The Miami Herald from Miami, Florida • 236

SATURDAY OCTOBER 19 1991 THE MIAMI HERALD INTERNATIONAL EDITION AT THE MOVIES Little Man Tate a small but enjoyable debut film MOVIE REVIEW LITTLE MAN TATE (PG) Ct: Jodie Foster Adam Hann-Byrd Dianne Wiest Harry Connick Jr Director: Jodie Foster Producer: Scott Rudin Peggy Rajski Screenwriter: Scott Frank Cinematographer: Mike Southon Music: Mark Isham An Orion Pictures release Running time: 99 minutes Vulgar language go all dreamy with parent-lust The battle here is to be between mother and surrogate not much but it is fun Adam and Foster have an easiness around one another on screen that makes you comfortable with them a swell mother and son Foster does rely a bit too much on stock scenes the film has the feeling of something compiled from existing films rather than the product of any real inspiration When Dede decides to throw a birthday party for Fred and sends him out with a stack of cute invitations to distribute among his friends you know coming: Fred who knows he have any friends thinks a bad idea And Fred is always right Except for a few times when quite sloppy Its most interesting character is not little Fred of course though Adam plays him well (he recalls the brigade of deadpan kids Woody Allen has drafted to play young Woody over the years) But mom Dede a single mother who scratches out a living as a waitress while harboring vague and barely justified ambitions of a performing career is the character with all the quirks After all in a profound sense Fred is father to the mom he knows so much more troubled by the ozone layer for instance Global warming Nuclear proliferation Dede whom Foster animates with the same kind of blue-collar swagger that she used in The Accused worries more about wise Little Man Tate would just be Rain Man upside-down It may well be true this image of the pre-tematurally gifted the child prodigies and preteen geniuses as sadeyed dreadfully solemn little creatures But no less a cliche And what Little Man Tate its other selling points notwithstanding is all about Key among those other selling points is that this is Jodie debut as a director She also plays mom opposite a little boy named Adam Hann-Byrd So Little Man Tate already bears a burden of great expectations To be fair Foster has done a creditable job: a smart borrower and she has a big big heart Little Man Tate is sentimental but never getting a dancing gig for the summer in Orlando and whether the hotel will have a pool She named her son Fred because never heard of a kid named Fred the true eccentric the one full of life also the character who faces the Big Conflict Early on established that Dede loves Fred dearly and vice versa so no dramatic help there this movie is crowded with hugs But Fred needs intellectual stimulation or so the head of a school for the gifted tells Dede As played by Dianne Wiest the childless Dr Jane Grierson (herself a former child prodigy) is the cardboard villain a collector of young brains: one look at test scores and her eyes BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic Fred Tate is 7 and already he can do many things He paints after the Cubist fashion and plays Mozart with a finesse that does honor to the composer In his college quantum physics class students crib from his notes For his birthday he wrote her an opera So why little Fred Tate happy? He has an ulcer for one thing he has read one too many dire headlines in USA Today lonely for another as he tells a solicitous counselor I want is someone to eat lunch with" More important Fred is unhappy because the script of Little Man Tate needs for him to be Other mother knows best Those are the best moments in this unassuming but much-hyped character play a nice small debut for Jodie Foster: no Dances With Wolves but that was no Citizen Kane either MOVIE CAPSULES Homicide's better half tops most whole movies Herald movie reviewers rate movies from zero to four stars Excellent VeryGood Good Worth Seeing Fair Below Average Poor Terrible 0 Worthless The reviewers are Herald movie critic BUI Cosford Juan Carlos Coto Christine Doien Beth Dunlop Leonard Pitts and Ryan Murphy Unless otherwise Indicated movies are playing at multiple POLICE PARTNERS: Joe Mantegna left with Tim Sullivan David Mamet makes a great cop drama By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic There are two movies inside David Homicide and one of them is the most riveting cop story ever seen The other is a drama about ethnic identity and a muddle When the second interrupts the first and you realize that Mamet has overreached and underwritten one of the great disappointments of this year at the movies And still half of Homicide is better than many of this whole movies Mamet as writer and director is such a distinctive talent that confronting his work after a long run of formula Hollywood pictures is like emerging from a cave and