The Atlanta Constitution from Atlanta, Georgia • 87

lbs Atlanta Journal The Atlanta Constitution WEEKEND PREVIEW Friday, October 28, 1994 P3 a whtaair in 6Mu to tats5 iaHpg 526s rediuced 'h "Bullets Over Broadway" Starring John Cusack, Dianne Chazz Palminteri. Directed by Woody Allen. Rated PG for themes. At Phipps Plaza; A Broadway babe: Daffy but determined Olive (Jennifer Tilly) wants see her name in lights in Woody Allen's jokey Over Broadway." ever, Woods comic gun is loaded, but it's mostly firing of Norma Desmond at sunset; Eden Brent (Tracey Ullman), a bubbly life-of-the-Green-Room type with a small yapping lap dog and a large cloche hat; and Warner Purcell (Jim Broad-bent), a leading man with an expandable waistline. The movie's big twist is that the untutored, trigger-happy Cheech turns out to be a far better playwright than the cafe-hopping, art-spouting Shayne.

Pretty soon, Cheech is rewriting the play and doing a much better job than Shayne ever could. This leads to the movie's nut: a debate of the artist vs. the man one that Allen has heard far too often about his private life in recent years. Like his far more provocative and resplendent "Husbands and Wives," "Bullets" takes an elusive, equivocating road. Harking back to those inescapable real-life parallels, Woody seems to be saying that he just slept with an inappropriate person; he didn't kill anyone or anything like that.

The disturbing thing about "Bullets" is how safe it is. How it poses a moral dilemma, then tackles it in such a blinkered I V. you-smile cinematography by Di Palma. Ardent young playwright, David Shayne (John insists his allegiance is not the world of commercial theater. Nevertheless, when agent (Jack Warden) lines up racketeer named Nick Valenti Viterelli) to finance "God of Our Fathers," next "Gene" says fine.

Nick's of course, is his whiny-voiced moll, Olive (Jennifer Tilly), who wants to see her name in so rehearsals begin. On are Olive and her quietly lethal bodyguard, Cheech (Chazz Palmentieri); Helen Sinclair Wiest), an aging Broadway legend with a major streak By Eleanor Ringel FILM EDITOR iven the number of potshots aimed at Woody Allen the few years, it's hardly sur-; 'prising he's named his new mov-Jier "Bullets Over Broadway," However, this theater-centric farce seems an aberration a 5 Jokey exploration of "the show must go on" vagaries of live the-feter in an earlier, more glamor-pus era. Writing in the Run-yoHesque mode of his "Broad- i "way Danny Rose," Allen takes usj back to the Great White Way of Roaring '20s the days of Max (Maxwell Anderson) and Ge'he (Eugene O'Neill) and bathtub gin. The days when a naive young playwright who insists he writes "to transform men's fouls can be bought out by a well-heeled mobster in the mood to back a Broadway show on behalf of his stage-struck chippy. That's pretty mucu plot of 'Bullets Over Broadway," an aimless, albeit amiable piece, with a scrumptious set design (by Santo Loquasto) and make- 1 Debating the i Drop Squad are Lenora (Nicole Powell) and Mali (Vanessa Williams).

The jnovie takes a serious look at what it means to be African-jAmerican today. tW font (-1 WW Wrest, adult As blanks. Carlo Cusack), to art, his a (Joe Shayne's the impetus, lights And hand (Dianne wish-fulfillment style (as in "Husbands and Wives" when our Woody turned down the luscious babe-let, Juliette Lewis, and wandered off in the rain). The uncouth, unlettered Cheech is the natural artist Shayne could only dream of being. But as insights go, this isn't an especially meaningful one.

While it may be news to the New York intelligentsia that you can be a talent without an Ivy League degree and a background in Thomas Mann, to a lot of us around these parts, this is old news. Thus "Bullets Over Broad-way" is best described as an Allen oddity. A great acting opportunity for Wiest and Palminteri (may they both reap best sup- 'Stirgate' has its ups and downs ifjjj mm i If m.mniiM i it I "It tt 'it) 1, prop Squad' targets Photos by MGM Meet the egghead: He's usually cast as a yuppie, but in "Stargate" James Spader (left) goes against type, playing a brilliant Egyptologist. Kurt Russell (right) plays the gruff colonel in charge of the space expedition. Flick has retro feeling down cold, but it never discovers where action is By Steve Murray FILM CRITIC engaging sci-fi yarn tricked out in Egyptian exotica, "Stargate" of-Ifers an alien planet with a flying pyramid, three moons and Jaye Davidson in a dress.

