LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 25

ninT reason, the tone in their prose is a gloat. They're also wrong. Let it be said somewhere that in James Garner and Carol Burnett, Altman has foundhis perfect players: they anchor his intentionally loose scenes, their timing is flawless, they're excellent technicians never at a loss for gesture, word, or grimace in Altman's group improvisations. Altman, like Brecht, is not giving you characters he wants you to identify with, he's giving you situations to watch and enjoy and the enjoyment takes a little critical thought, and is supposed to. Since America's and especially America's critics' favorite pasttime is to identify with people who live lives more exciting than we do, this finds disfavor.

Be that as it may, Health is Robert Altman's most realized film since M'A'S'H, McCabe and Mrs. Miller and Images. But lazy people won't like it. (MV) meanness of modern life. That's crap, and so is Dressed to Kill.

Whether or not you enjoy this movie depends on whether or not you enjoy pornography. (GV) THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK Oh boy! Producers Gary Kurtz and George Lucas and director Irvin Kershner spent 20 trillion dollars to make me feel like a toy for two hours and I loved it. I loved the snow camels and the space lizards and the rockets whizzing every which way; and I loved the Ice Planet and The Cloud City and the swampy, steamy Jedi world, which is where my favorite of Stuart Freeborn's knock-out "Special Creatures" lives. He's Yoda, half-gnome, half-teddy bear and all cutie-pie (crabby though he is). Perhaps it's the humidity that makes him huffy, but whatever, his is the burden of bringing further enlightenment to Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker.

This he does with patient explanations of The Force. Good, you understand, is Very Good, and evil is Very Evil. That digested, Skywalker goes off to fight Darth Vader and things get a bit dull. Star Wars never had much of a story and The Empire Strikes Back is no better in that department. Despite the bang-up editing and camera work and the wondrous sound, and the fun it is to hear Princess Leia call Han Solo a laser brain every five minutes, none of the characters is more than an ornamental gun toter.

And then there's the cheap-shot ending. Very cheap. The good guys never quite get back together again. James Bond always tidies things up without cutting into the next picture's profits, so why not the Star Warriors? Which means you, dear reader, get to wait three years to see what happens to one of our heroes. Not nice, not nice at all.

(GV) THE GETTING OF WISDOM From the Australians, another wonderful movie about another wonderful woman, or rather a girl who grows up to be that way. This movie, along with its sister films (Picnic at Hanging Rock and My Brilliant Career), is nothing short of a celebration of the female psyche, its'myth and its mystery. And more importantly, its health. Here is a young girl (Susannah Fowle) cl-! inging to the sense in herself in the narrowest of cages, a girls' boarding school in the Vic- torian era. All of the females in this film are under fire at one time or another.

It's what gives the. picture its power. But only Laura gives it hope, only she grows up to break away, to break away from the affection, the cir-cumstance, the propriety which dictates that women, like children, should be seen and not, heard. And all the while she's recognizing the worth in herself, she's learning not to deny it in others. It's this that her mother gave her, the same thing the one adult woman at Melbourne Ladies College tries to give her charges to carry with them when they go.

Theirs are the gentle voices that insist: go with the feelings you've got. The wisdom is mothering yourself first, and then the others. Excellent. Excellent for its ac- ting, its direction, its camerawork, and its very necessary values. (GV) THE GREAT SANTINI The Great Santini is an old-fashioned movie, the sort that wants an audience to hurt and Jaugh and cry and learn in their movies, and that's what makes it so wonderful.

This movie wants you to understand that love is a hard-fought-for thing and that the fighting is never completely done. Its adult characters all know, or will come to know, that you've got to love people for what they are, not what you want them to be, and the knowing of that gets them one leg up on life. Probably the only one they'll ever need. Director Lewis John Carlino (who also wrote the script from the novel of the same name) lets his actors have all the room they need to give great performances, so perhaps you won't mind, or even notice, how little else he does. The white audience will remember how very much work Santini's family puts into loving one another, and that's a hugely valuable thing.

