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Show by Hick Hroiih IV.' . V, v ' i A ' vi'CHS 'V -- .... Xi . rvVL v v-Hto : v" Dr. Emilio Lizardo (John Lithgow, left) attempts to extract information from Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller, right) in the Shock-Tower. 'Amadeus' and 'Buckaroo' are early season disappointments A Classic Recommended , Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only The trouble is, when you throw in ideas recklessly, you can't spend enough time on the good ones. For every nice wry moment with Jeff Goldblum, as crony New Jersey, there's a dull scene with the President (Ronald Lacey) and his gaggle of advisors. Peter W eller is rather dull and flat as Buckaroo. More promising: Christopher Lloyd is evil alien John Bigboote (in alien makeup that made -him look like an undernourished pumpkin) and Ellen Barkin is lachrymose as heroine Penny Priddy. jerk, paintings him as an aging, desperate con man. ) Meanwhile, an old enemy is pursuing the salesmen. The younger guy falls f6r a woman (Jane Kaczmarek) and tries to reform his buddy. Arliss howard gives an awfully apathetic performance. Only two good gags: At a high-pressure sales seminar, the speaker motivates his students with an . electric, current wired to their seats. Later, when the salesmen's car- sinks in -a river, Leibman rises from the waters, venus-like, holding aloft his dollar-sign dollar-sign hood ornament. equally convincing 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. V-i The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai "Buckaroo Banzai" sounds like a name someone created by picking two pieces of paper at random out of a barrel. The whole movie seems that way, and it's a shame the heap of pulp-magazine ideas don't always work. Buckaroo is an adventurer and comic book hero. -Like Doc Savage, he has a gang of buddies gathered around him. Not like Doc Savage, they all play in a rock band called the Hong Kong Cavaliers. Buckaroo also gets his jollies by crashing into the Eighth Dimension using a device called the Oscillation Overthruster. This brings him to the attention of the evil Red Lectroids, of Planet 10, who escaped from their prison in the Eighth Dimension 35 years ago and invaded New Jersey. (They disguised disguis-ed this by making Orson Welles present it as a "fake" radio broadcast.) Meanwhile, the good Black Lectroids (who appear to Earthly eyes as Rastafarians) threaten threat-en they will bomb the Earth if Buckaroo doesn't stop the Reds. The villainous Red leader, Lord John W horfin, is inhabiting the body of Dr. Emilio Lizardo. (The good doctor went crazy after he tried to leap into the Eighth Dimension and only got his head stuck in the portal. ) John Lithgow is hilarious as Lizardo a wild-haired hulk who postures like Mussolini and occasionally occa-sionally spouts what sound like rock lyrics. Trouble is, he's not on screen enough. The method of Earl Mac Rauch and director W .D. Richter is to throw in every idea they can think of seashell spaceships; spacey, mellow acting; and odd one-liners ("We're not in the Eighth Dimensions. Dimen-sions. We're over New Jersey.") Then they dish it up like a hipper version of the old "Batman'' series that is, camp. A Soldier's Story "Soldier's Story" isn't a great picture, but it has some complexity and a batch of good performances. Howard Rollins plays an Army officer who arrives at a predominantly predom-inantly black military base in the late days of World War II to find out who shot a tough black sergeant. As Rollins interviews the soldiers, a portrait emerges of the Sarge as a man with a pathological hatred toward "bad niggers" that disgrace the race disguised self-disgust for his own inability to get ahead as a career army man. What emerges here is a complicated compli-cated examination about the struggle ' to define oneself and one's race. Rollins manages to stay interesting interest-ing in a role that requires him to be mainly a sounding board for the other characters. Other notable actors are Art Evans, as the sergeant's toady, Denzel Washington's Washing-ton's rebellious black, and Larry Riley as a simple wise country boy whose affability is interpreted as Uncle Tomming. The spine of the picture, though, is Adolph Caesar as the tough-as-nails Sgt. Waters, who looks like a black Jack Webb and finally collapses in emotional tatters of despair and bitterness. Now Showing At the Holiday Village Cinemas: Impulse 'Irreconcilable Differences lt Teachers Thief of Hearts (Not yet rated) lk 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 C.II.U.D. The title stands for Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers. They're the focus of this enjoyably junky monster movie. The creatures are subterranean bums who have been transformed by toxic substances stowed in the New York underground. And if the good guys don't succumb to the monsters, they might be victimized by the big-government types who don't want anyone to discover the illegal waste dump under the city. A la "Jaws," there are three heroes from varying backgrounds: a police captain (Christopher Curry), a photographer (John Heard) and the proprietor of a soup kitchen (a very scruffy Daniel Stern). All the actors have been coached to play at an hysterical level. The direction is fast and furious. And the tongue-in-cheek lines in the script aren't great, but they're quick. V-i Door to Door "Door to Door" is an abysmal comedy, with Ron Leibman as a crooked, vacuum-cleaner salesman who takes a younger man (Arliss Howard) under his wing. Most of the plot is concerned with their cons and "stings" on innocent Middle Americans who are mostly decent folk even though Leibman preaches, "Only the greedy are suckers." (Amazingly, Leibman and the script manage to give a few sympathetic moments to this sleazy |