LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 46

CALENDAR FILM CURRENT RELEASES cally arresting "panic' music emanating from tee night teen tki tales about others (Brian Jones, Ornette Coleman and, most recently, master producer and bassist Bill Lasyvel!) who have become deeply entranced with this music. The poetry of jazz, as weii as tee handsome instrumental voice and countenance of a famous jazzman, is exquisitely detailed in Arthur Elgon's Texas Tenon The Illinois Jacquet Story, which approaches its subject with an elegance and reverence most often seen in European films about American art forms and artists. Other noteworthy steps along tee way: Maria-chi. Chris Rock in CB4 a Spinal Tap-) sh twist on the world of rap). High Lonesome The Story of Bluegrass Music.

Stepping Razor (a fribute to Peter Tosh), and Perry farreii and Casey Niccolis fantasy excursion Gift This event is co-sponsored by the LA Weekly, among others. (Laemmles SunsetS; Feb 19-23 213-466-FHM Lyneli George) THE TEMP At last a full-service honor movie with role models for super-yups of all persuasions, and just enough disclaiming comedy to make the politically correct critic look stupid for carping. Anxious careerists will get behind Peter tee Corporate Cog (played by Timothy Hutton, looking not a day over 18), a decent but insecure soui whose climb up tee ladder of Mrs. Applebys Baked Goods has been slowed by a cated without being obscure, intellectual without being pretentious. As part of its new series of experimental films, held in conjunction with Filmfomm, MOCA is presenting two Friedrich works her new film.

Rules of the fiosdjunavaiiable for press screening), and her 1992 Sink or Swim. The latter is a visual essay about the filmmakers painful, intense relationship with her charismatic, demanding but remote father, and the way it has shaped her imagination, her work and her sexuality. A child's voice-over tells tee girl's family stery, injecting myths and fables teat make it universal, playing off home movies of confirmations and beach parties teat make it social, and erotica teat make it erotic. Toward tee end tee girl's small stepsister, a product of her father's third marriage, is told by her father thatthe story tee is telling him is not interesting to him. So she sits "hying to invent a more interesting stery So, I assume, will Friedrich, all her life and shes succeeding.

(Museum of Contemporary Art; Feb. 21 2p.m. For info call 213-626-5222. )(Ba Taylor) RED DESERT Red Deserts 964 was Michelangelo Antonioni's first film in color, and tee determination to experiment is present in every frame, from tee nearly omnipresent use of telephoto lenses to flatten out the image, to the distortion of 'natural color, even to the point of painting tee fruit in a street vendor's cart gray. However, there is one important constant from his previous films: Monica Vitti, here playing Giuliana, the wife of an industrial executive.

Profoundly alienated from tee polluted landscape teat marks northern Italy, and from tee people who dwell within it, she is on the brink of a nervous breakdown when tee meets Corrado (Richard Harris), an engineer recruiting workers for an industrial project in Patagonia, and slowly works her way toward an affair with him. Antonioni isn't so much interested in the immediate cause of Giuliana 's condition tee devastation of the natural world by consumerism as in measuring her response to it and wondering why it should be held the unreasonable one. As Antonioni has remarked, Giuliana is betrayed by her own world and teat applies to ail of her worlds, inner and outer. The film is still frighteningly contemporary, an attribute that also applies to Blow-Up, being shown on the same program. Although tee latter film looks dated because of its preoccupation with the fetish objects of "Swinging London," the film takes Antonionis criticism of consumerism one step further, encompassing among other things a denial of the possibility of acquiring hipness.

Part of the UCLA Film and Television Archive's retrospective of Antonionis work, this bill also includes Preface, a short work made as part of an anthology film. (UCLA fiim and Television Archive; Feb. 20. (Henry Sheehan) H3EEBEEHL1EI THE MATCH ened primal fears worthy of Lord of the Flies, with tee 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 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 teat offsets even the most terrible events these are the movie's themes; yet it never becomes stupidly lyrical. I wish, though, teat the dialogue had been more concentrated and discreet. When the direction is strong, tee writing is weak; when the writing is strong, the direction goes weak. Defects to be sure, but the balance works.

