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Show hy Hick Ilrough " ; . ,. L. i Rooney (Kevin Dillon), caugnt in the act of a deliberate prank, shrinks in fright from the stern and unjust-disciplinarian, unjust-disciplinarian, Brother Constance (Jay Patterson), his English teacher at St. Basil's. "Heaven Help Us" is a Tri-Star release. Grim scenes of Cambodia and Catholicism appear this week Turk 182 The story is about "the little guy against City Hall," and it's familiar to a 10-year-old, but the freshness of several elements in the picture make it appealing. Timothy Hutton is the younger brother of a New York firefighter (Robert Urich) who was badly injured when he rushed out, during an off-duty hour, to rescue a little girl from a burning building. Since he was drinking in a bar beforehand, the city bureaucrats dub him a "drunk" and refuse him a disability pension. Hutton follows all the legal channels and hits a dead end on every one. (He's even personally repudiated by the mayor). Then he decides on a renegade tactic. He decorates the city with graffiti that refers to the mayor's corrupt administration and signs them "Turk 1B2." So far, it's a fairly routine premise. The appealing elements here are the "graffiti war" theme, plus the fact the mayor is the one who cuts his own throat. He likes to go in for big media events election propaganda splashed on a football-stadium football-stadium scoreboard, for instance-that instance-that are ideal opportunities for sabotage. He works overtime to provide large canvases dn which Turk 182 can publicly embarass him! It also helps that Robert Culp plays the mayor with a bristly charm, instead of the usual pompous approach. (For a more conventional villain, Peter Boyle is thuggish and dumb as the mayor's security man.) Timothy Hutton has a pattern now of portraying rebellious rectitude ("Taps," "Falcon and the Snowman") Snow-man") but here he's got a street-corner looseness to go along with his sincerity. He's a little like a shrimpy Stallone. Robert Urich, the former TV star, shows promise of becoming a good character actor, as the brash guy stewing in impotence. Leading lady Kim Cattrall doesn't have a chance to be more than decoration. , In particular, people who like this kind of "fighting back" story will enjoy "Turk" and can overlook the absurdities. (Hutton supposedly can't land a job, but shows enough expertise in his graffiti stunts to qualify as a technical Renaissance Man.) k A Classic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only Heaven Help Us "Heaven Help .Us" is a comedy about Catholic school daze, in 1965, as Pope Paul Visited New York and the Revolution brewed just ahead, but the laughs tend to choke a bit in your throat. The center of the story, St. Basil's school for boys, is a place where the teachers humiliate their students or bang their heads against the wall; boy-girl dances are preceded by fiery lectures on lust and priests patrol the dance floor to separate partners who are too close; and the kids are told they've got to stop the Commies, whose favorite sport is "killing Catholics." In this environment, new student Dunne (Andrew McCarthy) barely manages to survive, forging an alliance with the school's pudgy brain, Cesar, (Malcolm Danare) and its worst miscreant, Rooney (Kevin Dillon.) The gang plays hooky, tries to avoid the disciplinary paddle and attempts making out with girls. (On one date, Rooney parks his car over a bridge just as it separates for an oncoming boat.) These would look like the usual hijinks, but writer Charles Purpura and director Michael Dinner create such a grim atmosphere perhaps too grim the antics feel like desperate attempts to breathe in a dour world. . The orphaned Dunne has a home with his grandparents, who live for nothing else but that he become a priest. His little sister likes to play, dead with flowers strewn around her like a tiny Ophelia. His girlfriend cares for a retarded father. (In the role, Mary Stuart Masterson gives the film's best performance. She is a brusque, tender heroine. ) The movie strives for a little, complexity. Even the sadistic priest (played with devastating malice by Jay Patterson) feels a childlike awe as the Pope's motorcade passes by. But though the actors are uniformly uni-formly good most of the characters emerge as unlikable, except for the two young lovers. The cast is headed by two "name actors: John Heard as the new, liberal priest on the block and Donald Sutherland as the head of St. Basil. As for our resilient young heroes, it looks as if Heaven is the only help they'll get in this movie. The Killing Fields "Killing