Newsday (Suffolk Edition) from Melville, New York • 71

B3i Faux a Size matter is still a movie SODZILLA (PG-13) Nasty brutish and very veiy tall the rampaging GodzHIa does Manhattan and shows a lot more personality than most of the actors In this high-tech big-budget dramatically inept variation on the Japanese A-bomb monster movie classic With Matthew Broderick Maria PitWo Jean Reno Hank Azaria Arabella Fields Screenplay by Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich Directed by Roland Emmerich 2:19 (violence scary monsters) At area theaters in the original films you get the very standard-issue cast of incompetents and their interrelationships: The blustering Army colonel (Kevin Dunn) and his worshipful subordinate (Doug Savant of the mayor of New York (Michael Lemer) whose name is Ebert and who looks like film critic Roger and his beleagured aide (Lorry Goldman) the crazy-courageous TV cameraman (Hank Azaria) his ditsy wife Lucy (Arabella Fields) and her ditsy friend Audrey (Maria Pitillo) who get her boss sniveling TV anchor Charles Caiman (Harry Shearer) to give her a break As in the box-office-ruling the end of the world or even just a city is never given dramatic priority over a career advancement or love life The whiny conniving Audrey who along with Lucy is a kind of evolutionary throwback in the advancement of female film characters spots her old flame Nick Tatopoulos (Broderick) on a news report about the search for the mysterious lethal creature believed headed toward New York first and second concerns are how to get back with the guy she dumped and how to use the monster to get herself on the air You might think that imminent destruction would Robbins on canvas without having a story per Be like a Chagall or like a The text fragments Stravinsky incorporated are from traditional Russian folk songs and poems heard at Russian peasant weddings Stravinsky intended the music for dance he called it a The 1923 Paris premiere under the auspices of Ballets Russes was choreographed by Bronislava Njjinska the brilliant modernist choreographer and sister of the famed Vaslav Nyinsky Her version survives today in the repertory of quite a few companies but at the time Robbins was choreographing in the 1960s it had not been danced here for 30 years and he had never seen it Before the ABT commission came along Robbins had already been through several aborted attempts to create Noces" Even European opera house companies with their substantial state-supported budgets found the project daunting because it involved a substantial chorus unusual instrumentation and a stage large enough to place all the musical forces as well as the dancers on stage calls for six timpanists four grand pianos a chorus of at least 40 and soloists That easy to put together for a less-than-half-hour ABT managed to marshal the necessary resources and revived the ballet occasionally over the next two decades When New York City Ballet performs tomorrow as the center-piece of an all-Robbins gala program honoring the choreographer the stage will belong entirely to the dancers A few years ago Robbins discovered the Pokrovsky unusual recording of which brings it closer to its folk roots (It was sent to him by fellow choreographer Elliot Feld who as a young member of ABT danced in the 1965 premiere) He opted to use that version foregoing the live By John Anderson STAFF WHITER I IKE SKIRT lengths and exchange rates the his-torical mirrors the state of the world In 1954 when he first started tearing up 1 Tokyo he was the misbegotten spawn of the 9 atomic bomb a Japanese projection of an American nuclear threat and fear of Armageddon Twenty-odd movies and 40 years later when the makers of the latest first decided to bring him to New York the idea probably made sense symbolically: An unstoppable force of Japanese origin devastating an economically hobbled America Production time being what it is however the latest arrives in a world that quite jibe with its worldview economy is reeling The atomic threat is on the subcontinent And an ill-tempered creature rampaging through Manhattan and munching on taxi cabs might as well be a metaphor for Rudolph Giuliani No one of course is going to go Bee the hotly anticipated Bummer monster movie for so-cio-economic analysis They want thrills chills scaly green building-size lizards and valiant humanity They might also want a story that makes a modicum of sense and effects that insult the intelligence Like they say you have everything a shame really that directed by Roland Emmerich and starring Matthew Broderick is so lazy about what it does or even what it wants to do With every technological advantage at his disposal Emmerich has made a movie that is so emotionally uninvolving you help but scrutinize every minor detail most of which come up lacking It may be a strictly personal taste kind of thing but I prefer my enormous mutated Komodo dragons not to change their proportions to fit a particular scene First is the size of the Woolworth Building then hiding inside the subway system It make any sense And it destroys the illusion Unlike what Emmerich did in his sci-fi extravaganza pile on the effects but make the characters vaguely human in he makes the humans into paper cutouts and plays fast and loose with the visual aids Once Godzilla has made his presence felt tearing up a Japanese freighter and sending cartoon Japanese scurrying about as they did Photo tqr Centropoll Effects After decades of tearing up Tokyo the Japanese monster arrives to mash Manhattan Please see ROBBINS on Page B9 Symphony thing to do with a group of busy musicians with scattered professional lives who come together only five times a year and on Sunday during the opening move- funeral march it was dark and livid Lockington did not stint on the terror its mix of angry processional and fire-breathing sermon: The French horns preached furiously and the cellos and basses gave an eloquent shudder The long palate-clearing pause that Mahler demands and Lockington provided is a necessary respite after the first two movements and half an hour of white-knuckle music but it can also be deflating When Lockington hopped back onto the podium the orchestra had lost some of its edge and confidence and the third movement was less coiled and less exact The slackening was only temporary though and the performance sharpened again as Lockington and the Philharmonic arrived at the center of gravity: the Adagietto This one movement is among the easiest and most daunting music in the symphonic repertoire: easy because a conductor can almost get away with pressing standing back and letting the orchestra coast (dong the lulling stream of music difficult because to make it more than just pleasantly blurred orchestra and conduc- Please see PHILHARMONIC Page B9 be at least an afterthought but a lot going on The worried about re-election The worried about public opinion the military immediately destroys more of New York with its planes than Godzilla has with his tail worried about her husband and worried about keeping career on hold Only Nick Tatopoulos the mild-mannered single-minded scientist played by Broderick realizes that the motivations are nesting feeding and laying eggs Broderick gives the single real performance and rather charming as the gentle Nick sort of a post-silent era Harold Lloyd Jean Reno amusing as usual is confederate a French secret service agent trying to cover up the results of his Polynesian nuclear tests (aka Godzilla) and complaining about American coffee The rest are caricatures which would have been fine had the entirety of not been a catalog of tension-flattening illogic preposterous theater and Abbott and Costello-style slapstick While the picture is very careful to leave you with the sense that a sequel is not just possible but inevitable a more satisfying final shot would have been Roland Emmerich fleeing down a side street with a great black shadow in hot pursuit NEWSDAY TUESDAY MAY 19 1996.