LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 26

ed with particulars particular people of a particular age, speaking a particular argot in a particular time and place four high school girls and a boy trying to come of age in L.A. where all the grown-ups are still kids and all bets are off. Five kids taking responsibility for each other because neither their parents nor their culture know how to take responsibility for them. There are wonderful scenes and heartbreaking scenes; scenes that ring so true it's a wonder they came from a studio in this town; scenes diced with just enough "Hollywood" to give this film a mythic thrust, raising it from the "slice of life" genre to this "adventures of life" genre. Beautiful.

Say the names: Jodie Foster and Scott Baio, especially. And Marilyn Kagan, Sally Kellerrrfan, Adam Faith and Candice Stroh give great, old-fashioned, solid, emotionally committed performances that don't shy away from the implications of the fates of those they're playing. And Cherie Currie, from the first moment she's on screen, has an idelible presence. A major "screen debut," as they say. My admiration for writer-producer Gerald Ayres is unbounded.

Though there are things in this story I disagree with, it's impossible to disagree with his commitment and taste. The same goes double for director Adrian Lyne and producer David Putt-nam. In fact, it's hard to believe that a film this hard to make and this good about America came from an American studio. (MV) HIDE IN PLAIN SIGHT Too bad a good intention doth not a fine film make. Too bad fast-paced action, snappy dialogue, and a coherent storyline are lacking from the suspense-thriller flick this movie tries to be.

-Thomas Hacklin, Jr. (James Caan), your basic blue-collar, law-abiding citizen, loses his Michael Apted is English, his eye for American faces and his ear for American speech is more than refreshing in a town that usually goes for American plastic. Quite a good movie. (MV) FATSO Pure pleasure, for the most part. Dom DeLuise plays a happy fat man bullied into dieting by his sister (Anne Bancroft) who thinks he should be skinny and miserable.

The comic se- -quences are inspired elaborations on the joys of overeating and the best bit is one of those deftly staged and structured gags you'll remember long after you've forgotten the name of the movie in which it appeared. The comedy comes from the character, not just the situation, as DeLuise has a near. perfect instinct for inflection. His helpless, almost whimpering desire for food is communicated through the tender glance he throws at a cookie or the loving tone with which he describes his favorite treats. Then, too, the story is grounded in a fully fleshed-out milieu.

This Italian Catholic family lives in a duplex that has the look and feel of a real place, a real atmosphere. Only the last third of the movie is disappointing and that because I wanted laugh some more. Bancroft, in her first director's stint (she's also the writer), abruptly shifts the mood from rough and ready comedy to sweet romance. While the sequence is good-natured enough, it makes the film go flat and robs an audience of the violently funny ending the beginning promised. But aside from that, Bancroft seems to know when to direct and when to leave alone and how to combine harmoniously the many slippery elements of movie-making.

With Ron Carey and Candice Azzara, whose off-beat talents add the sort of shading you expect from a supporting cast but rarely see these Joseph Bologna are well-played cliches, rounding out the cast. In the fine line between cleverness and humor, Simon is damnably clever. Chapter Two, though, is more forced than funny. Chapter One (The Odd Couple I or even preface and prologue (Goodbye Girl, California Suite make the earlier Simon the better. (Diane Saltzberg) COAL MINER'S DAUGHTER Country and Western music in its roots from Jimmie Rogers and Bob Wills in the '30s and '40s to Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb, Kitty Wells, Patsy Cline and Loretta Lynn was the music of people who had worked for a living till they found out they could sing for one.

Loretta Lynn and Patsy Cline were housewives who could sing like hell. In the beginning, they riever expected to be anything but housewives; and in the beginning, they sang fpr people just like the people they'd known all their lives. It was a regional music, with the rich texture of a closed regional tradition something coast-to-coast homogenization has pretty much wiped out now. All the more praiseworthy, then, that Coal Miner's Daughter captures the music, the region, and the people as beautifully as it does. Sissy Spacek as Loietta and Beverly D'Angelo as the legendary Patsy act and sing their hearts out.

