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Show Hepburn, Nolte team in morbid, near-miss 'Grace Quigley' Video Views by Rick Brough and Robin Moench V2Grace Quigley If you're going to make "Grace Quigley" work, you require a firm, delicate balance between horror, humor and poignance. Consider the premise: Katharine Hepburn is an old lady who wants to die. Nick Nolte is a hit man with a bad case of the guilts, hired by Mrs. Quigley to bump her off. He has trouble swallowing the idea, but events start escalating when she gets the idea of using him as a "termination service" ser-vice" for all her friends. Before long, they've got a business going which attracts an eager clientele. And ironically, their "final catering" cater-ing" service holds the promise of giving meaning to the old lady's life, easing the killer's conscience and drawing both of them into a mother-son mother-son relationship. "Accept what you are a killer," says Mrs. Quigley sweetly, putting her boy to bed and tucking the blanket up to his chin. The look on Nolte's big mug confused con-fused but still babyishly accepting is hilarious and warmly morbid. Hepburn is perhaps the only person per-son who Could convince us and the killer to go along with the idea. Her tremulousness in the part, I'm afraid, may be partly real ill health, but it's not controlling her. She is molding it into the character of Mrs. Quigley and her fluttery temperament. tempera-ment. Nolte is captivating as someone who has a sensitive streak runnning straight through his hulking body. His killer may look threateningand threaten-ingand he does his job well but he sees a psychiatrist and his anguish about killing folks comes out in i' iii ii, i ii in many searches, father and son come face to face in the woods and the son saves his father's life. And here begins the heart of the tale. The father represents the pro-. gressive white world that is eating up the habitat of the Indians. And Tommy, who has embraced life in the forest, is part of the fragile species that is being wiped out. Boothe is fine as the parent who searches for a child and finds a man who is the leader of his people. Meg Foster plays the mother who glimpses glimp-ses her grown son beyond a window, visible but out of reach. The movie is directed by Charley Boorman's own father, who takes us from the simplicity of the forest into the traffic and violence of the big city. ci-ty. Events become a bit predictable here, as two rival forest clans tangle. The tale has the expected happy ending. But we know the native people peo-ple of the Amazon are fighting a battle bat-tle they can only lose. w : rm Gremlins ' ' i "Gremlins" is a light dark' tale , about a small-town boy (Zach Galligan) who gets a cuddly creature called a Mogwai as a Christmas gift. -The little fellow is adorable, and you only have to remember that (1 ) you shouldn't get him wet and (2) he ; can't eat after midnight. By accident ; or circumstance, the humans violate both rules, which means that (1 ) the Mogwai instantly multiply into more creatures and (2) they turn from teddy bears into mean two-legged lizards. - . The gremlins are a lovable, cackling lot, even while they cause , all manner of murder and destruction. destruc-tion. That teeter-totter of moods is really at the heart of the film's story, which certainly deals on the surface with the evil and good sides of the little creatures in the movie. While the gremlins are likably evil, the good Mogwai, named Gizmo is almost too cutesy-poo to be tolerated. The gremlins really are reflections of the worst in the people around them a rowdy pack of candy-gobbling, smoking, drinking imps who cut brake linings and blow their noses into fancy curtains. The small town has its two sides too. Behind the homey atmosphere of a small town at Yuletide, there are families suffering from unemployment unemploy-ment and a rich scroogess (Polly Holliday) dominating everyone's lives. The creatures dominate the "acting," but Galligan is good. Heroine Phoebe Cates has a weird monologue about why she hates .4 Christmas. Hoyt Axton, as the hero's i father, is a wacky inventor, always placidly baffled when his gadgets backfire. And the picture shows not only the imprint of producer Steven . Spielberg but of film buff-director Joe Dante. His picture has the .Vsplat" humor of the Warner Brothers cartoons of the 1940s. '; RB ii ' . A View to a Kill . Has James Bond met his match? We'll never know. The movie hints a lot (as do the ads) that we'll see a .confrontation between Bond and Grace Jones, as the lithe, sinewy villainess May Day, but it never comes. That blatant tease alone almost demotes "View" into the more routine class of Bond thriller. This time around, 007 is pitted against Zorin (Christopher Walken), the psychopathic product of old Nazi steroid experiments, who plans to corner , the microchip market by destroying Silicon Valley. Bond is besieged by perils from Siberia to Paris to San Francisco, and the picture continues the recent trend in the Bond series of concentrating on cliff-hangers that are less way-out but more gripping. For instance, Bond is trapped in an elevator with the building on fire all around him. The action is marred only by one sequence that goes for slapstick, with Bond, hanging from the ladder on a fire truck, being chased by a pack of Keystone-ish cops. It even sets up a great stunt (the fire truck leaps over an upraised bridge) and , then doesn't show the jump! Another major deficit is Tanya Roberts, who gives the poorest performance of any Bond heroine, though God knows little is required of them. Roger Moore is suavely familiar, though his voice is pitched so deep it sounds like it's coming from his shoelaces. Walken commits mayhem with a Method-actor snicker. It's fun to see Patrick MacNee (once John Steed of "The Avengers") spying again as a sidekick for Bond in the early scenes. The film doesn't make enough use of ; Grace Jones' kinky, coiled sensuality, except for a nice sexual reversaj ,she pulls on 007 in the bedroom.; rb ''qrr-K ' A Classic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only psychosomatic nosebleeds. They disappear when he starts bumping people off who want to go but return when Mrs. Quigley wants him to use "pest control" on a man who peeves her. The nosebleed becomes the emblem for a small group of people seeking peace and relief from the stains on their hands. Unfortunately, the tone of the film needs to hit its target consistently, and instead it makes a lot of fumbled stabs and you know how much that can hurt. In one bad, crass scene, a hooker bumps and grinds for a group of senior citizens. William Duell is good here, however, as a chinless old client nervously waiting for his demise like it was prom night. A dizzy diz-zy matron played by Elizabeth Wilson isn't as funny as you're sup- . posed to think, however. A "horror tour" to a nursing home looks like a bland sequence for a TV movie. The film rushes to a papered-over papered-over conclusion. But worst of all, it features a comic car chase with hearses! during which Hepburn, one of film's greatest actresses, is photographed flopping around "comically" in a back seat as her car swerves around corners. "Grace Quigley" would have served serv-ed everyone better if its comic touch struck more surely and swiftly. The bold comedy of its idea deserved as much. RB 2The Emerald Forest One day, near the Edge of the World where the Dead Place begins," Wanadi, chief of the Invisible People, Peo-ple, meets a Termite Child. If this sounds like the opening line of a fairy tale, that's because it is. "The Emerald Forest" is brimming with myth, memory and mysticism. : The Dead Place is the scar on the earth where an American engineer (Powers Boothe) is about to begin construction on a dam that will take. 10 years to finish. The Edge of the World is the boundary of the known1' universe of a tribe of Indians called the Invisible People. We are deep in the Rain Forest of the Amazon. Wanadi (Dira Paes) kidnaps the engineer's son, Tommy (Charley Boorman), to save him from civilization. As the boy vanishes into the forest, the camera rises to show its vastness and the small odds. of recovering him. Years later, the dam nears completion, com-pletion, and after the engineer's |