Again. We start on Earth, where a linguist named Daniel (James Spader) is re- cruited by the government to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphs on a circular mechanism unearthed near Giza in the 1920s. Buried for 10,000 years, it's the Stargate, a thingamajig that, when uncoded, becomes a portal to a twin gate on a sandy planet across the universe. Daniel gets enlisted for the space-jumping expedition, led by gruff Colonel Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell), who doesn't want him along. But Daniel is best equipped to crack the 'glyph code on the second Star-gate.

And if he can't, they'll be "Stargate" Starring James Spader, Kurt Russell, jaye Davidson. Directed by Roland Emmerich. Rated PG-1 3 for sci-fi action violence. At metro theaters. Endearing outer-space epic that has just about everything but its own identity.

stuck on that alien planet. For good. Luckily, the locals turn out to be desert-dwelling, glyph-speaking gallants who welcome the visitors with a feast of odd critters like chicken," Daniel opines). Problem is, these gentlefolk are enslaved by the sun god Ra, (Davidson), a cosmic vampire with soldiers whose ar- Miramax Films porting nominations at Oscar time) and a period coup for A1-. len's support staff.

As this kind of thing goes, it's satisfying enough, but as a Woody Allen film, it's desultory at best as if he'd decided to make a movie like the movie- within-the-movie in "The Purple Rose of Cairo." Weird. sert beast that's a buffalo-camel hybrid), it's easy to feel affection for "Stargate." It's harder to get revved up it. Like an "Indiana Jones" without the breathless action, or the wide-eyed sense of discovery, it's Spielberg minus Spielberg. Director Roland Emmerich turns out serviceable action scenes, but there's no animating spark. The big letdown is Davidson's villain.

We can now give credit to "Crying Game" director Neil Jordan for the actor's Oscar-nominated performance. In "Stargate," Davidson pouts prettily, but that's it; it's like finding out the universe is run by a waiter-slash-model wearing lingerie. The movie's MVP is Spader, nor-. mally typecast as yuppie slime, but here reinventing himself as an ador-' able egghead. He's terrifically likable.

Russell doesn't do much besides scowl, but the brush cut looks good. And he cracks one great deadpan comment about his cigarette lighter, object awe to the desert tribe: "Yeah, it's pretty fabulous. This list includes smaller-scale and independent movies that screen this weekend. Los Olvidados Not rated Luis Bunuel's 1950 drama about two boys in the slums of Mexico is a powerful slice of documentary-style realism, peppered with some of the director's hallucinatory interludes (check out the wild mom-and-meat dream). Presented by the High Museum of Art's Latin American Film Festival.

In Spanish with subtitles; 8 tonight. $5. Rich Auditorium, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peach- tree St. N.E. 733-4570.

Bullet in the Head Not rated Speed-demon director John Woo's 1990 action-thriller follows the com-ing-of-age of three street punks in Hong Kong of the '60s. This film is not suitable for kids. 8 p.m. Saturday. Rich Auditorium, Woodruff Arts Center, 1280 Peachtree St.

N.E. 733-4570. Steve Murray 1 4. 1 1 ,4 r1 3 1 Wd-- Gramercy Pictures blackness Lil "Drop Squad" Starring Eriq LaSalle. Vondie Curtis-Hall and Ving Rhames.

Directed by David Johnson. Rated for language, violence and adult themes. At metro theaters. Drop by. You won't be sorry.

I "Drop Squad" has a tremendous universality, it's not just a black thing. ing with his white bosses, who mouth pieties like, "These are the people who buy this product, so obviously we need to appeal to them Nobody drinks Mumbling Jack in my neighborhood." So Bruford ends up kidnapped, But while he's being smeared with Oreos and decorated with gold chains, a schism is developing within the Squad. Their leader, Rocky (Vondie Curtis-. Hall), may dress like a Black Panther, but he still espouses nonviolence. His second-in-command, Garvey (Ving jRhames, from ''Pulp believes changing times call for harsher methods.

The picture has its flaws. Garvey's brutal, in-your-face style of deprogram-'ming might have worked better within the abstracted confines of the stage. And the midmovie TV ad for "GospelPak" (guest-starring Lee,) while hilarious, is too obvious. Corporate America's co-opting of "diversity" and "multicultura-lism" is far more insidious, far more shrewdly corrupting. Much closer to the mark and equally chilling is a throwaway remark about the agency's sponsorship of a jump-rope competition called "Jump for Freedom," in honor of Black Family Reunion Day.

