Newsday (Suffolk Edition) du lieu suivant : Melville, New York • 110

0 t- Mu tr- B3 A Depicts 50s A IIIIMOVIEIREVIEWIS A CONFIDENTIAL (R) Curtis Hanson's adaptation of the James ENnoy best-seller is that rarest of modem HoVywood creations a crime drama with the brains sex appeal humor danger and action to satisfy al tastes The best film about Los Angeles since With Russefl Crowe Guy Pearce Kevin Spacey Kim Basinger Danny Devito 2:16 (Menu profanity sexuality At area theaters teer with And Rifkin is the compromised DA with an appetite for graft and young actors Best of ail are Spacey striking an impossible balance of smarminess and charm as Jack Vincennes a sharpdressing detective who moonlights as technical adviser for a TV show called of and DeVito a hilariously oily Sid Hudgens the reporter photographer and publisher for Hush Hush magazine Confidential) Hanson who toiled in low-budget horror films until breaking out with Hand That Rocks the works this complex material with the Burp-handedness of a magician Every scene is a link to all the others and though you can be confused by the sheer number of interrelationships you look back from the end at a trail that follows a perfectly logical progression The allusion is fair Just as used real estate scams of Los Angeles to enrich its film noir story uses police corruption and mob influ- The melodic romantic musical by Michael Stewart and Bob Merrill set in a traveling circus opens tonight at Airport Playhouse 218 Knickerbocker Ave Bohemia Tickets are 516-589-7688 Chris litre noy and Jennifer Bablak in PART 2 NEWSDAY FRIDAY SEPTEMBER 19 1097 of Make Believe By Jack Mathews STAFF WHITES JAMES ELLROY is to many people the densest toughest and smartest crime writer of our time and what may be his densest toughest and smartest novel is now a movie bearing the same distinction Curtis is a richly detailed intensely played cop drama that is as much a social commentary on post- Los Angeles as it is a pure butt-kicking entertainment is set in the early 1 1950s at a time when glamor still reigned despite the steady encroachment on its audience by television It was a period when corruptibility and the impulse for violence were rewarded skills of police recruits and when veteran cops often from the beat to the mob about a time when the LAPD was shifting from a frontier mentality to one modeled on the military and when the seeds of racism that would fuel riots 15 and 40 years later were being sown Ellroy's novel efficiently simplified and streamlined by Hanson and co-writer Brian Helgoland straddles that changeover in a story about two cops one all muscle and intentions the other all brains and big ambitions who are thrown into conflict by a murder case that stretches from an all-night diner where six bodies are found to City Hall where some of the skeletons are buried Hanson trying to avoid the distraction of star casting tapped Australian actors Russell Crowe Quick and the and Guy Pearce Queen of the to play the old-and new-breed cops respectively while filling out the rich array of supporting roles with Kevin Spacey Kim Basinger James Cromwell David Strathairn Danny DeVito and Ron Rifkin With the exception of Pearce who seems a touch too squeaky clean for his character the cast is a study in perfection Basinger is at her sultriest as Lynn Bracken a high-priced call girt with a Veronica Lake hairdo who becomes a pawn in the fight between detectives White (Crowe) and Exley (Pearce) Cromwell 'is' the Irish police captain with a brutal streak to match his brogue Strathairn is a suave racke Kevin Space? left And now The make me wretch Rcfency Entertainment PbotoKaiick Morton Ruisell Crewe rear and Guy Pearce and I suspect Last told us more about George Wolfe than about the real Jelly Roll Morton In general I wish the creators would acknowledge being by bo and so then make up names for their imagined characters Certainly Paul Simon could avoid the inevitable controversy around his much-anticipated new musical if he used fake names for characters inspired by the story of Salvador Agron the 16-year-old 1 street-gang leader who murdered two teenage boys in 1959 And given the mass hysteria against celebrity journalism today I bet the author of wishes he had called her something else Mamie? before getting a Broadway booking As the Diana entertainment industry revs up let us not forget its roots in Michael Jackson Woody -Allen Amy and Joey the Bobbitts the Menendez kids assorted pieces of Bill allegedly dirty laundry We gather in the media town square for our global-village versions of stonings beatifications and fact-based dramatizations When that French lawyer said his paparazzo client was the of theater last month he could not pretend to know that the curtain was just going up ence of the as the basis for pulp crime drama Mobster Mickey Cohen (Paul Guil-foyle) whose imprisonment opens the LA underworld to would-be succes-sors and his henchman Johnny Stom-panato (Paolo Seganti) were familiar figures to both cops and stars in a time when there was some mutual attraction Stampanato was the live-in lover stabbed to death by Lana daughter in 1958 and he and Turner (Brenda Bakke) show up together in better times for a very funny scene in LA's landmark Formosa Cafe with its authentically detailed production design and Dante elegantly moody cinematography also has tire romantic gloss of Los Angeles is a Elace where the real and the imagined ave historically overlapped and when filmmakers work that margin well they create their own magic Better get to the bookstore If is a hit be more Ellrpy to come He has 10 more nqrvels under option people I know watch the dramatizations The original cast had been so much more entertaining At least Simpson was famous How did this country justify its gavel-to-gavel national TV obsession with the William Kennedy Smith date-rape trial in pre-O antiquity 1991? America watched TV all day or restrained itself until the news highlights to hear people in business suits tell us which body crevices had sand in them and where the woman had bruises after an evening on the beach with a previously unknown nephew of Ted Kennedy The theater often bases stories on real people but unless there was a tape recorder in the room we must assume these are realify-inspired fictions from the point of view was a pop-sociology -dance on Eva Peron was a lot more about Terrence McNally than about Maria Callas i.