Leader-Telegram from Eau Claire, Wisconsin • 54

Entertainment SUNDAY, November 22, 1992 ff Leader-Telegram Al Directors make the most of Williams' talents Film's soundtrack was a triple challenge for composer LOS ANGELES Composer Alan "Jesus Christ on ad- things that remind you of ver Menken did more than provide the most ap- ditional "Aladdin" songs after Ashman died Middle Eastern moments in other filn things that remind you of very Middle Eastern moments in other films. exotic. The third point is animation scoring, parent creative continuity between "Aladdin" of AIDS complications. It was tougher on this one because Howard wasn't there, and he was much more the dramaturge than I was. So I had to play that role more." Menken, who lives in upstate New York with his wife and two children, saw his music contributing to "Aladdin's" dramatic structure in three distinct ways.

"The first is, it's a musical," he said. "We have to provide the peak emotional and entertainment points in song, and then in score I have to continue threading those themes along so, at the end, you remember them. "The second purpose involved the film's high quotient of live-action sensibility. It was up to me to also thread through the Cave of Wonders sequence and various other sequences things that remind you, maybe, of 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' or 'Romancing the where you're catching all of these comedic, little points. That's a very 'specific style of scoring." Foremost in Menken's mind through all of this musical construction was keeping "Aladdin" focused on Aladdin, despite the distractions of a feisty princess, hissable villains and a Genie who just doesn't know when to quit.

"The core story is street urchin has a big dream and wants to make his dream come true," said the composer, who owns a closet-ful of Oscars that testify to the realization of his own dreams. "I tried to reinforce that, so all those other exotic elements don't swamp it. It's really a balancing act." Bob Strauss and the preceding Disney cartoons he scored with the late lyricist Howard Ashman. He also had a major role in keeping "Aladdin's" internal continuity consistent through a plot that gyrated wildly from manic comedy to fairy tale fantasy, from young romance to terrifying adventure. And all without the help of his longtime collaborator Ashman, who besides writing the 1-yrics for such classic tunes as "Green" (from their stage musical "Little Shop of "Under the Sea" and "Be Our Guest" and the also wrote "Aladdin's" initial script treatment.

"This is a unique situation because I am the torchbearer for Howard's and my work," said Menken, who collaborated with Tim Rice "Mermaid's" Ariel, which he also designed. "Most people say. They all look alike. Why do the Disney heroines all look alike?" There is certainly an approach to our character designs 1 don't want to use the word formula because we try very hard not to do that. I came right off 'Beauty' and onto Jasmine, and it was like, 'I've got to do something different "Jeffrey has a feeling that these lead characters have got to be very appealing, and very attractive in that sense," Henn said.

"But here was a unique dilemma, because Jasmine has a fairly strong ethnic pedigree. We had to walk a very fine line: How far can you push that without offending? And how little to where somebody says it's just the same old thing? It was a tough one to get to work." Compare, for example. Jasmine's careful presentation to the insulting stereotypes of American Indians found in the 1953 "Peter Pan." In fact, "Aladdin" safely can be called the first of Disney's 31 animated features to fully reflect the attitudes of baby boomers most of whom were weaned, to some degree, on Uncle Walt's world view. "It's a film that's produced by our generation," proclaimed the 37-year-old Genie lead animator, Eric Goldberg, who finally was lured to Disney for "Aladdin" after a highly successful career in advertising animation. "The fact of the matter is, with a lot of films that Disney produced over the years, everybody kept looking back over their shoulders and saying, 'Now, would Walt have wanted that?" N.Y.

Times News Service ALADDIN from Page 1G 10,000 years and suddenly has an audience. He wants to get a reaction and he's constantly working for that." Indeed. When Aladdin, who is portrayed in the film as a sweet, street-smart, medieval Arabian delinquent, is tricked by the evil Jafar into retrieving the magic lamp from the fearsome Cave of Wonders, he winds up releasing Williams' Genie. To a tune called "Friend Like Me," which composer Alan Menken and his late lyricist partner Howard Ashman wrote as what Menken calls "a Fats Waller kind of number," the Genie shows off his powers with a zillion or so improbable transformations, impersonating everything from a belly dancing chorus line to Jack Nicholson, Ed Sullivan and Robert De Niro. "We-felt, there was a crazy logic to it, that the Genie can transcend time and space, therefore he's watched a lot of TV in the '50s and '60s or something in his travels," Musker said.

