The Gazette from Montreal, Quebec, Canada • 21

SECTION Mexican Taqucria A THRIFTY START TO NEW YEAR'S! TRY OUR SOUTH-OK- Ljj bJ THh-BORDER BURRITO with CHICKEN, A BOREALE DRAFT or A HEALTHY MONTREAL, FRIDAY, JANUARY 12, 1990 yyo SAVING! 4306 St. Laurent 982-9462 Henley, Petty and Prince top Grammy nominations LlSb Li 13 Ak Lij are Barry Mann, Cynthia Weill and Tom Snow for the Linda Ronstadt-Aaron Neville duet Don't Know Much, Henley and Hornsby for The End of the Innocence; Rutherford and Brian A. Robertson for The Living Years; Joel for We Didn't Start the Fire; and Larry Henley and Jeff Silbar for Wind Beneath My Wings. The best-new-artist category is dominated by dance-pop acts like Neneh Cherry, Milli Vanilli, Soul II Soul and Tone Loc. The folk-rock duo Indigo Girls rounds out the year nominations for his Full Moon Fever solo album, and his performance on the The Traveling Wilburys Vol.

I album. He is also up for best male rock vocal performance and best rock performance by a duo or group for his work on the Traveling Wilburys album. Funk singer Prince, who composed and performed the soundtrack for the film Batman, garnered nominations for producer of the year, best male pop vocal, best male vocal and best song written specifically for a motion picture or TV. Nominations for record of the bum. But the group's only nomination was for best rock performance by a duo or group for the hit single Mixed Emotions.

Dance-pop darling Paula Abdul, who swept the 1989 MTV Music Awards, is only nominated for best female pop vocal performance, for her Straight Up single. Henley's nominations include record of the year, album of the year, song of the year and best male rock vocal performance, all for his single and album The End of the Innocence. Petty received two album-of-the- year include Don Henley's End of the Innocence, Mike and the Mechanics' The Living Years, the Fine Young Cannibals' She Drives Me Crazy, Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire and Bette Midler's Wind Beneath My Wings. The race for album of the year pits Henley's End of the Innocence against Tom Petty's Full Moon Fever, Bonnie Raitt's Nick of Time, The Traveling Wilburys Vol. 1, and the Fine Young Cannibal's The Raw and the Cooked.

In the song-of-the-year category (awarded to songwriters), nominees and the Mechanics, Bonnie Raitt, Janet Jackson and Bruce Hornsby garnered three nominations each, as did late rock legend Roy Orbison. The Grammy Awards will be handed out Feb. 21 in Los Angeles in televised ceremonies. The Rolling Stones, who have never been voted a Grammy, were spurned in the major categories again this year. Many pundits predicted the National Academy of Recording Arts Sciences the organization behind the Grammys would honor the band's popular Steel Wheels al By BRUCE BRITT Los Angeles Daily News LOS ANGELES Rock veterans Don Henley, Tom Petty and Prince are major nominees for the 32nd annual Grammy Awards, which were announced yesterday.

Henley, Petty and Prince received four nominations each, as did producer and the Traveling Wilburys guitarist Jeff Lynne, Mike and the Mechanics songwriter Mike Rutherford and composer Dave Grusin. Billy Joel, Miles Davis, Aretha Franklin, George Harrison, U2, Mike Man behind Roger tirelessly plugs bleak 4 REEL 4 LIFE JE John JkZjfe. Griffin Owl iv j.y...; hi! 4 Success hasn't spoiled Michael Moore, but it has tired him out. The 35-year-old writer, director, producer and star of the leftfield documentary hit Roger and Me, hasn't slept in his own bed since August, and won't till spring. Instead, he's stumping round the planet promoting a quirky, insidious little movie about the decline and fall of Flint, after General Motors closed its auto plants in the city and threw 35,000 people out of work.

