel-in-distress stereotypes.

She has the gift for making audiences instantly empathize with her, an essential trait for her screen success. Patrick Bergin, earlier seen as explorer Sir Richard Burton in "Mountains of the Moon," plays Martin purely as a symbol of diabolical evil. We know nothing of his psychological background (and, for that matter, we know little of Laura's), and Bergin's pasty-faced performance offers no clues. Martin exists simply to torment the heroine. Director Ruben has fun with the solemnity of Bergin's portrayal: In one scene, he photographs Bergin clad entirely in black, striding dolefully through a college campus filled with carefree, casually dressed students.

Ruben's timing is so slick, you laugh with the scene rather than at it. Adams and reporter Stephanie Taylor. Victoria F. Lopez, says in the suit that the station slandered and libeled her in a January 1990 report on Lopez's battle to gain custody of her two children. The suit states that WAVY broadcast the news that Lopez "was a worshiper of Satan, engaged in witchcraft" and made sacrifices of animals.

Lopez's attorney, Andrew Sebok, has subpoenaed WAVY and WVEC for all videotapes, notes, scripts and sources of information about Lopez. Sebok said he asked WAVY management for a tape of lst-rate 'Sleeping' surprises no one -but no one minds By PHILIP WUNTCH Dallas Morning News "Sleeping With the Enemy" is a manipulative and contrived thriller. But it's so effectively done, you probably won't mind the manipulation or the contrivances. Julia Roberts is the perfect put-upon heroine for this suspense saga vulnerable, emotionally raw but consistently resilient. She also has a face and form the camera loves.

If there still exists any doubt that Roberts is a major star, "Sleeping With the Enemy" should erase it. And Joseph Ruben, whose eerie "The Stepfather" became a cult favorite, is the perfect director for this sort of psychological spooki-ness. He takes the viewer to scary heights only suggested by the paint-by-numbers screenplay. He obviously knows he's dealing with a formulaic plot, and he twists it to suit his sense of mischief. Roberts plays Laura Bumey, the perfect yuppie wife.

She dresses stylishly, fixes elegant dinners and immaculately maintains a large News Continued from Dl Monday at the Norfolk chemical plant. WVEC's Cynthia Lima told viewers at 6 p.m. the FBI had been given sole jurisdiction to investigate. And during the 1 1 p.m. newscast, WAWs Stephanie Taylor told why it was unlikely terrorists were involved.

But there was a bit of unfortunate TV melodrama. Lima also said the FBI's probe provided "strong evidence of a potential terrorist WVEC trotted out former REVIEW: "Sleeping With the Enemy" is rated R. Patrick Henry 7, Carmike Cinema 4. house. In the exquisite bathroom, the finger towels are all arranged symmetrically.

In the spacious pantry, the expensive sauces and condiments are stacked neatly, with the labels in perfect view. And they had better be. If Laura veers from this rigid routine, her wealthy and obsessive husband, Martin, will, at his gentlest, smack her in the face or, if in a particularly dour mood, punch her harshly. Laura is a terrified prisoner in her own home. She fakes a boating accident, flees from Cape Cod to the Midwest and establishes a new identity in an idyllic Iowa town.

She also enters into a reassuring romance with Ben Woodward, the local college's drama teacher, who seems like the least temperamental soul ever to be involved in the theater. Inevitably, just as Laura begins to feel snug in her new identity and fresh relationship, the evil Martin learns of her whereabouts. Ruben handily finds suspense Congressman Bill Whitehurst to tell anchor Jim Kincaid on the air how scary it was that terrorists could be attacking here. And WAVY led its 6 p.m. Tuesday newscast, after that day's bomb scares all proved to be hoaxes, with these overly dour words from anchor Alveta Ewell: "A second wave of fear grips Hampton Roads." Lawsuit A Virginia Beach woman has filed a $1.5 million lawsuit in Norfolk Circuit Court against WAVY, General Manager Doug KRTN Julia Roberts plays a damsel in distress in "Sleeping With the Enemy." As the gallant Ben, Kevin Ander- Bergin's nasty Patrick, he's a one-son plays Mr.

Right just as reso- note character, lutely as Bergin plays Mr. Wrong. "Sleeping With the Enemy" is a He's always good-natured, con- first-rate thriller, expertly patched cerned and patient. But, like together from familiar material. Taylor's story before filing the suit.

When the station refused, Sebok said he was forced to file a motion to produce the documents. Adams said corporate policy prohibited him from commenting on the suit. WAVYs attorney, Elizabeth Esinhart, said the station plans to vigorously defend itself. A court date has not been set. WAVY has until Feb.

17 to hand over the documents or challenge the motion. Score: It turned out to be a work of promotional genius dreamed up by Tommy Griffiths of rock station in Hampton Roads. That patriotic fervor bears out that these are unusual times. Kudos: Congrats to country station WCMS (100.5 FM and 105P AM) for being the only commercial music station in Hampton Roads to break from programming to air President Bush's Tuesday news conference live. Of course, the news event was cohered live by those stations with a news format But WCMS made the decision to take off the music and put on the president.

WNOR (98.7 FM and 1230 AM) he and morning partner Henry Del Toro asked Hampton Roads residents to create a living flag last weekend at Mount Trashrnore Park in Virginia Beach. The event, where people held up pieces of red, white and blue cardboard to form a huge flag when viewed from overhead, generated lead stories on the three local news stations and was covered by CNN. More than 40,000 people showed up, according to police estimates. It became one of the best-attended radio community events ever held JL.