"He works those back into his references somehow. The magical and fantasy elements of the story enabled us to stretch the boundaries more. It would have been tougher if it was a naturalistic story, like 'Bambi' or something, to have a Robin Williams type thing in the middle of it." Musker minimizes the situation. It would have been just as tough to drop a Williams routine into the fantasy-drenched "Beauty and the Beast." Although sporadically known for artistic excellence and even grand experimentation (Walt Disney's follow-up to his first commonly associated with Disney. "Aladdin" draws on an eclectic blend of influences that include richly colored Persian miniature paintings, the line-drawing style of showbiz caricaturist AI Hirschfeld and the energized plasticity that earmarked the product of Disney's only real rival in the golden age of Hollywood animation, Warner Looney Toons.

The new look manifests in dozens of different ways throughout "Aladdin," none more apparent than in the presentation of the feisty, proto-feminist Princess Jasmine. "Thank you. God bless you," gushed Jasmine's supervising animator Mark Henn when told that she looked markedly different from "Beauty's" Belle and animated fairy tale, "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs," was the proudly unconventional the Mouse factory never has been associated with cutting-edge wackiness. "Aladdin" breaks with other, newer conventions that have emerged from studio chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg regime's other cartoon hits. The plot reportedly was reworked well into the labor-intensive animation process, an almost unheard of extravagance in the field (about 600 artists and technicians worked on the movie).

Katzenberg requested that the title character, who originally was modeled upon diminutive actor Michael J. Fox, be redesigned into i more conspicuously romantic attempts to take over the mythical kingdom of Agrabah, the Sultan's attempts to find a suitable husband for his headstrong daughter Jasmine, Jasmine's romance with Aladdin and Aladdin's own, wayward journey to maturity lest they be overwhelmed by the Genie's bravura schtick. Despite all the echoes from recent hits, "Aladdin" would be an innovative film even without Williams' contribution. It contains computer animated bits especially a friendly flying carpet that exhibit new dimensions of personality only achieved by hand drawing in the past. There also is a different look to the film's overall design, more car-toony than the naturalistic approach lead.

Aladdin supervising animator Glen Keane rebuilt him with elements taken from Tom Cruise, rap star Hammer and Hermosa Beach volleyball players. Entire characters, such as Aladdin's mother, were dropped from the scenario. Whole production numbers, some of the last songs written by Menken and Ashman and others composed by Menken and "Evita" lyricist Tim Rice after Ashman succumbed to complications from AIDS, were axed after many man-hours worth of visualizing development. And, once Williams recorded his maniacally improvised Genie dialogue, a great effort had to be made to strengthen the film's classical story elements Jafar' Movie Capsules Gary Sinise plays his guardian, George, two itinerant laborers who find work at a farm thats a hotbed of internal tension. David Kronke "Passenger 57" (R): There isn't a genuine moment to be found in all of Director Kevin Hooks' "Passenger 57," an airborne "Die Hard" clone that has been assembled from a basic dramatic blueprint the way real estate developers throw up tract homes.

It's not a terrible movie but is less notable as film art than as the first to present, in the person of Wesley Snipes, a new breed of black action heroes, patterned after such white stars as Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Robert W. Butler, Kansas City Star "A River Runs Through It" (PG): Robert Redford's third directing effort is a respectful and often moving adaptation of Norman Maclean's Montana memoirs. Set mostly in 1926, it depicts Norman and his brother Paul's (Craig Sheffer and Brad Pitt) love of fly fishing, their hard affection for a stern, minister father (Tom Skerritt, who is wonderful) and their differing attractions to sustenance and destruction. Tough-minded nostalgia laced with quiet, for-givinggrace.

Bob Strauss "Under Siege" Steven Seagal's latest stupid action movie is his funniest yet, a self-joshing thriller about nuclear terrorists taking over the battleship Missouri. Villains Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Busey act rings around the squinty-eyed one, but he looks better in the knife fights. The film eventually takes itself too seriously, but at its eccentric best, this is as witty as such things get these days. Bob Strauss wise, director Michael Mann kicks out his usual stylistic stops flashy camera work, distractingly languorous slow-motion, overwrought music. Call it "MohicanVice." David Kronke "Malcolm (PG-13): Spike Lee takes an uncommonly timid approach to his material but comes up with an excellent piece of historical, if not totally effective biographical, filmmaking.

