Evening Standard from London, Greater London, England • 32

I i AM JlL 32 THURSDAY 17 NOVEMBER V' STANDARD THURSDAY 17 NOVEMBER 1988 33 appeal ADVANCED maths and income tax: who in their senses would choose to make films about these two turn-offs? Yet two new movies from America and Japan prove that if handled with flair and confidence such unlikely starters can end up entertainment winners STAND AND DELIVER (Cert 15: 103 mins) directed by Ramon Menendez is set in the sort of Los Angeles high school that usually only catches eye for the numbers of muggers and crack dealers it graduates on to the streets But this achievement is to focus for once not on the slaying and dealing but on the teaching It makes for an experience both totally absorbing and finally moving Based on a true case about a Bolivian immigrant Jaime Escalante who gave up a rosy and well-paid future in computers to interact with some for less predictable hardware called kids A maths teacher Escalante used (and still uses) his gift for turning lessons into a sort of to get to places in minds that other pedagogues reach only rarely By cunning patter and macho challenges he draws his largely Hispanic class of teenagers into his He dons a short-order cap and apron and takes a kitchen cleaver to cooking apples in order to demonstrate edible fractions to the class He leads the co-eds on to study algebra by inventing a proposition involving gigolos and their girlfriends where equals a bisexual deviant in the formula Finally he gets them sitting advanced papers in andthey do so well that the educa- tional bureaucrats think cheated and suspicions of racial discrimination rear their marking pens A mins) Itami is and tax played eyes like the -the Tokyo I never books ALEXANDER WALKER FRANCIS Ford much tooted TUCKER (Cert mins) opens with a 1948 advertising short for Man and His In other words for Preston Tucker and his wonder motor-car a streamlined torpedo with luggage space where the engine usually is pop-out safety glass in case of crashes seat belts and a third headlamp like a swivelling eye that turns with the wheels The tone of the promo film is all upbeat cheeriness and what the writer Thomas Hine recently called luxury at the price a family can afford Bold colours blaring soundtrack boastful self-assurance So for we think so slick and wait for film to begin It This is film Class conscious: Edward James Olmos Tucker is an undisguised euL -Ameriean-innovatormuch like to an ids Tearaways IL- i' 4 4 4 I S' V- V- JV- w--V- 'i 'V 1 fK i-' a-f- V-t-V Si- 'V 1 Hi A VVl'i W'M-: -LV 7 -o toSk --T tr-fc ms pi Motorised maverick who runs out of road: Jeff Bridges as Tucker looks nothing behind them Move at a lick it certainly does: but its trajectory is all ups and downs from peak to peak crisis to crisis hoopla to show-down trial to acquittal big parade to defeated but undaunted fade-out Only the essentials of an over-simplified story are gasped out by characters rushing in and out of it like telegraph messenger boys they wear three piece suits smoke cigars and sit at boardroom tables The good guys have stains on their overalls Tucker is forever being plucked from disaster by assorted nicks of time One moment vainly pleading for fair play (and a supply of steel) from a senator (Lloyd Bridges) in the pockets of the Detroit magnates The brush-off he gets lasts all the time it takes for the venal VIP to walk from his palatial office to his waiting limousine but the best sequence showing Coppola can still orchestrate this kind of on the scene and recalling Robert Duvall striding through the Vietnam car- nage in Apocalypse Now relishing smell of napalm in the But the next moment Tucker is on top again doing a midnight deal with a spooky Howard Hughes (Dean Stock-well badly recorded by a soundtrack that at times renders the dialogue all but incomprehensible) And so it goes One set-piece after another stuffed with period artefacts as well as 46 of the 50 Tucker automobiles that got off the assembly line before bankruptcy banished the dream and illness killed the man an easy-to-look-at designer TAXING WOMAN (Cert 18: 127 written and directed by Juzo a docu -drama about the thousand one methods of torture that the and one woman in particular by Nobuko Miyamoto with twin employ to separate cheats from the worker bees In hive dreamed that auditing the would develop the thrill of the chase As a rehearsal for the grand inquisition our heroine sows panic among the little people who fiddle the take she nails dishonest restaurateurs by squinting sideways at other people's hills marks up the slot-machine money in amusement arcades to detect the owners siphoning off the profit invigilates the occupancy of the car parks in "love and compares them with the mis-reported numbers between the sheets in the bedrooms Then she goes after her biggest a tax evader (Tsutomu Yamak-azi) squirrelled his billions away so tenaciously that it takes a dawn raid on the scale of a coup d'etat to uncover