LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 61

CALENDAR CURRENT RELEASES name, age and nationality are never revealed), Golgo saunters evenfarther down the hard-boiled road than the infamous 'shogun assassin, Itto Ogami of Lone Wolf and Cub, who at least had his son and his thirst for vengeance as humanizing influences. Even at his craftiest Golgo 13 is a two-dimensional character, a murder droid, a perfect match for the aesthetic of the series, which is cookie-cutter storytelling all the way. Created by writer-artist Tadeo Saito but credited to "The Tadeo Saito Studio, Golgo 13 is vaguely interesting only as a cultural artifact for die-hard Japanophiles. (Nuart Feb. 5-9 (David Chute) SNIPER A movie to remind you of many other movies, but entertaining enough for all that.

Tom Berenger plays Marine Sergeant Tom Beckett, a sniper with 74 kills whose new assignment Ss to track down and off a rebellious general and his drug-lord financier deep in the jungles of Panama. Unfortunately for him, Beckett has to bring along Richard Miller (Billy Zane), a young National Security Council careerist with a drawerful of sharpshooter medals but no actual assassinations to his credit. Not only does Miller have a hard time surrendering his murder cherry, but he and Beckett are soon bickering over who's in charge and how much killing the 3 A NATIONAL LAMPOON'S LOADED WEAPON I A send-up of the Lethal Weapon series (which was already pretty close to self-parody anyway) that doesn't have many big laughs, but does provide a stream of chuckles. Oddly, while the film is putatively a satire of formula filmmaking Basic Instinct and several other action thrillers also come in for ribbing), it is itself a perfect example of the copycat style. Following the example laid down byZucker-Abrahams-Zucker in Airplane I and repeated by some or all of the trio in both Naked Gun movies and Hot Loaded Weapon features a dumbed-down hero (Emilio Estevez) and a (not too much) smarter partner (Samuel Jackson) bumping up against a series of unlikely coincidences, literalized figures of speech, visual puns, missteps of logic and celebrity cameos.

Director and co-writer Gene Quintano can't duplicate the sure-fire staging of the originals, and his movie's sense of humor isn't as insanely loony as that of its predecessors', either. However, there are decent gags throughout, and the cast (which also includes William Shatner, Tim Curry and, more briefly, Whoopi Goldberg, Phil Hartman, Denis Leary and Bruce Willis) is appropriately silly. (Citywide (Henry Sheehan) NEMESIS It's getting harder and harder to tell the good rohots from the bad robots but not so robot movies. The time is the 21 st century. Human beings are being "enhanced with mechanical parts.

Our hero is an enhanced" detective who follows in the overworn footsteps of Terminator, Robocop and Blade Runner, tracking down other "enhanced humans and destroying them. Every now and then he emits a thought balloon: "Am I human, or am I machine?" His friends and his enemies ask him the same question, with monotonous intensity. To judge Nemesis on the basis of its stylish atmospherics would only exaggerate its virtues: there's no question that director Albert Pyun has, with production designer Colleen Sara and costumer Uzza Wolf, worked a loaves-and-fishes miracle with their shoestring budget. Boil the screenplay by Rebecca Charles down to its essential ideas which is to say, boil the slipshod structure and bad dialogue away, leaving only the voice- over (which describes a bleak world of uplinks, downlinks and corporate group-thinks) and there's lively, even satiric potential. But, alas, the script loses its edge in the first five minutes.

The dialogue is ail glib profanity fine if you're David Mamet working with characters who struggle with our world, but locker-room language in the mouths of robots snaps the moorings of this imaginary world. Likewise the incredibly sadistic violence: much of it shoot-the-woman-first and the rest literally gouging eyes, all of it supposedly okay because the people are primarily mechanical and can be repaired. (But then, what's at stake?) Quickly enough, Nemesis itself is beyond repair. (City wide) EX. Feeney) THE PROFESSIONAL: GOLG0 13 Herky-jerky Japanimation in the service of a tediously complicated thriller plot tedious in large part because the characters arent drawn well enough to be easily distinguished.

The inventive design filigree and propulsive pop graphics of top-drawer Japanese animated features like Akira and Nausica are missing here, and not even the chance to watch cartoon characters strip, curse and copulate, or spew blood in slow motion, is enough to spice things up. The Professional is based upon Golgo 13. one of Japan's longest-running comic-book series there's been an adventure a week for almost 30 years about this amoral, unstoppable and seemingly emotionless global-trotting hit man. The movie version weaves together the stories of three of Golgo 13's successful kills, and adds a perfunctory twist the wealthy father of one of the killer's earlier victims has thrown all of his worldly resources into an effort to rid the world of its best eliminator. All but anonymous (his Frank Marshall and screenwriter John Patrick Shanley that this movie is able to awaken those feelings and fears, even across 20 years, and no doubt will afflict a whole new generation with the same jitters.