Fields" presents a terrifying picture of warfare, but the picture's central emotional relationship relation-ship is one of the casualties amid the smoke, shrapnel and tangled political poli-tical history. Sam Waterston plays New York Times correspondent Sydney Schan-berg, Schan-berg, presented here as an abrasive loud-mouthed reporter in 1970s Cambodia who aggravates the U.S. military and pushes his guide inter-; inter-; preter, Dith Pran, to get him scoops. When the country falls in 1975, Schanberg suggests (maybe with half a heart) that Pran can leave, but Pran loyally sticks with Schanberg. When the Communist Khmer Rouge takes over, Pran is sucked into the evacuation of citizens to the countryside and Schanberg is shipped ship-ped stateside. Director Roland Joffe creates some classic images of war the terror of random bombings; people losing limbs or being mashed into bloody smears; children crying and people scrambling in chaos. The evacuation (at the film's mid-point) is especially masterful. But the movie never explains the tie between the two men, which at worst looks like Schanberg as an obnoxious journalistic Lone Ranger and Pran as his forebearing Tonto. There's nothing in the film to show why Pran loves and respects the American. Conservatives have misread the film as a blanket statement that callous American meddling led to the genocide of the Khmer Rouge. The picture does believe that, to an extent, but it also compares the American misadventure in Southeast Asia to Schanberg's own mistreatment mistreat-ment of Pran, whom he kept in the combat zone in order to go after the news. At worst, we see the prisoner Dith Pran wandering through a bog of human bones, then we cut to New York, where Schanberg accepts a journalistic award, and in his acceptance speech implies that Pran's plight is caused by U.S. government policy. Schanberg looks like a jerk, albeit with shadings of guilt and compassion, compas-sion, and is played well by Waterston. Pran would almost look like a silly Gunga Din figure, if not for the humanity and dignity given him by Cambodian non-actor Dr. HaingS Ngor. And John Malkovich shines in the supporting cast as a scruffy photographer. V-i Amadeus The film begins promisingly as a handsome, lyrical study of cruel, inexplicable fate. But over its nearly three-hour length, it dissipates into a conflict between two familiar character charac-ter types. The aged composer Antonio Salieri (F. Murray Abraham) wallows wal-lows in a madhouse and recalls to a startled priest how he ruined the life of the young Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. His justification? He was defying God, who gave Salieri the lust to write music to the divine glory, but no skill. He only has enough talent to recognize genius in Mozart who is a foul-mouthed, froggy little lecher. Two sounds dominate this movie Mozart's soaring music and his obnoxious giggle. But for the premise of Peter Shaffer's story to work, we have to feel that Mozart is an often-loathsome character who creates beautiful music. Yet Mozart is rarely unlikable; he's a combination of two comfortable comfort-able old stereotypes the quirky genius burning himself out, and the rebellious lout with a decent heart. He's modestly aware of his crudities; when he mocks royal authority, the victim is always someone who's a fool or a pompous jerk. At his worst, Mozart humiliates his rival by taking a Salieri piece, the product of hours of labor, and making it 10 times better with a few minutes of improvisation. But later, Mozart redeems himself. After Saliere premieres an awful, bombastic bombas-tic opera, he asks an opinion of Mozart, who replies tactfully ("I never thought such music possible.") pos-sible.") As Mozart, Thomas Hulce reconciles recon-ciles the slob with the genius. He's a stammering ball of energy, and equally convincting later, when tortured by the death of his father. (Ironically, Hulce's biggest previous credit was as one of the "Animal House" slobs.) Director Milos Forman has created a beautiful picture, with sumptuous sets, music and lighting. The second half of Shaffer's story, though, bogs down into a straight recounting of Salieri's intrigues. In the supporting cast, Jeffrey Jones is fine as a vague, unintelligent King Franz Joseph and Elizabeth Berride, woefully miscast as Mrs. Mozart, acts like a high school girl in a time warp. But if there's any rationale for seeing "Amadeus," besides the music, it's F. Murray Abraham. He takes us from young man, seething with repressed frustration, to old, forgotten lunatic who smiles with a crazed sweetness and creakily charts the wreckage of his life. , |