(Citywide) (F.X. Feeney) BAD LIEUTENANT Shot to the humdrum, real-time rhythms of a documentary, Abel Ferraras 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, tee nameless bad lieutenant (Harvey Keitel, in a naked performance teat's mostly stunning and occasionally ridiculous) is looking fora 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 humiliatibn as plausible as it is appalling, the film's physical excesses are mostly stylized and symbolic, far less traumatizing than its psychic agony.

In Ferrara's enthusiastically NC-17 world, the base line for transcendence is rock bottom, and redemption is an act of mercy as silly as it is sublime. His in telligent extremity stands for the lunacy of a society in which the boundaries between the cop and his beat, between good and evil, are perhaps irretrievably erased. (Laemmles Sunset 5, Monica 4-Plex) ET) A BRIEF HISTORY OF TIME What could be boring about a man who has a wasting muscle disease that will eventually leave only his heart, lungs and brain functioning; who asks questions like, "Why do we remember the past but not tee future?" and tries to answer them; and who keeps a poster of Marilyn Monroe on the wall of his Cambridge University office? Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a genius-nut in his own right ought to be the perfect biographer for Stephen Hawking, but in this surprisingly straight documentary about tee British physicist whose book on the origins of the universe sold more than 5 million copies, Morris seems awed into timidity by his subject. The film is mostly interviews with Hawking's relatives, friends and colleagues, almost all of whom are upper-class andor scientists, and therefore very odd indeed. (His mother is wonderful.) Aside from a few witty tricks with chickens and roulette wheels, a cleverly placed clip from the Disney movie The Black Hole, and the usual Philip Glass funeral music, there's a lot of jazzy but bland and unnecessary visuals of watches floating around the ether and giant clock parts grinding together.

The film's best moments come when Hawking himself a waggish charmer with the face of a sad frog and a body that barely exists talks about his life and work through a specially constructed computer that makes his voice sound Welsh- American. (Laemmles Sunset 11 a.m.)( ET) BROTHER'S KEEPER When Bill Ward, an elderly farmer in the village of Munnsville, New York, was found dead in bed on June 6, 1990, the state police arrested his illiterate and borderline-retarded brother Delbert, who had shared his bed all his life. After confessing to suffocating his brother, Delbert recanted and insisted that Bill had died of natural causes. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky's documentary about Delbert's trial is cast as a peas- Reviewed by Anon Berger, Tom Corson Steve Erickson John Powers, Henry Sheehan and Ela Taylor. ALADDIN Disney is out to repeat tee smash success of last year's 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 tee 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 tee romantic punch of the kindly monster who won Belle's heart. That's partly because the original story of Aladdin isn't as powerful, and partly because tee 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 FACTORY GIRL 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; he's 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) ALIVE Alive begins with the most startling, realistic and technically imaginative plane crash since Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent. What follows 22 college rugby 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 1972, 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 awak- ARMY OF DARKNESS Sam Raimi is the writer-director of The Evil Dead Evil Dead ft and Darkman, and his new Army of Darkness is for all intents and purposes Evil Dead Hi, die continuing saga of a store cleric whose tip to the woods with his girlfriend in the first film unleashed Raimi's nightmare vision in all its garish panache. The girlfriend was dispensed with two movies ago, but tie cleric has been hoiding off tie same unseen horror ever since. Now he's bear sucked back into medieval times where he literally kerplops, along with his car, amid sorcery, civil war and an army of skeletons led by the decomposed remains of his doppeiganger. Army of die Night means to be as ridiculous as it sounds.