In a recent New Yorker, Henry Louis Gates Jr. wrote: "With integration, black America has been disintegrating: The realities of race no longer affect all blacks in the same way." In other words, being black is no longer as simple as not being white (if, indeed, it ever was). "Drop Squad" and its expert cast tackle this disturbing reality head-on, with vividness and humor and a sense that it's well past time somebody spoke up. grees of Eleanor Ringel STAFF WRITER he Atlanta-filmed "Drop Squad" drops a bombshell squarely in the ip middle of the African-American cojnmunity. Produced by Spike Lee and directed i by David Johnson, this fiercely engag- 'iqg dramasatire looks unflinchingly at highly charged and often confusing of what it means to be African- in the '90s.

Thematically, the is similar to David Mamet's in which Joe Mantegna played a Jfiilly assimilated Jewish cop forced to 'confront the choices within his heritage. 'Tb his non-Jewish friends and col-legues, his simply being Jewish is eilough of an identity; for Mantegna and 'otjher Jews, it's just a beginning. Thus "Drop Squad," while it deals twith the African-American experience iri particular, has a tremendous universality, i.e., it's not just a black thing, Rather, it's a daring and often fall-' down-funny film that will doubtless provoke debate, discussion and dozens of talk-show programs. Plotwise, the movie is oddly like "The Colored Museum" meets "The (Man From U.N.C.L.E." The DROP (De-. programming and Restoration of Pride) Squad, a supersecret militant organiza-' tipn that's been around since the '60s, specializes in reminding certain Afri-, rcan-Americans the "safe Negroes" of the corporate world of their roots.

But you don't find them if you want somebody they find you. So, when Lenora Jamison (Nicole Powell) decides it's time someone did a number oh her beloved but sold-out buppie (brother, Bruford (Eriq LaSalle), she's tbld the Squad is just a myth. Nonetheless, shortly thereafter, Bruford disappears. He's locked up with an immoral minister, a corrupt politician and an author who advises her 'readers that, in order for him to feel like in a white world, "at times, the African-American male must administer discipline to his African-American I sister." (She ends up tied to a lawn I But Bruford's case is the film's focal point. Through flashbacks, we see him jas part of a tony ad agency's Minority (Development Division, cheerfully de-'vising campaigns for Mumbling Jack Liquor and General Otis Fried Chicken's new "GospelPak" dinner.

'When a colleague says she finds the ads offensive, Bruford has no problem sid- 4 I cie Given its mix of adventure and neato designs, it's easy to feel affection for "Stargate." It's harder to get revved up by it. mor resembles the gods Anubis and Horus. Packed with cultural detritus, "Stargate" mines the mystery of the Great Pyramids for its main gimmick. Ah-ha, so they were built by extrater- restrials. Like a Tintin adventure or "Lives of a Bengal Lancer" set in the cosmos, the movie has an enjoyable retro feel.

(You almost expect an eclipse to save the day.) Given its mix of adventure and neato designs (a spaceship whose walls slide 'round like a Chinese puzzle; a de "Aswang" Starring Norman Moses, Tina Ona Paukstelis, Flora Coker. Directed by Wrye Martin and Barry Poltermann. Rated NC-1 7 for sexual situations, gore. Halloween party begins at 7 tonight, screening at 7:30. Costumes welcome.

$5. IMAGE FilmVideo Center, 75 Bennett St. N.W. (in the TULA complex). 352-4225.

A horror flick that's not as outrageous as it wants to be. obvious gynecological angle. The speed-demon camera tricks, chain-saw antics and even a self-amputation are straight out of "Evil Dead 2," but without the adrenalin high of Sam Raimi's film. The movie does have its moments. Like the scene of one poor aswang, swinging from a balcony by her tongue after it gets slammed in the window.

Oiich. by of 'Aswang' is vampire schlock with double dose of gonzo gore By Steve Murray FILM CRITIC vampire with a milelong tongue and 44 a taste for unborn babies is called Irm "Aswang" in the Philippines. There's a whole family of the suckers in this schlocker, which mixes uteral squeamishness and gonzo gore. It's a derivative mix of "Rosemary's Baby" and "Evil Dead 2." Unwed mom-to-be Katrina (amateurish Tina Ona Paukstelis) contracts with a wealthy adoptive couple. Then the hubby, Peter (Norman Moses), has her masquerade as his wife during a visit to the family manse.

Mom (Flora Coker) is a wraith in a wheelchair, the Filipino housekeeper is a midwife who takes pointed interest in the pregnancy, and Peter's sis is a nut case who lives unseen in a cottage on the grounds. The filmmakers don't put much spin on these Gothic devices, except for the.