He was in Montreal this week to beat the drum, meet the press, and take a little time to wash his jeans and plaid shirt before today's North American commercial release of Roger and Me. It's Moore's second visit in as many months he was here for the Montreal Festival of New Cinema and Video in October and he's bone-weary. People, critics agree In the whiplash turn of events since Roger and Me hit the film festival circuit last year, the onetime journalist and first-time filmmaker has watched his movie win prizes, nail cover stories in major publications all over the world and make "Ten Best" lists with critics and audiences alike. He's also experienced the bizarre sensation of seeing a $160,000 film shot by a bunch of amateurs over a three-year period with money raised from garage sales, the sale of his own house and a weekly bingo game in Flint's Carmen Plaza Hall become the object of a fierce bidding war for distribution rights from some of the very corporate citizens Roger and Me skewers. By the time the dust of intense negotiation settled late last year Moore had signed a world deal with the giant Warner Bros, for $3 million an astonishing figure for a leftish documentary.

In an equally astounding deal, and Me Flint saga But he utterly dismisses those animal rights activists who've protested the film's footage of a rabbit being clubbed on screen for a family's dinner table in economically ravaged Flint. "Wake up and smell the coffee," he tells those "middle-class people with time in their hands. There's a real world out there. People are getting clubbed every day. A poor woman has a right to eat.

The question of us filming or not filming the event has nothing to do with the fact it actually happened." Despite, or because of, the controversy, Moore claims "the response to the film has really cut across social and economic lines. Thankfully, intellectuals and working-class audiences both know what the film is talking about." The story they're taking to heart is surreal, satirical, brutally funny, intensely personal and bleak as an eviction notice in "the unemployment capital of America." Old-fashioned rant Moore's quixotic quest to meet GM chairman Roger Smith and persuade him to visit Flint for a firsthand look at the devastation stokes emotions common to filmgoers everywhere it's a terrific, unashamedly-biased, old-fashioned populist rant against a corporation that puts profits ahead of human lives. "We showed it to a bunch of auto workers in Wisconsin and it was really a great crowd. You could see how the movie is going to play in a non-art house situation. "When Roger cuts my microphone off in the stockholders' meeting, some guy in the theatre shouted out 'son of a "Then another guy leaned over to him and explained Roger's move by saying 'yeah, that's 'cause he's (Moore) been bird-dogging "After the movie was over, and the lights came up, they gave it a standing ovation.

Just like at Lincoln Centre. Only much more important to me." Oliver Stone reminds us again that the Vietnam War was heck in his numbing Born on the Fourth of July. And lest anyone entertain romantic illusions about the joys of war in earlier days, director Edward Zwick takes us back a century to the gore that was the U.S. Civil War in Glory (opening in Montreal today). It's difficult to attach degrees of hell to war.

Forget the stats that tell us 700,000 lost their lives in the U.S. Civil War, as opposed to the 50,000 Americans who died in Vietnam. Zwick, creator of the hit TV series Thirtysomething, manages to convey as deftly as Stone the futility of war in his rather graphic treatment. But that's not what makes Glory the emotionally draining epic it is. This shocking history lesson tells us about the battle of America's first black regiment of soldiers to fight in the war.

On one level, Glory recounts the formation of the all-black 54th Regiment of Massachusetts, under the command of the rich, right-thinking and white Col. Robert Gould, in 1863. On another level, however, the movie is about the birth of knee-jerk liberalism. It cuts through the veneer of emancipation and gets to the messy roots of racism: North or South, it is a no-win situation for blacks. This black regiment was assembled by the northern powers-that-be as a public-relations ploy.

The unit was reviled as much by white comrades in the Union Army as by enemy white Confederate soldiers. Recruits were underpaid, under-equipped and overly disciplined. And they were never intended to do anything but perform manual labor and be part of parades. Kevin Jarre's brutally frank screenplay doesn't give all the credit to beat drum for film he wrote, directed and produced. Tackling racism: Glory uses irony while Daisy is fender, touching Moore also persuaded the mega-movie conglomerate to include commitments to find new homes for evicted GM workers in Flint and put aside 20,000 free tickets to the film for the unemployed across the U.S.

The intensity, speed and sheer absurdity of these developments has sent everyone in the movie business scuttling for metaphors and demographic surveys to explain why a very funny, very sad, outraged, and outspoken saga about the downside of the American dream is working at the box office. Everyone, that is, but Moore himself. "I thought people would come see this one, mainly because I don't like documentaries myself," the rumpled filmmaker said while fighting a cold and mauling a plate of grilled chicken in the kind of toney hotel restaurant they don't have in Flint. "We're pretty average people. We go to a lot of movies, you know.