Unlike other moviemakers working in this genre, Raimi is interested less in graphic renderings of death and dismemberment than in giving tuft expression to his visual imagination, which is equal parts Kurosawa, Ray Harryhausen, EC Comics and the Three Stooges: his strategy is not to avoid cliches but rather to blow them up like balloons full of laughing gas and let go. Because it doesn't have the pathos of Darkman, and because a movie that starts in tee pitch of manic has nowhere to go except frantic and teen frenzied, the air goes out of Army of Darkness about 20 minutes before tee movie ends. But tee first hour is a hell of a lot of fun, good for Sink or Swim at least every other laugh it intends, and if you havent seen Raimi in action before, you may want to jump on the ever-accelerating bandwagon now before he gets too hip for his good and ours. (Citywide) (Steve Erickson) GROUNDHOG DAY From the moment Bill Murray established himself as the snidest star in Hollywood, he began trying to shake off that image what he really wants is to be corny. He achieves his goal in this amusing, sentimental, sometimes slack but thoroughly entertaining comedy about a conceited wise-ass of a weatherman forced (for Twilight Zone-isb reasons) to relive tee same Groundhog Day in a small Pennsylvania town.

(Each day begins with tee clock radio playing '1 Got You Babe," a wittily infernal choice.) The idea of such endless repetition is droll in itself, and Danny Rubin's story (co-scripted with director Harold Ramis) spins enough frustrating variations teat, when the film finally goes soft, you feel Murray has earned whatever joy he gets. At bottom. Groundhog Day presents the heartening thought teat if we were condemned to repeat tee same events over and over, it would turn us into the decent, humane people we really want to be. This may sound like pure Hollywood sap, but Friedrich Nietzsche said just about the same thing. Bill Murray, Ubermenschl (Citywide) John Powers) MEMORY AND DESIRE: FILMS BY SU FRIEDRICH With a title like this, you might be forgiven for expecting one of those frightening Lacanian lectures about the archaeology of the psyche.

Mercifully the films of Su Friedrich are experimental without being inaccessible, compli See Him feature. We also recommend: Aladdin, Alive, American Impressionist A Robert Altman Retrospective, Antarctica, Army of Darkness, Bad Lieutenant, Brothers Keeper, The Cemetery Club, The Crying Game, Groundhog Day, Hollywood Salutes the Grammys, Howards End, Matinee, Passion Fish, Plano, Plano Kid, The Player, The Quarrel, A River Runs Through It, Strictly Ballroom, Tropical Rainforest, Under Siege, Unforgiven. little problem with paranoia and a collapsed marriage. If you're a secretary with revenge fantasies starring you as woman of power and your boss as victim, then Kris the Temp (Lara Flynn Boyle, dressed for excess in business suits teat could do double duty as Playboy Bunny uniforms) is the girl for you: she specializes in grievous bodily harm ranging from lethal wasps to mechanical shredders for all personnel who get in tee way of her meteoric rise to the top. And for tee out-and-out misogynist the top is occupied by yet another predatory career woman, company president Faye Dunaway (in a downscaled reprise of her role in Network Director Tom Holland Child's Platf can do the horror stuff with one hand behind his back, and for tee most part he does competently but without passion.

He loses interest altogether three-quarters of the way through tee movie. Me too, had i not been so entertained by his Hobbesian vision of corporate life as a rotten barrel filled with rotten apples, paralyzed by male terror of women who have the effrontery to work. (City-wide) (Ella Taylor) SOUND AND VISION: HOLLYWOOD SALUTES THEGRAffiMYS Impressive in its global reach and stylistic scope, the American Cinematheques lively, classy salute to the Grammys' 35th year does a whole lot more than pay homage to the statuette; it just may set an important example for broadening tee music biz's voting members' middle-of-the-road leanings. Some of the series highlights: in Dingo, Miles Davis (suitably enigmatic and taciturn in his first and last acting role) plays the mysterious and magisterial trumpeter Billy Cross, whose jet touches down for a moment in the middle of the Australian outback, long enough to let loose with a surreal jam session teat alters tee course of young John "Dingo Anderson's (Colin Friels) life as he journeys toward tee source. In Apocalypse Acmss the Sky, William Burroughs craggy voice introduces us to tee equally craggy Norte African hills within which tee master musicians of Jajouka cast their musical spell.

In a collage of interviews and text Paul Bowles, Brion Gystn and Burroughs wax rapturous about the narcoti- 46 LA WEEKLY FEBRUARY 19-FEBRUARY 25, 1993.