They succeed by staying resolutely true to the facts many of which have that improbable, borderline-unbelievable quality that gives life its strange integrity. "Life," "alive ness" and the weird beauty that offsets even the most terrible events these are the movie's themes; yet it never becomes stupidly lyrical. I wish, though, that the dialogue had been more concentrated and discreet. When the direction is strong, the writing is weak; when the writing is strong, the direction goes weak. Defects to be sure, but the balance works.

(Citywide) (F.X Feeney) ANTARCTICA With its sweeping panoramic views of a paradoxical terrain mountainous sheets of ice, arid grand canyons, amazingly bleak plateaus Antarctica is a true celebration of nature, against which we humans seem as small and insignificant as we often forget we are. Captured on IMAX film with an astounding sense of space by photographers Tom Cowan and Malcolm Ludgate, the viewer is welcomed to "a world as remote as the moon." Unlike other IMAX films, where the experience leaves you feeling somewhat claustrophobic, this exploration is wide open, filling the five-story screen with not so much a history as a journey, following current-day explorers and scientists through the continent. Then, just as you're thinking theres really somewhere on the planet humans have forgotten to mess up, Antarctica reminds us of the devastating effects that ozone depletion and global warming have brought to that continent. My only complaint about this movie is that at 43 minutes, it's much too short. (IMAX at the California Museum of Science and Industry, Exposition Park see Film Video Events for info Mary Melton) ASPEN EXTREME Two passionate skiers, lifelong buddies, break out of blue-collar lives on a Detroit assembly line and head to Aspen, Colorado, with a dream of becoming ski instructors Once there, the handsomer of the two, who also dreams of becoming a writer, gets sucked into the fast life of the super-rich, while the goofier (and, in odd ways, deeper) of the two explores a downward spiral among Aspen's drug dealers and hangers-on.

There are two women, one a standard-issue rich-bitch, the other a sad, wise, literal girl-next-door Our hero the would-be writer has love affairs with both and is forced to choose. His buddy the would-be hero has a love affair of sorts with a prostitute, played by Nicolette Scorsese. It's a pity the buddy's love life gets such short shrift in the story; his downward spiral is too abrupt, making him seem a bit stupid when the story's curve would suggest he's just desperate. That our hero is trying to be a storyteller, and that this movie is, itself, the story he doesn't yet know he's telling, is a pleasing touch perhaps a personal one on the part of writer-director Patrick Hasburgh. Aspen Extreme weakness is that its characters are types, not flesh-and-blood individuals.

Its strength is that it has velocity, and a sense of place. Aspen's landscape is beautifully evoked, and the ski scenes (which are plentiful) have all the kinetic, eye-popping exuberance of the jet scenes in Top Gun. (North ridge Cinemas, Pacific's Hastings, AMC Burbank 14 F.X. Feeney) BAD LIEUTENANT Shot to the humdrum, real-time rhythms of a documentary, Abel Ferrara's quietly bestial new film is an intensely religious character study of a depraved cop scrabbling for salvation in a world from which hope, love and decency have fled. Though he's too doped up to know it, the nameless bad lieutenant (Harvey Keitel, in a naked performance that's mostly stunning and occasionally ridiculous) is looking for a way to say he's sorry for his sins of commission (abusing his authority for drugs, gambling and kinky sex) and omission (he drifts through his family's suburban tract house like a forgotten ghost) He finds it when investigating the altar rape of a nun (Frankie Thorn) who refuses to turn in her assailants because she forgives them.

Aside from one scene in which Keitel subjects two girls to an act of sexual humiliation as plausible Reviewed by Arion Berger, Tom Corson Steve Erickson, Steven Mikuan, John Powers, Henry Sheehan and Ella Taylor. ALADDIN Disney is out to repeat the smash success of last years Beauty and the Beast right down to the lyrics by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman (with a few songs from Tim Rice); a mildly feminist Princess Jasmine, who, despite her thick black braid, looks and talks just like Belle am not a prize to be and heavy messages about character counting for more than appearance. But Aladdin who, in this responsibly brown adaptation of the rags-to-riches Arabian Nights fable, looks like an ethnically correct surfer (he's based on Tom Cruise, Michael J. Fox and rapper M.C. Hammer) doesn't pack the romantic punch of the kindly monster who won Belle's heart.

That's partly because the original story of Aladdin isnt as powerful, and partly because the film is a smart-aleck vehicle for Robin Williams. Wisecracking his way through the voice-over for the endlessly metamorphosing Genie (an animator's dream, heavily influenced by cartoonist Al Hirschfeld) whose three wishes show Aladdin how to become a prince and a mensch, Williams comes on like a manic cross between Arsenio Hall, Mel Brooks and Phil Donahue, with about 70 other pop tributes on the side. Though at times his endless gabbing makes you want to stuff him back into the lamp, Williams is perfectly cast here: hes a thousand times better at performing than he is at acting. But the movie's real star is an incredibly versatile flying carpet with great social skills and a gift for getting passengers from A to faster than a fax. (Citywide) (ET) AUVE Alive begins with the most startling, realistic and technically imaginative plane crash since Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent.

