LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 64

1FILM CALENDAI ns PICK OF Michael Parks gives a fine cameo as a rustic recluse. Even so, Niagara Niagara never quite reaches that spiritual velocity which would make us understand these lovers from the inside their torment, their hidden motives, even their conscious intentions, remain as opaque at the end as they were at the beginning. (Beverly Center Cineplex, Royal) EX. Feeney) MR. NICE GUY Disappointing, though not bitterly, Mr.

Nice Guy is the first Jackie Chan picture to be filmed entirely in English and the superstar's seventh with his former schoolmate, Hong Kong mainstay Samo Hung. The duo's previous collaborations Project Meals on Wheels, Dragons Forever, more) are fine, funny movies that straddle the cultural chasm between English and Chinese comedy by way of a weirdly disarming charm and head-spinning martial-arts choreography. Mr. Nice Guydelivers on the latter, with Chan sublimely kicking asses in a van, on a horse-drawn carriage and throughout a funhouse construction site. Sadly, though, Mr.

Nice Guy's story of Chan as a TV chef in Australia who's caught up in a drug-sparked gang war doesn't translate. You could lay the blame on a desperately limp script by Chan regular Edward Tang Drunken Master II, Police Story, both Armor of God movies, flat supporting performances from a largely Australian cast or simply on the loss of rhythm and flavor that comes with an imperfect command of a new language. (Citywide) (Hazel-Dawn Dumpert) POST COITUM There are moments during Brigitte RoGan's new film when the urge to throw your hands over your eyes is overpowering not necessarily a bad thing for a film about crazy love. The story of a 40-year-old book editor who falls for a man nearly half her age, Post Coitum begins with a woman's happily-ever-after (wonderful husband, two great kids, beautiful home, ANTONIO GAUDI Japanese filmmaker Hiroshi Teshigahara Woman in the Dunes) turns his camera to the works of Spanish architect Antonio Gaudf. The film is virtually wordless, accompanied only by Toru Takemitsu's atmospheric score, some natural sound and a brief interview with Gaudfs assistant.

who tells us that Gaudf fasted for 15 days (like Jesus before preaching the to 'purify his sins of frivolity' prior to designing the intricately sculpted fagade to his mind-blowing Temple of Expiation in Barcelona. It's obvious that Teshigahara is totally gone on these buildings, and with good reason they are astounding swirls of dreams made tangible. part gingerbread castle, part fevered religious vision, part gorgeous gothic beast. Teshigahara is the ultimate tour guide, highlighting details and placing them in context, all with quiet admiration. He lets the buildings speak for themselves, stepping aside to let us gaze in slack-jawed amazement.

(Nuarf March 21-22, noon) (Hazel-Dawn Dumped) CHAIRMAN OF THE BOARD Fart jokes. Carrot Top in drag. Gags recycled from every bad SM-alumni film. Zero laughs. Courtney Thorne-Smith, Larry Miller and Raquel Welch apparently working off some past-life bad karma, and in visible pain.

In the words of Annie Lennox and Nancy Kerrigan: "Why?" (Still at several theaters, unfortunately) Ernest Hardy) FIREWORKS See Film feature. NIAGARA NIAGARA Robin Tunney and Henry Thomas are a pair of alienated upstate New Yorkers who meet shoplifting and head north. She's rich and lonely, hes poor and pathologically shy. She suffers from a tangle of neural disorders, among them a form of Tourettes Syndrome that makes her spout wild, bitterly honest invective whenever she's the least bit frustrated, which is often. He is the only person she's met who can take her explosions in stride.

Pretty soon they're in trouble with the law. Writer Matthew Weiss and director Bob Gosse follow their romantic trajectory across the famous falls to safety or is that over the falls toward doom? and avoid the more obvious 'lovers on the lam' cliches. Tunney is wonderful at giving us this woman's perilously balanced psychological state. Thomas is a strong, subtle reactor for her to spark off of; It's a rare American movie that has the courage to be pitiless, but director John McNaughton and writer Stephen Peters have done right by the land of the free with Wild Things. This is a film that takes off at a mad tilt and whose flight path climbs a fast corkscrew.

Matt Dillon is a guidance counselor at a plush Florida high school who's at the mercy of his good looks. One of his wealthier students (Denise Richards, of Starship Troopers) Is out to seduce him. When he rebuffs her or does he? he wakes up at the center of a hellacious courtroom drama. (The courtroom is merely a detour the real staging areas of this movie are the Everglades, both literal and psychological.) To say more about the twists in this story would be to give away too much. Suffice it to say that Neve Campbell is the witchy, vulnerable nymphet from the wrong side of the tracks who becomes Dillon's other nemesis.

(Or is she? Between them, Campbell and Richards are a two-person swimsuit issue on the hoof, and through them McNaughton spoofs a sleazy wealth of male sex fantasies.) Bill Murray, in a fake neck brace, plays the teacher's lawyer. Kevin Bacon is the detective who's convinced Dillon is guilty. Daphne Rubin-Vega the sidekick who thinks he's innocent. Theresa Russell (dangerously over the top, but rightly so) is the ballistic mom who had an affair with Dillon herself some time back, or is still having one. Just when you think you know what the setup is, Peters and McNaughton pull back a sliding panel in the plot and presto! everybody in sight proves to have motives within motives.