confronting the noonday sun: You blink and squint and marvel at the heat At his best Mamet necessarily blind you but he sure does focus your attention His hero in Homicide is a detective Bobby Gold in a large city that is apparently not New York (Chicago maybe) Bobby (played by Joe Mantegna) and his partner Tim Sullivan (William Macy) are hot on a case that the Feds have bungled (we see the bust gone awry in an opening sequence that is stunning and terrifying in its detail) Later back at the precinct house the usual after-action meeting goes badly (as they always seem to in the movies) but Mamet makes even this stock scene bristle with new life And then at the end of the scene a black police official calls Bobby Gold a as much violence in that simple verbal exchange as in the earlier gunplay and crisis-to-come is neatly foreshadowed In the middle of the drug case Bobby is sidetracked ordered to investigate the death of a member of a prominent Jewish family He sees nothing special but the family cries conspiracy stalking them they say At first MOVIE REVIEW HOMICIDE (R) Ct: Joe Mantegna William Macy Natalia Nogulich Ving Rhames Rebecca Pidgeon Vincent Guastaferro Director: David Mamet Producer: Michael Hausman Edward Pressman Screenwriter: David Mamet Cinematographer: Roger Deakins Music: Aleric Jans A Triumph Releasing Corporation release Running time: 102 minutes Vulgar language violence adult themes a nuisance Then maybe something to it after all And as Bobby investigates he seems to be investigating himself as well His identity as a Jew becomes the center of his life threatening to displace even Bob-by-the-cop a fascinating idea but a misplaced one and for a time the film threatens to grind to a halt Mamet apparently thought that his story needed more than the bangs and shrieks of a cop story but wrong: The culture of big-city police is no less Mamet territory than the turf of Glengary Glen Ross (high-pressure sales) or House of Games (con men) dialogue with its careful exaggerations and its forced meter has the cadence of prepared testimony and the accrued impact of many small blows landing without let-up Mamet is a verbal harrier he will exhaust you And he has a visual style to match voluptuous and gaunt by turns His movies are very very dark In Joe Mantegna Mamet has long had his ideal protagonist Mantegna knows how to say these stylized lines knows how to make them his own which is no small trick William Macy and in a supporting role Vincent Guastaferro are also from the Mamet stable Mantegna and Guastaferro particularly seem made for Mamet on screen blunt instruments hammering away They are excellent Homicide fails finally But its early success is so complete that the film is a must-see anyway It changes the rules for cop movies And when it is good it is brilliant ges star in this fantasy-comedy about a search for the Holy Grail in modern-day New York But more than that thanks to director Terry Gilliam Brazil who turns a clever story into an engrossing parable of life in New York If only he'd made it a little shorter Coto (violence vulgar language gore adult situations and humor) Frankie end Johnny (R) They're lovers of course but reluctant ones Michelle Pfeiffer and Al Pacino two high-gloss stars in low-wattage parts star as employees at a New York diner and not incidentally possessors of broken hearts Based on Terrence McNally's off-Broadway play (Frankie and Johnny in the Clair deLune and directed by Garry Marshall who leaves few cliches untried Ah but those performances: Pacino and Pfeiffer are wonderful- and the rest of the cast particularly Kate Nelligan as a randy waitress is excellent Great chemistry too Cosford (vulgar language sexual situations) Dd: The Final Nightmare (R) the sixth they say it's the last but since when has Freddy ever Stayed dead? Maybe this time when the wise-cracking old child-molester is killed off in 3-D his death scene literally in your face Cosford (vulgar language violence gore) With the Homeboy (R) Joseph Vazquez's scrappy and quite funny character play about four pals from the ghetto out for a night on the town in the Bronx (they take Manhattan too) The best thing about the picture is its refusal to sugarcoat either the characters or their circumstances At the end of this Friday night each of the homeboys may have learned something but each still has a lot to learn Cosford (considerable vulgar language brief nudity brief sexual situations) Hot Shot (PG) Call it Naked Top Gun a spoof of jingo movies with Charlie Sheen the hot-shot pilot Directed and co-written by Jim Abrahams who was part of the Airplane! and Naked Gun teams but it's nowhere near as funny as its predecessors Cosford (vulgar language) Late for Dinner (PG) What happens when hubby and brother-in-law return a tier 29 years away? They are very very late for dinner for one thing In this film by Richter (Buckaroo Banzai they are