the loot Some scenes are hilarious Like the local A1 Capone barging into the tax offices to cow the auditors with menaces hollered through a bull-horn but like Capone getting caught on a technical triviality And some of the techniques revealed are impressively Oriental in their thorough ness Many an HM Inspector of Taxes here must have put his foot-in the door Fewer bet were issued with an industrial boot in case the client launched a toe-capping counter-attack IGUARANTEED DELIVERY WITHIN 14 Having to sit your finals all over again to prove your honesty doesn't seem the stuff that suspense is made from (except to the finalists) But take my word for it and the word of a bare pass-mark student in all papers with figures on it is a fascinating film acidly laconic wit is like a lifc mus test and we watch the students change hue with sympathy and satisfaction from tearaways to swots Everything about his impersonation of Escalante compels belief and admiration And Lou Diamond Phillips recently the screen's Ritchie Valens in the musical biopic La Bamba plays a Hispanic teenager who makes the transition from horn loser to over-achiever look the best kind of a boy can one that takes you further in life than the crack dealer at the street comer Ford Coppola An undisciplined Wunder kind who over-reached himself and instead of beating the system got buried by it It 'is the film-maker blowing a lament on his car horn in memory of the creative loner who made cars his way not Henry the way Coppola once looked set to make his own movies in his own factory the Zoe trope Studios and not in Hollywood's Both men found that the big boys of the industry got together and flattened them not without a fair bit of help from their own profligate ways As tale unfolds you read into it comeuppance too what gives the movie a deeper interest than simply a last hurrah to a vanishing breed of American maverick the backroom inventor Jeff Bridges play Tucker he personifies him One reason is given virtually nothing to play with Just a goofy grin equally applicable in triumph and adversity both of which you feel he meets the same way by taking the family out for a triple-scoop ice-cream treat style like the film commemorating him is that of a story-board artist turning life into instant wish-fulfilment All posture no depth: all good Dean Tavoularis and photographer Vittorio Storaro see to that And easy to like since nothing really gritty ever gets thrown in the works No darker thoughts ever foil across Preston sunny horizon Such as the ethics of adding another unnecessary model to the one domestic invention that has done more than any other to kill malm pollute and desecrate you buy a used car from this is the question since become the touchstone for integrity Knowing the statistics of death on the roads I even buy a new one DORIANO 3 PIECE SUITE £1999 SAVE OVER £500f i rf i Jr on the theme of the rogue cop (martial arts division) who abandons his badge to clean up some dirty work in the neighbourhood involving drug-dealing and political assassination Any excuse will serve a patriot and of course the exploitation of violence I am weary of the one and sated with the sight of such over-developed brutes parading themselves on the screen as if they are last bastion The only item of interest to distinguish Nico from other super-heroes personified by Stallone or Schwarzenegger is that Steven Seagal who plays him and at least does his own stunt work was at a Hollywood gym frequented by the president of Warner Bros to whom he acted as trainer and exerciser At last the casting couch has been re- placed by the rubbing bench fyi a ik 'f NICO (Cert 18: 99 mins) must have hit title trouble (or maybe box-office disappointment) after it opened in America as Above the Law But call it by whatever name you wish the game remains the same It's yet another variant ALL of us who pay our and some who will be thankful we have only our friendly neighbourhood tax inspector to deal with not the terrible variety of fiscal avenger who flourishes in Inland Revenue rt'i'V-iV t' ry- -lrtlWf Ai Making the facts fit COMFORT SUMPTUOUS ALL LEATHER MODERN SUITE CONTAINS CMHR FOAM £1899 SAVE OVER YOUNG man walked Into a television studio one day and told a story of how he had been a soldier in Northern Ireland It was a powerful story of disgrace and rejection of disgust at the actions of himself The great faction debate rumbles on brutamies of irar his story was Yesterday the top brass met to discuss the subject Charles Wood author of Tumbledown reflects on fact and faction in wail SIM vivrj was made Into a film It was absorbing and shocking and it was all lief He bad made the whole thing up Later the piece was repudiated INTEREST FREE CREDIT OPTION It? slon Is not that people might be misled into thinking something Is true when it Is not but that people might believe anything to be true once It has been lit recorded photographed and cut Into shape The amount of television that gone through