The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 35

LIVING Thursday, Feb. 22, 1996 DS The Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution THRILLER OF THE WEEK VIDEO REVIEWS A quick look at what newspapers nationally say about recent video releases! Great -kick 2 Good: Fair. I 1 '5? Copycat (R) NA Dangerous Minds (R) NA Desperado (R) Hackers (PG-13) NA Jeffrey (R) The Net (PG-13) Something to Talk About (R) i i To Wong Foo (PG-13) 11 11 TrJ The Usual Suspects (R) NA 1111 1 MINI VIEWS "Unzipped" (R) Fabulous. This witty documentary follows fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi as he builds his fall collection. The supermodels all turn up Cindy, Naomi, Kate and bratty Linda.

But the star is Mizrahi, whether he's stating that Mary, Tyler Moore and Jackie 0. shaped American fashion as we know it, or doing a mean Eartha Kitt impression. Former lover Douglas Keeve shot the warts-and-all tribute, and you can't help thinking that the final product (however affectionate) had a lot to do with their breakup. The film climaxes appropriately on the runway, and it's exhilarating enough to explain why some people seem ready to live or die for fashion. "Mute Witness" (R) In this Hitchcockian tale of American filmmakers in Moscow, the mute makeup artist Billy (Marina Sudina) witnesses a killing during the shooting of a snuff flick.

Or was it just convincing special effects? Director Anthony Waller keeps the twists coming as Billy tries to convince skeptical police and friends. It's overloaded with plot turns and jokes in its second half, but the movie nicely mixes thrills and giggles to seat-gripping effect. (And look for the great Alec Guinness as a shadowy operator.) "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar" (PG-13) It's supposed to be about drag queens, but it's more like eunuchs. In this sanitized Hollywood comedy, three New York cross-dressers (Patrick Swayze, Wesley Snipes and John Leguizamo) get stuck in a tiny Midwestern town on their road trip to Los Angeles. Naturally, no one sees through their disguises, and they make over the whole place while fighting homophobes and wife-beaters in the process.

The script is frisky enough at times to keep you distracted from how unbelievable the darn thing is, and Swayze offers a lovely turn as the woman you'd most like to buy Tupper-ware from. But mainly it's a candy-colored (and coated) drag. Steve Murray "Window to Paris" (PG-13) -Gentle Russian music teacher Nikolai (Sergei Dontsov) makes an amazing discovery when he moves into a room in a crumbling, overcrowded tenement: Simply by walking through a window onto the roof, he's magically transported from St. Petersburg to a Paris rooftop. He secret is too good to last and soon his vodka-swilling, flat-mates are following him to the City of Light.

Writerdirector Yuri Mamin isn't a subtle filmmaker and, in a Warner Bros. One cool cat: Sigourney Weaver plays an aristocratic criminal psychologist trying to sniff out a copycat killer. Killer star power propels 'Copycat upcoming Tuesday: "I Am Cuba," "Double Happi-i ness." 11 Wednesday: "Pocahontas." March 5: "A Walk in the Clouds," "The Brothers McMullen," "Moonlight and Valentino," "The Run of the' Country," "Fair "Empire Records," "Party Girl." TOP RENTALS 1. "The Net" 2. "Waterworld" 3.

"Die Hard With a Vengeance" 4. "Nine Months" 5. "Showgirls" 6. "Clueless" 7. "Jade" 8.

"Desperado" 9. "Something to Talk About" 10. "The Indian in the Cupboard" lot of ways, his movie recalls the quirky politicized Eastern European pictures of the '60s. He's awfully hard on his countrymen they're the type who would hang their dirty underwear in front of a view of the Eiffel Tower but he brings a good deal of good humor to his fantastic tale. "The Stars Fell on Henrietta" (PG) A meandering slice of Americana that's brightened considerably by Robert Duvall's performance.

Set in Depression-era Texas, where hard luck outweighs hard work any day, the movie is about a wandering wildcatter named Mr. Cox (Duval!) and his dream of finding oil. "Bandit Queen" (Unrated) Based on a true story, this Indian film is as fiercely unrelenting as its heroine. Doubly abused as both a woman and a member of a lower caste, Phoolan Devi (Seema Biswas) became one of the most famous women in India in the late 70s. As an outlaw known for taking brutal vengeance on her enemies, Phoolan became so popular with India's down and out that she became a threat to the government.