Sissy Spacek is one of our best actresses, as convincing as 14-year-old Loretta falling in love as she is as the superstar; and the lady can sing. Beverly D'Angelo can sing even better, sings incredibly as a matter of fact there could have been no better choice for Patsy Cline. Tommy Lee Jones is a surprise he's finally as good as everyone used to say he is; and another surprise is Levon Helm of The Band, playing beautifully as Loretta's father, the coal miner. Perhaps because director days. (GV) THE FOG When I watched this movie, I sat in the second row.

From that angle all the lunging weapons and falling corpses and otherwise animated inanimate objects gave me quite a fright for about half an hour. Thereafter, I was not only calm but bored. John Carpenter's enormously successful film Halloween works so well because he shows us horror where we least expect it smack in the center of a tidy Midwestern town. The Fog, on the other hand, is structured like a ghost story and situated in a tiny coastal community. Its characters are forever fooling around dark, lonely churches or lighthouses or isolated beach homes between midnight and morning precisely the time and places where slimy, mottled creatures can be expected to 'materialize and do nasty things.

And with the regularity of a metronomethey do exactly that, always accompanied of course by the fog of the title (which looks, incidentally, like moldy astro-turf). If Carpenter had taken the time to develop characters instead of cliches, and rooted their menace in less artificial circumstances, the very lively danger that ensues might have had some life. As it is, The Fog simply demonstrates the uncon- querable distance between the practitioner and the innovator. George Romero (Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead) is an innovator; Carpenter is still a practitioner With Adrienne Barbeau trying her level best to take the silliness seriously. (GV) FOXES The first important American film of the 1980s.

Though such a sweeping statement can hardly do justice to a movie so passionately concern NIVERBAL STUDIOS TOUR MCA COMPANY OPEN DAILY FOR INFO CALL (213) 877-1311 BRAD DAVIS IN HIS FIRST FILM SINCE MIDNIGHT EXPRESS. 1 "EVERYTHING IS FIRST-CLASS." -John Skow, Time Magazine WOOER JULIE MATTHAU ANDREWS 0 0 UTILE MISS MARKER A JENNINGS wANG fcodjctcr TONY CURHSEOB NEWHART-LEE GRANTS SARA SIZMSON $cnptoy by 'WRITER BERNSTEIN terd on story by DAMON RUNYON Move by he NRv manCini Itzvtwt ftoducr WALTER MATTHAU Pioduced by INNINGS LANG Dwcted by WALTER BERNSTEIN MNAVISON A UNIVERSAL PICTURE BRAD DAVIS KAREN ALLEN JAMESON BARKER A SMALL CIRCLE OF FRIENDS Wttw by EZRA SACKS Dirac of Photography WCHtfL BUTLER Produced by TIM ZMNEMANN DirvcM by R08 COHEN Music comport by JM STEINMAN PAKAVISJOH TECHNICOLOR iiifttsiuDnaiL aunrwitmiiMO wAmtWWIIMMWM1 Sf Ml- itlfr Ly yfr I Avatt in Paperback from Pocket Books Cop MO UMM Mm Cvponeon. MriUttawnd. II ATransamerica Company WESTWOOD Mann Wastwood 473-7664 Oaily 1:00 3:15 5:40 fcQO A 10:15 PM HOLLYWOOD Mann Hollywood 463-9371 Dally 12:30 2:30 4:30 0:30 8:30 10:30 PM txnuawtiNwniMauT. OTARTO TODAYI COSTA MESA Edwards Cinama 714546-3102 HAWTHORNE Hawthorns 6 644-6688 LA HASAA Fashion Square 4 691-0633 MISSION VIEJO Viejo Mall 7144954220 ORANGE Plitt City Canter 2 714634-9282 PASADENA Mann 2 351-9641 TORRANCE Mann Old Towns 371-1221 AkUMMITMUTK RnencuT, Westwood 1 045 Braxton 477-0059 DAILY- 1 10:00 SAT.

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