The Los Angeles Times from Los Angeles, California • 97

ORANGE COUNTY EDITION NDAR Cos Angeles (Times Tuesday, August 16, 1988 Part VI CALE THEODORA UTSIOS If i ll yv K- CRITIC AT LARGE Lasting Imprint of 'Last Temptation' By CHARLES CHAMPLIN, Times Arts Editor The first and last irony about "The Last Temptation of Christ" is that it is certainly not guilty of blasphemy as charged, but that its honorable and admirable intentions are only intermittently achieved. Any fair and reasonably objective eye must see that the Martin Scorsese-Paul Schrader film is devout, intelligent, passionate and concerned. The attempt, it is clear enough, was not to mock or trivialize the central events of Christianity but to rescue them from the sentimental shrouds of myth and the pastel-colored pietistic lithographs that surround them, and to understand better what it might really have been like to be there, 2,000 years ago. The attempt, unfortunately, was probably foredoomedin part by the awful literalness of the screen. Historical dramas require even more heartfelt suspension of disbelief than most dramas.

Now is not then, here is not there, and the actor playing Winston Churchill is not Churchill nor is the actress Eleanor Roosevelt nor are they F.D.R., Andrew Jackson, Gable, Lombard or George Washington. With help from Henry Fonda and Raymond Massey, we may get a better notion of what Lincoln young or old was like. But to attempt to portray what Time calls "the most influential life that was ever lived" was the most daunting challenge of all. It is a further irony about "Last Temptation" that Willem Dafoe looks as much as any portrayer yet has like the palely, gently handsome, compassionate Western European Christ of popular churchly art. Dafoe could have posed for the painting of Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane that hangs on many a Christian wall.

The cast performs with skill and sincerity as Paul and John the Baptist, Peter and Mary and Mary Magdalene. It is just that it is impossible not to see them as actors acting. The effect, more often than not, is of one of those summertime son et lumiere pageants at castles and battlefields. Schrader's attempts to paraphrase the Gospels and to create other dialogue in a resolutely unpoetic and documentarian 20th-century prose is counterproductive. It tends to defeat the reverberating overtones of mystery that these earthly events also have to carry.

Scorsese has said that the movie was "my way of trying to get closer to God." And while his detractors argue that he could have done that as well on his knees in a church, it is not in the nature of film makers to go private. And at its best and most moving, Scorsese's film leaps across two millennia and creates an extraordi-Please see' Page 7 Slow Release Strategy Pays Big Dividends By NINA J. EASTON, Times Staff Writer Hollywood distributors spend inordinate amounts of time and money trying to persuade as many theater owners as possible to show their films. But every once in a while, it pays off to open a movie on just a handful of screens hoping to set off a favorable buzz among moviegoers before releasing it more widely. Two of last weekend's four top-grossing films "Die Hard" and "A Fish Called Wanda" first opened that way.

And another film, Martin Scorsese's controversial "The Last Temptation of Christ," opened at only nine theaters last weekend with record-breaking results. It's unlikely "Last Temptation" which grossed $401,211, or $44,579 per screen, between Friday and Sunday will ever move to the top ranks of the summer box-office competition. But Universal Pictures is counting on word-of-mouth as well as the controversy surrounding the movie to carry it through a wider release this weekend. Many Hollywood insiders suspected that 20th Century Fox's "Die Hard" would die hard soon after its release. The film's star, Bruce Willis, suffered an image problem among fans of his own TV show, "Moonlighting." And the movie's preview footage was so weak that some theater audiences even booed it.

But Fox officials who had seen the film sensed its audience appeal. After running an ad campaign that played down Willis' starring role, Fox opened "Die Hard" July 15 in only 21 theaters, hoping the film would speak for itself. It did. Last weekend "Die Hard" held onto a No. 3 spot, grossing $5.7 million at 1,713 theaters, or $3,353 per screen.

The film followed close behind another Fox release, "Young Guns" Please see BOX OFFICE, Page 12 Paul Sierra? oil "Chronicle" depicts two generations trapped in a room, separated by psychological distances. ART REVIEW Visible Roots in 'ExpresionesHispanas' By SUZANNE MUCHNIC, Times Art Writer national competition. "In an effort to avoid any predetermination of what constitutes 'Hispanic "the Ethnicity is written all over some of the works in "Expresiones Hispanas 8889." In others, references to Latino culture are tucked into crevices. But except for a half-dozen abstractions and a couple of free-floating figurative pieces, the exhibition at the Southwest Museum (to Sept. 4 emphasizes that roots are the source and sustenance of minority artistic expression.

Plain as that may be to the viewing public, the definition of Latino contemporary art seems to have been a sticky issue for the organizers and jurors of this Coors-sponsored only criterion for inclusion in the show was "artistic excellence," exhibition director Maureen Leon Acosta writes in the catalogue. Juror Giulio V. Blanc declares that the show "contributes to the elimination of the old myths of Hispanic art" and avoids being trapped "by the ethnocentric view that certain elements must be present if an artist is truly 'Hispanic': Please see' Page 7 STAN HONDA GARY AMBROSE Loe Angeles Times Savoring a Birthday With M.F.K. Fisher 4 a I a si By RUTH REICHL, Times Restaurant Editor LAFAYETTE, Calif. you still writing restaurant reviews?" Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher asks a visitor.