The closest thing to a true African American epic since Alex Haley's "Roots," the 3-hour-20-minute film benefits from Lees newfound, narrative-focused discipline. And Denzel Washington shows at least three different Malcolms, playing them magnificently but never quite integrating them into a complete portrait of the man. Bob Strauss "Mighty Ducks" (PG): Emilio Estevez skimps on the charisma in this kids-only hokum about a rags-to-riches children's hockey team, which is both maddeningly predictable and hypocritical in its winning-isn't-everything message. David Kronke "Of Mice and Men" (PG-13): This intelligent and handsomely photographed adaptation of John Steinbeck's Depression-era novel is also dramatically inert. John Malkovich stars as dim-witted Lennie and director JENNIFER 8 in Ev.

Sit least, recognizably related to life as we know it. Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News "Dr. Giggles" (R): This is a horror film about a pudgy, mad, very general practitioner (Larry Drake) who is inclined to giggle in moments of stress, which are frequent. After escaping from an asylum, he returns to his hometown to kill everybody in one seemingly endless night. The job is not as difficult as it might seem: His victims have very small brainpans.

Vincent Canby, Y. Times News Service "Home Alone 2: Lost in New York" (PG): Chris Columbus' comedy sequel stars Macaulay Culkin as a young boy fending for himself in Manhattan after accidentally being separated from his family during a holiday trip. With Joe Pesci, Daniel Stern, John Heard and Catherine Hara. "Jennifer 8" (R): In this thriller, writer-director Bruce Robinson has masterfully created an atmosphere of eerie melancholy, reflecting the somber, slow and just a tad unsteady mindset of detective John Berlin (Andy Garcia), a former Los Angeles cop who takes on a grisly murder case in a small town. The film also stars Uma Thurman and John Malkovich.

David Kronke "The Last of the Mohicans" (R): Overblown, melodramatic epic, based on the James Fenimore Cooper's adventure yarn, about an 18th century colonist (Daniel Day-Lewis) raised by Mohicans who is drawn against his will into the battle between the French and the British for possession of America. He sides with the British, mainly because they have prettier women, and falls for Cora (Madeleine Stowe), the daughter of a British colonel. Other- Following are brief reviews of movies playing at Eau Claire theaters. The rating system for the film list is: four stars don't miss it; three stars worth your while; two stars has it moments; one star if you must. Star ratings not available for some films.

"Aladdin" (G): Another endlessly entertaining animated feature from Walt Disney, buoyed by Robin Williams' energetically inventive turn as the Genie who helps a poor street kid named Aladdin surmount the evil plotting of Jafar and win the love of the Sultan's daughter Jasmine. Dazzling color and breathtaking animation combine with non-stop laughs and spritely songs. As with "The Little Mermaid" and "Beauty and the Beast," adults will enjoy this as much as (if not more than) kids. David Kronke, Los Angeles Daily News "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (R): Technically, Francis Ford Coppola's film is a bona fide dazzler; on every other level, it's an outrageous mess, a rudderless jumble of weirdness for weirdness' sake. Call it "Dreckula." Gary Oldman's performance as Prince Vlad is solid; unfortunately, it's his lover Mina who's the center of this film, and her character makes no emotional sense whatsoever.

Winona Ryder does her best from scene to scene but can't figure out Mina any better than we can. David Kronke "Ci Tdyman" (R): A relatively in-tellic, ant, artfully mounted horror movie. Virginia Madsen is a Chicago graduate student whose investigation into urban legends unleashes a hook-handed ghost on the Cabrini Green housing project. Lots of bees, murky sociology and ideas lifted from other shows, but it's psychologically intriguing and, at THE LAST OF THE MOHICAHS Ev.7:00-:30 Sat rttfimi MIGHTY DUCKS No 1:00 Show on Sun. POl Em 81-8un SPECIAL SNEAK PREVIEW Sunday 1 :00 p.m.

"EXHILARATING. 'ALADDIN' IS A RAVISHING THRILL RIDE." PASSENGER 57 Lro Ew. St-Sun. 1 UNDER SIEGE Em St-Sun. -RICHARD CORLISS, Time NUgwm.

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