also very very dim It's an oddball knock-off of Ghost guaranteed to make cry and then make you irritated that you did Cosford (vulgar language) Large! (R) Network and Jungle Fever are spoofed unevenly at best by Michael Schultz (Car Wash Which Way Is Up?) in the story of an anchorman-wannabe (Terrence Carson) who stumbles into the job of his dreams Schultz has been around a long time but his movies still look like on-the-job training Cosford (vulgar language) Naked Gun 2'A: The Smell Of Fear (PG-13) The delightfully deadpan Leslie Nielsen is back as Lt Frank Drebin in a new sometimes hilarious but mostly tepid Police Squad caper Doien (violence sexual situations vulgar language brief nudity) Neceary Roughne (PG) Unnecessarily bland football comedy about a college team of misfits including an aging quarterback played by Quantum Leap's Scott Bakula Stay on the sidelines for this one Coto (vulgar language comic violence some adult humor) 101 Dalmatian (G) A reissue of the Disney classic in which villainous Cruella De Vil steals a gaggle of Dalmatians for the wonderful coats they make It's as fresh and funky as ever a pleasure for children and adults alike Dunlop ParadiM (PG-13) Believe it or not chemis try between Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith It's a tearjerker potion to be sure but this story about a marriage broken by the death of a child and how a little boy whose own family is a mess tries to put things right works its own small magic Based on the French film Le Grand Chemin Cosford (vulgar language brief nudity) Problem Child 3 (PG-13) Better than last year's Problem Child which saying much this sequel has bigger gags more creative direction and two brats instead of one John Ritter stars Michael Oliver and Ivyann Schwan play the terrors Coto (comic violence vulgar language bathroom humor sexual situation with teens in their underwear) Rambling Rote (R) Laura Dern stars as a coltish young woman whose sexuality brings chaos to the nice family who takes her in though interesting the film is slow and over-long Doien (nudity sexual situations vulgar language violence) Ricochet (R) Denzel Washington stars as a district attorney being framed in bizarre and violent fashion by a psycho played by John Lithgow The casting is odd the film is bloody and foolish and the best performance is a chiller by rap star Ice in a small supporting role Cosford (vulgar language nudity sexual situations considerable violence) Robin Hood: Prince ofThieve (PG-13) Kevin Costner wanders aimlessly through Sherwood Forest in this slow-to-get-started version of the legend of Robin Hood But the merry men are just that the action scenes are worth the wait and the supporting cast delivers Morgan Freeman Alan Rickman and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio also star Coto (Violence vulgar language brief nudity) Shattered (R) Tom Berenger and Greta Scacchi make steam in a vaguely Hitchcockian thriller about a man who wakes up from a near-fatal accident with amnesia and big trouble The plot makes no sense and the direction by Wolfgang Petersen (Das Boot is long on cliches including the old booming-surf-as-sexual-metaphor montage Cosford (vulgar language nudity sexual situations violence) Shout (PG-13) White boys in a small Texas town learn rock 'n' roll in the 1 950s Only trouble is John the teacher and there's no good rockin' in the soundtrack Nicely shot with OK acting Otherwise Shout is a gasp Coto (brief nudity vulgar language sexual situations violence) Suburban Commando (PG) (unrviwed): Wrestler Hulk Hogan takes a break from the ring in this action-adventure in which he plays a pursued intergalactic warrior forced down on our planet when his spaceship crashes Christopher Lloyd and Shefly Duvall take this cuddly little alien into their home Tha Super (R) Joe Pesci gets his first starring role after winning an Oscar and blows it He plays a slumlord sentenced to live in one of his own buildings meant to be a comedy but Pesci was much funnier in GoodFettas the drama Here in what appears to be a very bad toupee he merely hurries about spewing obscenities at his neighbors right up until he and becomes a caring landlord Atrocious Cosford (considerable vulgar language) The Taking of Bvrfy Hill (R) Ungainly mix of comedy (Matt Frewer plays a dimwitted cop) and melodrama (Ken Waht is a pro quarterback who's willing to run up the middle against crime) the plot is all about an attempt to rip off the entire small city city of Beverly Hills The performances are uniformly bad but the script is worse Pure junk Cosford (vulgar langauge violence) OPENING THIS WEEKEND Company Business (PG-13) (unreviewed): A spy swap goes awry in Berlin and aging spies Gene Hackman of the CIA and Mikhail Baryshnikov of the Soviet KGB find themselves on the run from their former employers Directed by Nicholas Meyer Cool as Ice (PG) (unreviewed): Rapper