The occasion is her 80th birthday party, held Saturday in this Northern California town, and the woman who has been called "the most interesting philosopher of food now practicing in our country" (Clifton Fadiman) and "our greatest food writer" (Shana Alexander) has made an infrequent foray from her ranch. On this occasion, Craig Claiborne (former food editor of the New York Times) calls her "a national treasure" and wine-maker Robert Mondavi toasts her by saying "you've raised the image of food and wine in this country." Meanwhile, M.F.K. Fisher will sit there with a slightly bemused expression on her face; when all the toasts are over, she will respond with a dry "very nice." Although this author of 30 books has by now, gotten used to being called one of America's greatest living writers, she has said of herself, "I used to say that by the time I was 50, 1 would have written a good book. And I got to be 50 so I raised the ante to 55. Then I took a good look at myself and I said, I don't like to read the stuff I've written.

Never have, never will." Few people share that opinion. As Americans have become increasingly interested in eating, more and more of them have discovered M.F.K. Fisher either through her books or her many magazine pieces, particularly for the New Yorker. Among people interested in food, Fisher has attained something close to cult status; when a restaurant in San Please see FISHER, Page 10 Three-legged Geoff Hoyle in "Spare" section of "The Fool Show." STAGE REVIEW Geoff Hoyle Is Singers Eric Carmen and Merry Clayton perform in the "Dirty Dancing" concert in Costa Mesa. POP MUSIC REVIEW Searching for the Steam in 'Dirty Dancing' By MIKE BOEHM, Times Staff Writer Sometimes a show-biz enterprise that has little to do with the creative impulse but everything to do with the love of a buck can manage to throw off a spark of life.

Exhibit A is the Monkees, the made-for-TV pop band that had its honestly engaging moments, both in the '60s and during its reunion tour two years ago. Now we have the "Dirty Dancing" tour put together by David Fishof, the man who repackaged the Monkees. The shrewd calcula pletely cynical exercise in consumer manipulation. In the movie a formulaic, platitude-filled tale of Borscht Belt romance between a rich girl and a boy from the wrong side of the tracks, set in 1963 to allow for plenty of musical nostalgia the key dance scenes were duets in which close-ups of various erogenous zones helped generate the steaminess that was the film's main attraction. On stage, as many as 14 dancers cluttered the proceedings with aimless routines.

The Dirty Dancers, some of whom appeared in the Please see DIRTY, Page 8 tion here is that there is a ready-made audience for a song-and-dance show derived from a hit movie and its two mega-hit sound-track albums. The package arrived Sunday night at the Pacific Amphitheatre in Costa Mesa (before a three-night Greek Theatre stand continuing through Wednesday), stuffed with dance routines and stage gimmicks that were so much worthless packing material. Wrapped in this dross were musical segments by Merry Clayton, the Contours, Eric Carmen and Bill Medley that had enough intermittent spark to keep the 110-minute performance from being a com By SYLVIE DRAKE, Times Theater Writer LA JOLLA "The fool is ironic rather than comic," Geoff Hoyle told an interviewer shortly before the Sunday opening of his "The Fool Show" at the La Jolla Playhouse's Warren Theatre. "The fool's nonsense comes from sense." These are key thoughts, precisely articulated in the world according to Hoyle a stage universe with a single black screen, a few props, masks and a coat rack. But how simple, really, is keeping things this simple? Watch Hoyle, a master of the (seeming) effortlessness of effort (just like his buddy and co-clownfool Bill Irwin).

The first half of "The Fool Show" is a one-man concert that starts at its own risk with a shadowy and unprepossessing "Primal Folk Fool" show that does little to herald what's to come. But then things lighten up. Hoyle, who begins sluggishly with bits of lecture-demonstration on the history of fools and fooling, then quickens Please see 'FOOL SHOW; Page 5 Inside Calendar Morning Report Another offer for Elstree Studios, Bri-tan's largest film lot. Page 2 Chapin's Best "Harry Chapin: Lies and Legends" reviewed by Dan Sullivan. Page 6 Orange County PAGES 8,9 Strike Up Again Randy Skinner's innovative choreography puts the hoofing back into the 1927 Gershwin musical, "Strike Up the Band." Page 9 JAZZ: Horace Silver in the building stage.

Page 3 POP: Mark Farner on different railroad. Page 4 RADIO LOG: Today's programs. Page 10 TV: Today's programs on TV and cable. Page 11 JAZZ: Miles Davis Octet Page 12 Spinning Off Those "Dirty Dancing" oldies remind fans of Patrick Swayze. Page 8 Timbucking Trends Pat and Barbara MacDonald prove charming as Timbuk 3.

Page 8.