Often as raw as its subject matter, the movie suffers from a ragged narrative and an overwhelming aura of outrage. Still, director Shekhar Kapur has delivered an unusual and gripping work. In Hindi with subtitles. "Hackers" (PG-13) Hollywood hack work from Iain Softley, director of "Backbeat." A group of teen hackers, led by Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie, takes on a nasty cyber-snake (Fisher Stevens) who's planning to rob his own company and pin the crime on the kids. There are some isolated moments of interest (the most commonly used passwords, apparently, are "love," "sex," "romance" and But overall, this is an embarrassing computer-nerd fantasy in which everyone into computers wears leather, hangs out at cool clubs and is busy eluding the FBI.

Fine for the target audience, but anyone else may find it hard to swallow. Eleanor Ringel "Copycat" Oh, no, you say not another serial-killer flick. Yeah, but what's different about "Copycat" is the cast. Holly Hunter plays a San Francisco cop, Sigourney Weaver is the shellshocked psycho-shrink whose experience with killers (including a convincing Harry Connick Jr.) is Hunter's key to tracking the latest sicko. He's making a specialty out of copying famous butchers from the past, from Ted Bundy to Son of Sam.

And he's focused on prying Weaver (agoraphobic after a vicious run-in with Connick) out of her fortresslike bay-side digs to add to his list of victims. Directed by Jon Amiel the thriller has occasional lapses and moments of predictability. But it sustains momentum by throwing in some unexpected twists. The real treat is the interplay between the two stars. Hunter brings a no-nonsense grit melded to a strategic little-girl act.

She's a perfect foil for Weaver's aristocratic bearing. As for Weaver, she's predictably good. But that clenched-teeth-and-thrust-jaw school of acting is wearing thin. Steve Murray WHAT THEY'RE RENTING Linda Dubler, High Museum of Art media curator "My husband is the one who does most of the renting, and he's usually in the 'Die -t Hard' vein. It's a taste.

we don't share. Right now I have a tape from a distributor called 'Cold It's called 'the best Icelandic-Japanese road movie 'f you'll see this TOP VIDEO SALES 1. "The Indian in the Cupboard" 2. "Apollo 13" 3. "Playboy: The Best of Anna Nicole Smith" 4.

"Batman Forever" 5. "Playboy: 1996 Video Playmate Calendar" 6. "Street Fighter II: The Animated Movie" 7. "The Land Before Time III" 8. "Casper" 9.

"The Big Green" 10. "Cinderella" mum mm MYSTERY John Updike Buchanan's 'Betrayal' holds reader I-V "A- i despite scattershot plot elements By Don O'Briant STAFF WRITER John Updike has dealt with religion in several of his works, but in his latest novel, God is practically the main character. "There's a sense of emptiness in America today brought about by religious expectation," says Updike, whose book "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (Knopf, $25.95) explores the spiritual quest of a New Jersey family. In a recent phone interview, Updike talked about the influence of religion and movies on American life. Explain what you mean about the religious aspects of movies.

A In the '30s and '40s, movies raised your horizons and lifted up your thoughts. Until the studio system broke up, there was a strict morality on screen in which virtue was rewarded and vice punished. They gave us happiness and Jl direction, which is what religion is supposed to do. In your early work, such-' as "Poorhouse Fair" and "Pi- geon Feathers, you wrote about spirituality with more of a sense of optimism. This work focuses' more on the dark side of human nature.

Why? u. A The dark theme may b6 part of the same process that's making my hair turn gray. I'm, getting older and perhaps sour-, er. It's involuntary and I can't dr much about it. By Rod Cockshutt FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION "Act of Betrayal" by Edna Buchanan (Hyperion, Back in her heyday as a tough crime reporter for The iliami Herald, Edna Buchanan once wrote a memorable beginning for a story about a man shot to death when he tried to cut in line at a fast-food restaurant: "Gary Robinson died hungry." Buchanan, who has turned most of her attention lately to writing fiction, makes use of that same drop-shot style in her popular series featuring (what else?) a Miami crime reporter named Britt Montero.

Read the opening paragraph to her latest Montero chronicle: "The sweet little old lady was dead, shot in the face by her Kenmore range when she opened the oven door to investigate explosions inside. Baking cookies for her favorite grandson, she had no idea where he stashed his ammo." Taken simply as episodic entertainment, "Act of Betrayal" is a lot of fun. The problem is that, like the parts of an exploding race car, these episodes too often seem to speed in widely divergent directions. In addition to her usual romantic dilem- ricane to hit Miami in 50 years; plus the usual miscellany of washed-out scam artists, washed-up boat people and sun-washed palm-and-art-deco Miami cityscapes. The parts ultimately equal a plausible whole, but you've got to hang on tight.