Vanilla Ice is a nice guy whose motorcycle breaks down in a small town and who proves to the townspeople that he's a hero Homicide (R) There are two movies in this film by David Mamet House of Games ThingsChange acop melodrama and an ethnic-identity drama Alas for Mamet who seems to want more it's the genre piece that's dead on and the extended story-within-a-story about a attempt to come to grips with his Jewishness that founders (especially in the muddled second half) Still Joe Mantegna is excellent as detective Bobby Gold on the trail of a murderous drug pusher And Mamet even when he fails is one of American cinema's singular talents Cosford (vulgar language violence adult themes) Liebettraum (R) (unreviewed): Present-day characters become involved in an unsolved 1953 murder in this erotic mystery starring Kevin Anderson and Kim Novak Written and directed by Michael Figges (Stormy Monday Internal Affairs) Little Man Tale (PG) He paints in the cubist fashion plays Mozart with 6lan aces quantum physics and wrote his mom an opera for her birthday and little Fred ate is all of 7 years old So why isn't he happy? Well lonely for one thing and the script requires him to be unhappy for another Get past its big selling point Little Man Tate marks the directing debut of Jodie Foster and this is a rather ordinary little comedydrama about a fractured family Charming though: As Fred Adam Hann-Byrd suggests a young Woody Allen (he even has an ulcer) As his mom Foster is as usual first-rate Cosford (vulgar language) Love Wilhoul Pity (R) (unreviewed): Eric Rochant writes and directs this saga of a young man without a job or much of a life to go with it until a beautiful young translator translates his existence into one he can be proud of In French with English subtitles Mala Noe he (U) (unreviewed): An off-beat love story about the relationship between a Mexican youth and a transient directed by Gus Van Sant Drugstore Cowboy My Own Private Idaho Also showing: Gu Van Sant' Diary a short documentary on gay life in Portland Ore My Own Private Idaho (R) It's a land of meta phor where a narcoleptic street kid (River Phoenix) and his hustler buddy (Keanu Reeves) roam in search of the comforts of family denied them long ago Gus Van Sant's darkly comic picture" is an and but affecting successor to Drugstore Cowboy he's one of the true hopes of the American independent film movement Cosford (vulgar language nudity sexual situations) Other People's Money (R) (unreviewed): Larry the Liquidator (Danny DeVito) thinks that the New England Wire Cable Co will be a financial pushover and easy to buy But he hasn't reckoned on old-fashioned company loyalty FIRST RUN Bingol (PG) The story of a runaway circus dog who makes some bad choices in his life including winding up in a roadside barbecue joint that makes hot dogs literally Not at all some Disney-fied excursion into the cutes Bingo is as funny as it is corny and smart enough to appeal to even jaded adults Not just for kids Honest Cosford (mild vulgar language) Boy the Hood (R) The script shows more ambition than ability in spots but overall this inner-city coming-of-age-tale is gripping gritty and realistic As a look at life in South Central Los Angeles Boyz walks the same turf Dennis Hopper's Colors tried to but much more convincingly Pitts (vulgar language nudity sexual situations violence) Child' Ply 3 (R) Chucky the murderous doll returns wreaking havoc in a military school Preposterous and dumb too it will leave you wanting to spend more time with Barbie and Ken Cosford (vulgar language violence) City Slicker (PG) Billy Crystal is funny for a while as a midlife dude on a find-yourself cattle drive with his pals (Daniel Stern Bruno Kirby) but then the film turns mawkish Billy saves a drowning calf and it's like Disney run amok Whatever happened to movies that were simply funny with no High Moral Purpose? Cosford (vulgar language) Cross My Heart (U) This charming French film about a boy whose friends take care of him after his mother's sudden death is anything but grim touching and tender it is as memorable as My Life as a Dog Doien Dead Again (R) Kenneth Branagh directs and stars in a dazzling thriller about a mystery woman and a detective whose lives are frighteningly intertwined with those of a long-dead pianist and her composer-husband who was executed for her murder Doien (violence vulgar language) Deceived (PG-13) Goldie Hawn and John Heard Star in a "thriller" full of unintentional laughs about an art restorer whose husband isn't all he seems to be Doien (violence vulgar language) Doc Hollywood (PG-13) Michael Fox as a doctor on his way to Beverly Hills to become a plastic surgeon to the stars waylaid instead in small-town South Carolina where they need a doctor real bad Strictly sitcom stuff but amiable and hard to hate Cosford (vulgar language nudity) The Doctor (PG-13) William Hurt is excellent as