In the universe of Wild Things, innocence is a particularly lethal demon if it doesn't get you killed, it becomes too expensive to hang on to. To play this theme for such delicious, wicked laughs is a mark of true imaginative intelligence. (Citywide) F.X. Feeney We also recommend: Afterglow; The Apostle; As Good as ft Gets; The Big Lebowski; Boogie Nights; The Borrowers; Colors Straight Up; Fireworks; Four Days in September; The Full Monty; Good Will Hunting; Kundun; L.A. Confidential; Live Flesh; Love and Death on Long Island; Ma Vie en Rose (My Life in Pink); Men With Guns; Moon Over Broadway; Post Coitum; The Sweet Hereafter; Ulees Gold; Waco; The Rules of Engagement; Wag the Dog.

with an attention to emotional nuance that seems particularly French, Post Coitum understands the violence of female eroticism as few films do. (Left alone in bed, Diane howls like an animal.) There's something fiercely unapologetic about Rouan's portrait of this woman unbound by her own sexuality, and something undeniably exhilarating (Music Hall, NuWilshire, Town Center 5) (Manohla Dargis) PRIMARY COLORS See Film feature. A RAT'S TALE Marionettes from the German puppet theater Augsberger Puppenkiste star in this ambitious but wobbly family film. Monty, an artist among sewer rats, meets and falls hard for classy uptown girl Isabella, and naturally her rich-rat parents are furious. Alas, their thwarted love takes a back seat to the exterminating habits of a real estate lug called Dollart, who looks like a cross between Boss Hogg and Larry Stooge and has an arsenal of rat poison aimed at Monty and friends.

Based on the award-winning children's book, A Rat's Tale has a lot of charming aspects: the teen-rat romance and characters like Jean Paul, a Creole "canalligator" with a voice like Barry White, are just clever or trippy enough to work. Far too much is going on at once, however, including a few snappy but out-of-place CGI effects and live-action sequences which, despite game human support like Lauren Hutton and Beverly D'Angelo, feel like they were plucked out of another movie. All this might not even amount to much in the face of an unfortunate truth: Today's tech-sawy kids, just like a few at the preview screening, are likely going to fidget if they see strings attached. (Selected theaters) (Nicole Campos) WIDE AWAKE Joshua (Joseph Cross) is a parochial-school boy, 10 years of age, who has a question (Is Grandpa all which he would like to put to God following the death of his beloved grandfather (Robert Loggia). None of the parents, nuns or priests in view (Denis Leary, Dana Delaney, Rosie O'Donnell, Dan Lauria) offers a reliable pipeline to the Creator, and this causes Joshua to precociously question God's existence.

The dilemma is interesting, Loggia's performance in the flashbacks is warm and genuine indeed, everybody gives a good performance but writer-director M. Night Shyamalan never makes the story feel truthful at a gut level. He deals in readymade characters, easy miracles. In life (speaking as an action-decorated veteran of Catholic schools), the big question that afflicts you pre-puberty is less 'Does God exist?" than "Did I do something wrong?" For a 10-year-old believer to dispute God's existence requires an angry disturbance deeper than the death of a loved one you would have to feel betrayed by God's foremost ambassadors, your parents, to throw such a rock at heaven. Here, all the relationships are sweet and solid and the affirmations that resolve Joshua's quest, when they arrive, feel sentimental as hell.

(Selected theaters) (F.X. Feeney) Reviews by Greg Burk, Nicole Campos, Manohla Dargis, Hazel-Dawn Dumpert F.X. Feeney, Ernest Hardy, Paul Malcolm, Ella Taylor and Chuck Wilson. AFTERGLOW Alan Rudolph's new film is aptly named The feelings and images evoked by the word afterglow love, loss, desire, heady abandon, regret describe the spiritual wilderness being explored and settled by the four central characters. Two couples one middle-aged (Nick Nolte and Julie Christie), one young (Jonny Lee Miller and Lara Flynn Boyle), engage, by a luxurious coincidence, in crisscrossing affairs.

This was roughly the plot of One Night Stand a movie I enjoyed, though Rudolph's story flies without the tear-provoking safety net of a dying character. These folks are engaged in trying to live, a more demand- high-profile career a post-card clich6), then proceeds to turn it upside down and inside out. When Diane (Rouan herself) meets Emilio (Boris Terral, a petulant beauty), she doesn't simply fall for the callow engineer, she tumbles. Initially, there's a giddy lightness to the illicit affair, to the couples' hot afternoon sex, even Diane's petty lies to her family. But it's giddiness with an edge: Diane isn't just crazy about Emilio, she's crazed by him.

And, when he finally breaks off the affair with a cruel casualness, that craziness nearly swallows her up whole. Loosely directed. 64 LA WEEKLY MARCH 20 26. 1998.