this process Is minute If not nonexistent The rest is faction OR29-5 APR OVER 24 MONTHS Here's your chance to make a real saving on a real leather suite Over 1000 leather suites available from stock for delivery within 14 days and all at discount prices In fact we guarantee you can't buy your leather suite for less There's a wide range of styles and colours to choose from and you can even spread the cost with our superb Interest Free Credit Option der them into a form called a story about faction in plays or books But This Is done all the time Our book- on television the audience is larger shelves are full of such fictions our than anywhere else and apparently stages have carried the weight of more susceptible to being fooled klngsr captains statesmen and andnafipniafiHf SPECIAL FINANCE SCHEME by the television company respon-slble But I understand why It may have been true that he was a liar However It was also true that he was a storyteller of great ability who had something Important to say Because he had made It up did that make what he had to say any less Important? And in a sense he was telling the truth He had convinced himself and his audience of the truth of his story Out of his deception had come dramatic truth ENABLING YOU TO DECIDE ATA LATER DATE WHICH WAY OF FAYING SUITS YOUR BUDGET BEST their followers and still do We have never seriously objected to the representation of real historical figures In drama and literature OIM ALL LEATHER PURCHASES But television is faction It lives it The much vaunted of documentary Is a carefully constructed sham Television docu- UVILU OlUUllo ACICvUlVll tlUvIl If the Robert Lawrence portrayed by the actor Colin Firth In Tumbledown is disturbingly real It is not because he Is based on a real person saying the things that real person might have said It is because he convinces and he convinces because I know the character! have created better than I know the real Robert Lawrence I should I knew why I wanted him and how to get him But to factlonalise something mentaries are as much the product suggests a shady manipulative and of a director as television plays are untrustworthy practice It suggests the product of an author Material fkuf anil nnlmlh hfilM Kaam Is that truth and untruth have been ordered and arranged to elicit a reaction from an audience And we are all partners In this process families NORTHWEST-Manchester 061 274 4244 Oldham 061 627 0676 Chester 0244 390404 Warrington 0925 41 1 1 23 Rhosesmor- 0352 780854 Liverpool 051 708 6339 Preston 0772 704477 MIDLANDS Bilston 0902 45 1 30 Nottingham -0602 700024 Nuneaton -0203 371 557 -Derby-0332 365275 -Leicester-0533 537099 Saltley 021 326 7787-Tamworth 0827 286747 Rugby- 0788 541 1 28 LONDON SOUTH EAST-Abingdon 0235 28830 Enfield 01 805 8228 West Thurrock -0708 863565 -Charlton -01 305 2224-Beckton-01511 0148 Coiindale 01 200 4353 SOUTH SOUTH WEST- Pbole 0202 666390 Weston-Super-Mare 0934 635928 Swansea 0792 48573 YORKSHIRE Leeds 0532 565738 Sheffield 0742 722247 Barnsley 0226 731508 Wakefield 0924 387177 Rotherham 0709 780078 Ybrk 0904 692707 Bradford 0274 393399 NORTH EAST-Gateshead 091 482 6673 Hartlepool 0429 860601 grafted together to delude an audl-us wno write And those of ns who ence- On television faction is reck- do so for television are potentially oned to be particularly dangerous Mgger liars than most Wtldl The Monoded Mutineer was cri- PfrinfT tor a wedding relatives manipulate facts to suit the truth ticised tor purporting to be a his- to a disaster have a know we are trying to portray As far as torlcal document when It was ledge of the roles expected of them I concerned this Is Just as It never Intended to be anything of television and behave accord-should be Facts are facts but they the kind My own television play pese days we are aU actors depend on the use you wish to put Tumbledown came in for similar wben the red light of the TV cam- tnem to To fictionalise something treatment earlier this year before coraes on means to take known facts and ren- it was even seen No one gets upset The amazing thing about televi- EjEPLTIttlATE ROOMSERGE The Wagner the Churchill even the Robert Lawrence you see before you may utter the carefully researched and avowed statements his precursor Invented But ultimately he will stand or fall on whether he Is truthful And that depends on how well he has been written Or Jn fact created UccnMo Croon Broker Written quounons ateitoble on request from ELS Thames House Proscut RowLSl Helene Merseyside WAK) 3XB Typcal eianvie Cutli Ftm £600 OeooM £60 24 monthly payment of E29 13 Tout Crede Puce £795 12 IVo APR 29 5 fnteresi Free Credit on an purchases over C300 Hyou opr to sent ttie egreemeie welim the first 6 months you will be obliged to pay more Itianttie cash once tAgamsi once ol Hems sold seoaraieN 'SutMcttoawilafciMy Fact versus taction: Actor Colin Firth left and Falklands hero Lt Robert Lawrence during the aiming of the BBC drama Tumbledown written by Charles Wood 3 WMF.