Dr Jack McKee a cardiac surgeon with a casual cynicism about his patients and his profession until he becomes a patient himself for throat cancer The transformation in his character is hardly unpredictable but no less riveting Elizabeth Perkins and Christine Lahti are Fine in supporting roles as a fellow patient and McKee's wife respectively A tearjerker of the first order Cosford (vulgar language adult themes) Double Impact (R) Belgian martial-arts hunk Jean-Claude Van Oamme returns playing twins in this gimmick-heavy turn on The Corsican Brothers set in modern-day Hong Kong Twice the Van-Damme half the fun Coto (violence profanity nudity gore) Eml Scared Stupid (PG-13) (unreviewed): Ernest Worrell (Jim Varney) lets loose a troll and gets help from a witch (EarthaKitt) to save his town The Fiher King (R) Robin Williams and Jeff Brid Idaho's street kids spark laughs tears MOVIE REVIEW MY OWN PRIVATE IDAHO (R) Cast: River Phoenix Keanu Reeves William Richer! James Russo Rodney Harvey Chiara Caselli Jessie Thomas Director: Gus Van Sant Jr Producer: Laurie Parker Screenwriter: Gus Van Sant Jr Cinematographer: Eric Alan Edwards John Campbell A Fine Line Features release Running lime: 105 minutes Vulgar language nudity sexual situations projects inside his head takes them across the Pacific Northwest and then to Italy and back and is just the thing They hit the road The road is funny the road is sweet the road is ineffably sad The of these two characters however momentary is beautifully drawn and involves believe it or not a long passage lifted rather abruptly from Shakespeare Henry IV Part I Even this borrowing works because Van Sant is no poseur When he wants to have fun he borrows well all My Own Private Idaho circles back upon itself revisits the best of its characters and then ends as it must no melodrama and lacks the living-on-the-edge electricity of Drugstore Cowboy But deeply affecting its portrait of life in the Portland tenderloin has the rasp of documentary and Phoenix Reeves and Richert are particularly good in their disparate roles Phoenix and Reeves at least are nouveau bratpackers (Richert is a 40-ish director) and when they kiss you can feel the shock zip through the audience But Van films gay by ideology so much as by circumstance and if My Own Private Idaho has a message a cry for the lost virtues of a functioning family These travelers want a destination worth the effort Their trip is long There are as always no guarantees By BILL COSFORD Herald Movie Critic My Own Private Idaho is a state of mind as much as a geographic place perhaps more so where a sensitive if not so bright narcoleptic street kid retreats when things going so well which in this movie by Gus Van Sant Jr I Drugstore Cowboy is nearly all the time Leave it to Van Sant to make a hero of a teen-age hustler whose response to moderate stress is to fall into a deep and troubled sleep The director is a Metaphor Man also a director of no small vision one of the true hopes of the American independent filmmaking movement Van Sant is neither as commercial as Spike Lee nor as cheerfully aloof as Jim Jarmusch Stranger Than Paradise Mystery Train he occupies his own private territory His concerns seem to be adolescent rootlessness familial collapse and sexual disaffection With the exception of Drugstore Cowboy which had a heterosexual veneer Van stories are about gay runaways also tender after a rough fashion directed with elan and possessed of career-high performances Look at Matt Dillon in Drugstore Cowboy for instance or River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in this film Each is a piece of acting of unexpected quality Phoenix plays the narcoleptic Mike a fugitive from a home so bro-'ken a wonder he got out alive Mike meets Scott (Reeves) on the streets of Portland Ore where part of a scuffling band of hustlers loosely allied with the local Fagin Bob (William Richert) who loves them all (or would love them all if he could afford them) The ringer in the gang is Scott whose father is the mayor of the city and who stands to inherit a fortune in just a few weeks when he turns 21 Mike and the rest of his pals are true creatures of these blighted boulevards often they barter sex for food Scott on the other hand is merely slumming and he has it in his mind that when rich his will make him some kind of hero He is correct In the meantime the boys need a reason to turn this into a road picture The search for mom whom Mike remembers only as a character in jumpy home movies he BANKRUPTCY SALE LIQUIDATION FLORIDA DOWNTOWN FT LAUDERDALE AREA 18 Buildings total 536800 square feet ShowroomOfficeWarehouse Ranging from 3546 sq ft to 58555 sq ft 24 ft ceilingsmezzaninedock high Sold individually or as package FOR INFORMATION CONTACT Sterling Management 1812 Sherman St Hollywood FL 33020 87-03864 Phone: (305) 929-9510 Please recycle this newspaper U4ijytL 0 0.