What the black audience will remember, I can't say. Stan Shaw plays the part of a crippled black boy, beautifully, but the story simply sacrifices his Toomer for the sake of a healthy white boy who needs to be a man. Its the one caricature in a movie whose excellence comes from its characters. (GV) HEALTH Except for a brief heyday, the Brecht whose name is now revered everywhere played mostly to skimp audiences. And Altman's brave and in Health, bravely realized Brechtian cinema will probably play to the same.

Altman is having similar luck with the critics. You'd think that if critics really felt Altman had deteriorated in his mind, theyd have the decency to be sad about it instead of snotty. For the most part they don't. For some incomprehensible and shameful HOPSCOTCH Thank goodness for Walter Matthau and Glenda Jackson they're the movie star royalty these days, the people who enjoy themselves in the pictures they make, enjoy their talent and the uses they put it to. With them up there on the screen, an audience can relax; we know we'll see and hear humor and style and class.

These are two of the few performers left who please themselves and know full well that's what pleases others. Their new movie is gentlemanly and even a touch tough. It races around from, this country to that, now playful, now serious, never one mood dominant over the other, clear ly a contemporary movie in its values which is to say that only the hero and heroine have any values which could really be called ad-mirable but always there's the bond between' the entertainer and the audience. We want to a smile and laugh and root for the good they're working every minute to give us ex-', actly that. Matthau and Jackson are supported by fine performances from Sam Waterston, Ned Beatty and Herbert Lorn, but it's Waterston who has the hardest part to play.

His CIA agent remains a company man right through the final frame, and it's this character, with his always -practical reality radar, whose eyes an audience sees the action Without him, wed be watching a fairy tale; with him, we believe it's still possible to give the bad guys the old heave-ho, at least every once in a While. (GV) IN A YEAR OF THIRTEEN MOONS Oh, the great hand-wringing, intellectual- wrenching horror of it all. Poor, poor Er-winElvira. Nothing can shatter the solitude or even soften the suffering of tortured transsexual who only wants to find some humanity in this inhuman world! Which is no wonder, -especially considering where she confines her search. Hers are some of the sleekest, most selfish friends a girl could have, endlessly maneuvering to take fop honors in the latest symbol-soggy misery contest from Fassbinder.

Junk food for the effete angst addict who can't -take soap opera straight. (GV) Vista, thru Oct. 7 A ORDINARY PEOPLE Robert Redford, in his first time out as a direc: tor, has made a movie about something real: the American family. He had good material to begin with, the novel by Judith Guest, and he gave it his professional best. Above all, he knows how to work with actors.

Mary Tyler Moore as the mother is excellent. Her TV persona goes bottoms-up and there it is: the cruelty and control that was always behind all that reassuring surface sweetness and spunk. For an entertainer with her following to play what is practically the part of a cannibal woman is an act of bravery, and honor to her for it. Then there's Donald Sutherland as the father. He hasn't been this good in years.

That static quality that gives him such a detached look in other movies is here the. mask of a man weak enough to only want everything to be "nice." And the son, played by Timothy Hutton, who is taking his first steps toward sanity and. finally forces the father to do the same this is another fully-realized role. But the spirit that pervades -the picture, the quality that touches nerves and draws blood, is the mothering one, or rather, its absence. And for once that loss has been given the circumstance, the mood, and the language true to the pointless middle class life which produces it.

(GV) THE STUNT MAN Every now and again a movie hits that is so far out in front of everything else in what it's doing, how it's doing it and why, that critic and viewer alike can just sit there with their eyes and their mouths hanging open, being thankful. The Stunt Man is that movie. Cinematically, it takes as many chances as a great stunt man, and it lives to tell about it. Visually: you almost never see a sound-film the visual mayhem, Paramount Pictures Presents a Wildwood Enterprises Production "Ordinary People" Donald Sutherland Mary Tyler Moore Judd Hirsch Timothy Hutton Music Adapted by Marvin Hamlisch Based upon the novel by Judith Guest Screenplay by Alvin Sargent Produced by Ronald L. Schwary Directed by Robert Redford EXCLUSIVE ENGAGEMENT NOW PLAYING Daily 12:45 3:10 5:35 8:00 10:20 Late Show Fri.

Sat. 12:45 AM E3 PASSES ACCEPTED FC TK1S CSASEKZST.