The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 48

C8 The CITIZEN, OTTAWA SATURDAY, AUGUST 2, 1986 For Singles Only IF YOU ONLY GO TO ONE BARBEQUE PARTY DANCE THIS YEAR BE SURE Come to the Single Gourmet Special effects blitz fails to save Howard the Duck Barbeque Party Dance on Thursday, August 7, included is a full hour unlimited Champagne Reception, juicy Suckling Pig and succulent Lamb broiled on a spit, a variety of Salads, Turkey and Roast Beef Platters, Variety of Pates, Sweet Tables, Cakes and Pastries, stroll in the gardens and By David McDonald Citizen correspondent it Uovla review Howard the Duck Quaensway Drive-In St Laurent if ft DANCE to the fabulous music of VI ft "SOUNDS The Party JJ 00 starts at 6:30 p.m. and goes to the wee 1 17 nours or ine morning, vve re cauing it a Mid-Summer's Night Dream, and Guests are welcome. It's a night to meet dozens of new friends, or just one perfect stranger. And, you're invited to discover the Single Gourmet. For details and to Reserve Call Ruthy at 230-8660.

Reservations are essential Why a duck? Well, why not? If there is intelligent life on other planets, it's just as likely to be a cigar-smoking, three-foot duck named Howard as anything else Hollywood can think of. Howard, who began life as a Marvel Comics character in the mid-'70s, is brought to the screen by producer George (Star Wars) Lucas. As the movie opens, Howard is living in Marshington, D.C., on the planet Duck World, where the natives watch movies like Breeders of the Lost Stork, read magazines like Playduck, and shop at Bloomingducks with their MallardCards. Howard is a med school dropout parents wanted me to be a plastic surgeon making big bucks doing beak jobs and tail and a former rock musician whose new job as an advertising copywriter is cut short by a cosmic laser accident on Earth. The laser sucks Howard right out of his livingroom and drops him down in an alley outside a Cleveland punk club, where he hooks up with the simpy Beverly, as aspiring rock singer played by Lea Thompson (Michael J.

Fox's mother in Back to the Future.) Beverly, her friend Phil (Tim Robbins), and a sympathetic scientist, Dr. Jenning (Stratford Festival veteran Jeffrey Jones fLgffilJf who played the Emperor Joseph in Amadeus), try to protect Howard from a variety of earthly bullies and bureaucrats, while the wisequacking duck tries to figure out how to get back home. The best thing about Howard the Duck is Howard himself: Howard is actually a midget in a duck suit with an impressive array of facial movements and expressions. The trouble is just about everything else about Howard lays an entire omelette. The script by the husband-and-wife team of director Wil-lard Huyck and producer Gloria Katz (who, in better days, wrote American Grafitti and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom for Lucas) is a long, rambling mishmash of not very comic events that quickly abandons Howard and his satirical potential to a blitz of spectacular, but tediously irrelevant special effects courtesy of Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic Co.

In the process, Howard, the acerbic outsider from the comic books, is reduced to Howard the Capon. There's little bite left in this beak. Jackie Gleason growls through his character Nothing in Common teeming with out-of-sync characters By Noel Taylor Citizen staff writer Movie review Nothing In Common Somerset, Kanata 110 York Street Only! (Above Houlihan's, Byward Market) Prime Rib (8oz) Served with a baked potato, stuffed with butter and sour cream or rice and fresh vegetables. Come early, 'cause this magnificent treat is a sellout every night. 6.95 Sirloin Steaks 8 Oz.

Sirloin or 8 Oz. Teriyaki Includes your choice of baked potato stuffed with butter and sour cream or rice and fresh vegetables. 5.95 a Lobster Tail Brunch With Us. or Deep Fried Shrimp Father and son, fathers and they don't have much in common except perhaps the generation gap. As the springboard for Nothing In Common, it's a proposition this picture seems to be making light of until it realizes this is no time for levity, and it turns serious.

As for people out of sync, Nothing in Common collects them. Take David Basner, for instance. And his father, Max. David is everything that Max isn't rich, talented, smooth, fast and young. Especially young.

David is an advertising executive on the way up. Max is a veteran garment salesman on the way out. Even the actors who portray them share nothing in style. Jackie Gleason, as Max, growls. Tom Hanks (David) tends to chirrup.

Everything about Gleason celebrates the gift of timing. Hanks has something to learn from him. But when it comes to emotion the gap narrows. Glea-son's repertoire is on the familiar side. Hanks is still experimenting.

Nothing in Common is one of those diffident diversions which sets out to let an audience frolic in the shallow end, and then pretends to chuck it in the deep end because this actually is a rather serious matter about parents and their children and the miseries they are capable of inflicting on each other. Hanks in overdrive is someone to keep up with. On the flight back to Chicago from a holiday in Mexico we discover him under the blankets in the back seat with the stewardess. "I'm a frequent flier. This is a bonus," he explains to a worried passenger.

Back at the agency, he dishes out one-liners as though they were trophies and floats into a new office where an adoring staff serenades him. There are one night stands, a girl next door (Bess Armstrong, someone to cherish in this asylum), a rival female exec (Sela Ward, formidable) and a boss (Hector Elizondo, amusing) who is more paranoid about his hairpiece than the next account. Then one night Max calls and announces that his wife, David's mother, has left him after 36 years. "I know you hate me but you've got to help me." On such irrationality is the generation gap built. Mom (that old Hitchcock heroine, Eva Marie Saint, moving feis-tily through the 50s) complains about 30 years of silence, and infidelity.

The tables are turned. The child becomes the parent of the father and the mother. And writers Rick Podell and Michael Preminger become the mothers of invention. Max loses his job, gets gangrene and goes into hospital. David moves out of the fast lane and nudges the curb.

Nothing in Common joins him. The only consistency in all this is that mother and father still can't stand each other. Marshall, whose last film, The Flamingo Kid, bore some family resemblance, seems safer at slow speeds. The emotions seem closer to the truth, and the hysteria less tiresome. He almost succeeds in making the shallow end look deeper than it really is.

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