And because I admire Buchanan's grasp of style and pacing so much, it didn't bother me unduly that the solution to her novel's central mystery the fate of those lost boys hinges perhaps too much on a deiis ex Edna coincidence. Still, while "Act of Betrayal" lacks the cohesion of "Contents Under Pressure," the first Britt Montero story, or the funkiness of "The Corpse Had a Familiar Face" (a non-fiction exploration of Miami crime and mass demeanor), I read it with genuine pleasure and a reluctance to see it end. Rod Cockshutt reviews mysteries for the Journal-Constitution. He teaches in the English department at North Carolina State University. mas and worry over her aging mother, the reporter investigates the mysterious disappearance of several fair-haired teenage boys; the machinations of a clot of Cuban exiles, plus her late father's involvement with them and with her; the meanest hur Cult-ure clash features murder, mom, missing tot example, sell for more than $550 and the original Wynwood Press first edition of John Grisham's 1989, first novel, "A Time to Kill," fetchea as much as $3,500.

A high school dropout from Charleston, S.C., the 53-year-old Dunning worked as a glass cutter, radio historian, newspaperman, racetrack groom and library clerk before opening and then closing an antique bookstore in Denver, He wrote a couple of paperback mysteries in the early '80s, then hit a dry spell. i "A lot of editors thought 'Booked" to Die' was my first novel," Dunning says. "That's the big trend today. Publishers are looking for a talent that has never been heard of before. That way they can bill him as the next great author." '4 Dunning will sign his books at 3 p.m.

Sunday at Oxford Book Store, 1 360 Pharr Road N.E. 404-262-3331 BOOK NOTES BOOKISH DETECTIVE: John Dunning says it's a mystery to him why several publishers rejected his novel "Booked to Die" because it had too much information about the book business. "It was like telling Tony Hiller-man to cut out all that Indian stuff in his novels," Dunning says. "But I knew a lot of people fantasized about owning a bookstore." Dunning was right. When Scrib-ner finally published the novel about an ex-cop turned book dealer in 1992, the first edition of 6,500 copies sold out in 48 hours.

That edition sells for as much as SSOO. Dunning's sleuth Cliff Janeway is as adept at solving crimes as he is explaining inside information about the book collecting business. In Dunning's second novel in the series, "The Bookman's Wake" (Pocket, Janeway tries to track down a rare 1969 edition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven." Dunning advises beginning collectors to look for first novels by unknown writers. First editions of Robert James Waller's "The Bridges of Madiilon County," for By Joyce R. Slater FOR THE JOURNAL-CONSTITUTION "Lost Angel" by Marilyn Wallace (Double-day, Late one afternoon, paid companion Valerie Vincent and her wealthy employer are watching TV in a post beach house in East Hampton.

Valerie pays little attention to the talk show; she's too busy wishing she could afford to be back in Brooklyn with her baby daughter. Suddenly a news bulletin interrupts the program. An elderly woman has been found murdered in her ransacked apartment. A toddler survived unharmed; for now, the police are calling her "Baby Jane Doe." HorrifiedValerie sees that the weepy tot on the screen is her own 18-month-old Joanna. Could a mother's nightmare gefany worse? You bet.

When our heroine races to claim her child, trying all the while to absorb the death of her neighbor and babysitter, the police tell her that the baby is gone. The mystery woman who picked up Joanna had plenty of identification, and the little girl called her "Mommy." Well. We're only on Page 13 of "Lost Angel," and Marilyn Wallace already has us hopelessly hooked. Wallace, who edits the annual "Sisters in Crime" anthologies, pegs her latest on a theme as disturbing as it is timely. Before we can catch our collective breath, we're plunged into a netherworld of Satanists, religious watchdogs and disappearing children.

This is no episode of "NYPD cops are clueless, but Valerie thinks she knows who's responsbile for Joanna's abduction. Didn't her former in-laws declare her an unfit mother, the devil's handmaiden, when they learned she was writing her thesis on the hysteria in Salem? Valerie suspects they may belong to the underground "rescue" organization Deliverance and Safe Haven, which she proceeds to infiltrate with the help of an investigative journalist and her ex-husband. Wallace gets a little carried away with her witch-hunt scenario. Some calm editorial voice should have told her to lose the secret rituals, the safe houses and the coded messages on computer bulletin boards. Even so, "Lost Angel" is a tidy thriller redeemed by its gutsy heroine.

Joyce R. Slater is a reviewer in Kennesaw. EVENTS Bill Bradley signs "Time Present, Time Past." 7 tonight. Chapter 11 Discount Bookstore, 1544 Piedmont. Ave.

N.E. 404-872-7986. Don O'Briant.