We don't go to a lot of esoteric art film sort of stuff. We go to see E. T. and Batman and Lethal Weapon." Moore's Everyman, fix-it-in-the-mix approach to movie making has paid off. He gleefully relates the news that Roger and Me is the largest-grossing film at the Cumberland Cinema in Toronto since Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, and seems genuinely hurt that a couple of critics, including the powerful Pauline Kael of the New Yorker, are among the few people who haven't fallen for his singular, skewed vision.

star in Driving Miss Daisy. t1 I Michael Moore was in town Bill Brownstein to the well-meaning, though hopelessly naive, Col. Gould (played with astonishing depth by Matthew Bro-derick) in forging a crack regiment. The ragtag soldiers draw on their own reserves of strength, idealism and hate when they make it to the front lines and distinguish themselves with valor. Denzel Washington, playing the regiment rebel, makes it plain he's fighting this war for himself not the white man.

And he has nothing but contempt for fellow soldiers who go soft on Whitey. He refers to one such recruit, Andre Braugher, a bookish Bostonian with a penchant for the philosopher Emerson, as "Snowflake." Ultimate irony Morgan Freeman, as the stoic conscience of the regiment, finally succeeds in keeping a lid on the pent-up emotions and in helping to ready the regiment for battle. But, of course, the ultimate irony and indignity is the soldiers go on to lose the battle they fought so hard to wage. This is the rare Hollywood blockbuster that has the gumption to tell us there really is no justice. The issue is also racism in Driving Miss Daisy (opening today), scripted by Alfred Uhry and based on his Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

But although the film is set in simmering Atlanta, from 1948 to 1973, bigot- laazette, Peter Martin tle of the wills continues for 25 years until Daisy and Hoke are aged and feeble and realize their bond is deep and is what sustains their lives. While Beresford mostly alludes to the racial disharmony that envelops his characters over the years, through some particularly terrible chapters in U.S. history, he still drives home the message about rapid changes in the South. He uses the velvet glove method lots of subtle nuance and shading and brings the film down to the lowest common denominator: the human relationship. Beresford used the same approach in penetrating the U.S.

heartland in Crimes of the Heart and Tender Mercies. Even without actor-hubby Hume Cronyn, stage pro Tandy is formidable as the eccentric who is as sharp and graceful at 97 as she was at 72. If Tandy doesn't take the best-actress Oscar this year, there should be an investigation. Maintains dignity Freeman, who recreates his stage role, is no less forceful as the wily chauffeur who maintains his dignity and never bows to subservience. Un- 'fortunately, Freeman, who also sparkles in a smaller role in Glory, must contend with Tom Cruise for best-actor honors, but it could be close.

The film's biggest acting surprise, however, is not Freeman or Tandy. Would you believe Dan Aykroyd? The former Saturday Night Live goof has fallen on hard times on the film comedy front, but he earns his keep in this bittersweet drama as Tandy's overly ambitious though dutiful son. And just wait until viewers catch the younger, pudgy Aykroyd In Roy Rogers duds it alone is almost worth the price of admission. 7T 'r5 'V1- A a '-'v 'hi IpMA''''' ft 1 cX V1! 4 MATTHEW BRODERICK As Civil War colonel in Glory ry has almost been completely air-brushed here; Ku Klux Klan cross-burnings and lynchings have been neatly swept under the carpet. Aussie director Bruce Beresford doesn't attempt another Mississippi Burning or an update on Glory, for that matter.

His approach to changing social values in the genteel Old South is not to leap into the boiling caldron and hammer viewers over the head with morality. He opts for an offbeat love story and in the process pushes all the right buttons. Driving Miss Daisy is tender and touching and understated the latter, a most refreshing quality in light of recent film assaults on the senses. There is nothing terribly complex about the film's two principal characters. Daisy (Jessica Tandy) is a crochety Jewish Southern matriarch, whose heart may be in the right place but whose body can't adjust to the aging process.

To that end, Hoke (Morgan Freeman), a black chauffeur, has been hired to drive Miss Daisy around Atlanta. The proud Daisy resists, while the equally proud Hoke persists. The bat rtT jfV i Aykroyd, Tandy and Freeman.