What follows 22 college soccer players trapped on an Andes mountainside along with a handful of parents and siblings is solid and true. I was 1 9 (the same age as most of these boys) in 1 972, when this incident actually occurred. I can remember reading, with terrible fascination, every newspaper account (of which there were dozens) and, eventually, the Piers Paul Read book upon which this movie is based. The story awakened primal fears worthy of Lord of the Flies, with the added kicker that those who resorted to cannibalism were not fictional characters but contemporary teenagers in prep-school neckties. It is to the great credit of director THE CEMETERY CLUB 1 know how it sounds: a comedy about three Jewish widows one uptight, one free-spirited, one sensitive learning to live and love after theif husbands death.

But Bill Duke A Rage in Harlem is not a director to let a story this obvious hit only the obvious marks. Rather than show the old gals romping with heavyset new swains in the heart-warming-yet-contemptuous way Hollywood does that sort of tiling, Duke posits that the women's reactions are informed by the void that's central to the film and at the center of their lives the dead husbands so that they never really regain their footing, and neither do we. Timid Doris (Olympia Dukakis) finds nothing liberating in her newly single status; after her friends refuse to continue their weekly gatherings at the cemetery, she considers her life over. Elegant smartass Lucille (Diane Ladd) is prepared to nab any man she wants, but when the first available suitor screeches to a halt in front of soft-haired, soft-eyed Esther (Ellen Burstyn), she comes undone. This is Esther's story, finally, and Duke teases out all of the guilt and grief that accompany her mincing courtship dance with a fickle cabbie (Danny Aiello, looking surprisingly tall).

The Cemetery Club Is fast Sniper and funny, with moments of delirious humor (usually involving golddigger Lainie Kazan and her various wedding ceremonies) and sharp stabs of pathosjEsther, contentedly allowing the cabbie to fix her car, flips down her window shade only to have one of her husband's cigars roll onto her lap like a reproach). It's the only Hoi lywood movie I've seen about middle-aged women that doesnt despise them. AMC Century 14, Crest (Arion Berger) HOMEWARD BOUND: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY The best parts of Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey happen when the animals shut up; the movie's worst fault is that, unlike the 1963 original, it's much less about three devoted pets who travel hundreds of treacherous miles to join their owners than it is about dumb jokes spoken by humans. Director Duwayne Dunham, possessing far less courage or imagination than the first Disney crew that adapted Sheila Burnford's novel, has, by updating this version, drained nearly all dignity from a premise that's already vulnerable to ridicule. As the pet cat tumbles over a waterfall, Sally Reid's voice complains that she just "got this coat as a bulldog puppy eyes a porcupine, Michael J.

Fox observes that it looks tike a "squirrel having a bad hair day." And as the patriarchal golden retriever looks longingly out over the river that supposedly drowned his cat buddy, we hear Don Ameche deliver a cloying speech about the duties of a dog. Such anthropomorphic cowardice not only papers over the animats' own personalities which, after all, should have been the only reason for making this movie it takes the sting out of potentially moving episodes. The movie still works sometimes, but only for kids too young to be annoyed by the wisecracks, and just old enough to want to take issues like separation and loss a tiny step beyond cartoons. (Selected theaters (Judith Lewis) Bad Lieutenant No pick this week, but we recommend: Aladdin, Alive, American Impressionist: A Robert Altman Retrospective, Antarctica, Bad Lieutenant, Bram Stoker's Dracula, The Cemetery Club, The Crying Game, Deadly Currents, Glengarry Glen Ross, Howards End, The Last of the Mohicans, Malcolm Matinee, Passion Fish, The Player, The Quarrel, Rain Without Thunder, A River Runs Through It, Second International Festival of Short Films, Tropical Rainforest, Unforgiven. psyche can bear.

Director Luis Llosa (brother of novelist and politician Maria Vargas Llosa) displays no qualmsover the political implications of the two men's callings; Millers objections to Beckett are purely of the pop-psych variety. In fact, Llosa tends to view killing itself as a kinetic kick, employing a neat optical effect in which the camera appears to trail along through the air with the bullets. Even these moral qualms, however, are muffled beneath action conventions. The bad guys, who include a renegade CIA agent, are so bad that their eventual extermination is a hoped-for given. More damaging is the sense of ddjb vu; the relationship between the two protagonists is strictly buddy-cop stuff, while the plot has been used i countless Westerns.

(There's even a scene lifted from The Searchers.) Nevertheless, thanks to the efficiently streamlined narrative and very good performances from Berenger and Zane, Sniper definitely offers pleasure to the action fan. Citywide (Henry Sheehan) Not Available at Press Time: Sommer sby The Vanishing FEBRUARY 5-FEBRUARY 11, 1993 LA WEEKLY 61.