The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 67

Cos Angeles Slimes 1 0 Part VIFriday, December 21. 1984 "A TOTAL DELIGHT-COMPLETELY CAPTIVATING. DCCDCCUIUri niCCCDClIT -n ncrnciininuLi uiriinim. inR miisi DKimniiui ininn mitii ''fff' Gods Must Be Crazy' is tt" waV intercuts the goofy v-xy j(r oeoole with the real animals, natives and nature. MOVIE REVIEW irl i ne aDsuraity or mooern lire is onuianiiy conirasiea with the simplicity of the natives." 3U Ren Weed NE VORK POST SURREAL 'BIRDY' SOARS' AS POWERFUL DRAMA "SO YOU'RE SICK OF HOLLYWOOD take your friends, your kids.

It's that good, that lunny. that sexy, that crazy and yes. touching." Peler Slack SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE "A REFRESHINGLY LOOPY Kathleen Carroll NEW YORK DAILY NEWS THE COW MUST BE notice should be given to the details from its superlative production design (Geoffrey Kirkland) to its camera work (Michael Seresin, who should be especially commended for the graceful and seemingly far-ranging flight scene); to Kristi Zea's (always) intuitively right costumes, the exceptional music by Peter Gabriel, the especially fine touch of editor Gerry Hambling, to David MacMillan's wonderfully atmospheric sound, and to Alan Marshall, "Birdy's" optimistic producer. And to the great believer, "William Wharton," who started the whole thing. 'BIRDY A Tri-Star Release of an Film Production of an Alan Parker Film.

Producer Alan Marshall. Executive producer David Manson. Director Parker. Screenplay Sandy Kroopf, Jack Behr based on the novel "Birdy" by William Wharton. Camera Michael Seresin.

Production design Geoffrey Kirkland. Music Peter Gabriel, Costumes Kristi Zea. Sound recording David MacMillan. Bird trainer Gary Gero. Stunt coordinator James Amett.

With Matthew Modine, Nicolas Cage, John Harkins, Sandy Baron, Karen Young, Bruno Kirby, Nancy Fish, George Buck, Dolores Sage. Running time: 2 hours. MPAA-rated: (persons under 17 must be accompanied by parent or adult lover, he enters his homemade aviary. And from there, in dreams (in fact?) Birdy takes off, to swoop and soar over his depressing surroundings. As it was in the novel, it will be the film's most hotly debated scene.

Parker and editor Gerry Hambl-ing keep the film flowing back and forth, from the hospital where the clipped-haired Birdy perches, naked, in the blue night light and stares up at his screened window, to the boys' richly comic life in the streets and sandlots of Philly. It's one of the deepest portraits of real, interdependent friendship to glow from a screen, full of the ribald shorthand of adolescence and the loving allowances that best friends make for each other. Modine was part of a cast that won its acting award as a group (all the men of Robert Altman's "Streamers," cited as the best actor at the Venice Film Festival.) He's gotten himself into the same fix now. It becomes impossible to think of Cage or Modine separately, but to regard them together as two of America's most strongly promising young actors, connected by a particular inner sweetness both contain. It's also a film where special he has felt completely himself, the world of birds while not letting Birdy's psychiatrist know anything about his patient's bird-obsession, Al comes dangerously close to the brink of his own abyss as well (Screenwriteradapters Sandy Kroopf and Jack Behr have moved the book's war experience from World War II to Vietnam.

Although this way we lose the book's pungent Depression-period scenes of adolescence, it is a choice that gives the movie immediacy. It's only in Al's Vietnam summing-up monologue that the adaptation falls below its own high aims. The film dares the book's most mysterious moment, when Birdy's gentle entry into the world of his beloved canarylove Perta quite literally takes off. After proving on Senior Prom night how faultily adjusted he is to the world of his contemporaries, Birdy comes home. Leaving his clothes on the floor, strewn like an impatient A TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX RELEASE JAMIE THE GODS MUST BE CRAZY" a AT.

FILMS PRODUCTION WEYERS SANDRA PRINSLOO and XAO, THE BUSHMAN f-BOET TROSKIE BOSHOFF -HlSSSt JAMIE UYS It IHIMIlHIIMlll NOW SHOWING Laemmle's MUSIC HALL 9036 Wilshire Beverly Hills 274-6B69 Dailyll5330545800IOI5PM And In Orange County Edwards TOWN CENTER Costa Mesa 714751-4184 Daily 130 3 45 6 00 8 lO MO IO PM ENDS 1224 By SHEILA BENSON. Times Staff Writer To call director Alan Parker's "Birdy" (at the Regent) the season's high-risk movie is wild understatement It attempts the almost impossible: to change an almost surreal novel's interior monologues and descriptions into vibrant screen action. And, through an inventive adaptation and the passion and precision of Matthew Modine's and Nicolas Cage's beautifully sustained performances, it may well have succeeded. It may not satisfy hard-line lovers of the book, who may argue that William Wharton's eccentric characters should have remained between its covers, but for those who do not know the novel, or for less rigid William Wharton-ites, it is a risk well taken. (Real fans, incidentally, know that Wharton is a pseudonym for a painter born in Philadelphia in the 1930s and now living in Paris.) Birdy and Al, Al and Birdy.

Unlikely, inseparable friends in the same grimy high school where Birdy's father is the janitor; bound together by their energy to amount to something in the rubble-ridden horror of South Philadelphia and, initially, by an interest in raising pigeons. Al (Nicolas Cage), the athlete, the stud, would raise cockroaches if there, were money in it. Birdy (Matthew Modine), the gentle dreamer, raises birds because they fly. So does the film, with the power and stomach -dropping anxiety of flying in our dreams. Because the director is Alan Parker Express," "Shoot the Moon," "Pink Floyd-The we will have to pay dearly for the soaring moments, with searing, "Apocalypse images of Vietnam and with an indelible, Celine-like sequence at a horse-and-dog slaughterhouse.

Nevertheless, this is one of the films of Parker's less dark side, and this time you may feel that his ends justified his means. The framework for the story is a post-Vietnam Army hospital, where an almost catatonic Birdy, squatting in hunched up postures or barricaded beneath his bed, has been under the scrutiny of a rigid Army psychiatrist, Dr. Weiss (John Harkins). It is Weiss' idea to bring Al down from the Army hospital where he has been, undergoing major plastic reconstructive surgery on his face, to see if the presence of Birdy's best friend will break his withdrawn silence. Al, with half his face blown away, seems the stronger of these two young war victims.

But in fighting to bring Birdy from his other world the only world where I It's a -MsdfantaW. ited a whale of lan adventure. It's Disney's aU-tinp dassicH back for the holidays. Becoming a real boy isn't as easy as it looks. A jSjjkX TECHNICOLOR flisncitland GENERAL AUDIENCES biTenavia distribution co.

inc ZJttjae- I AMgesMrmlled MCMXL Wa, DiSnev Productions Slf 1984 Walt Disney Productions BALLET Continued from Page 1 an irresistible crop of half-pints scrambled in and out of his voluminous skirts. When "The Nutcracker" moves into the downtown Civic Theatre tonight for its final weekend of performances, the company will display full-blown versioncomplete with live orchestra (instead of the taped accompaniment heard at the East County center) and special effects (including falling snow for the Ice Kingdom). Performances are at 8 p.m. tonight and 2:30 and 8 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

STARTS TODAY Mornings cro special in San Dtago County. The San Diego County Edition of The Times. A special local edition of the West's finest newspaper. And you can have it delivered to your home early each morning for only $2.50 per week not a cent over newsstand rates. To order, call 1-800252-4000.

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