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Show 'Cat's Eye' winks at flaws; 'Rose' asks, 'What is real?' AClassic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only Movie review by Robin Moench 2Cat's Eye Stephen King's spiffy little horror trilogy borrows feel and format from the old "Twilight Zone" television series and links its scenarios by means of a cat and a small girl. But even with these props it often leaves the viewer scrambling for answers to questions that seem to be thrown in more for effect than a stronger story line. Devotees of the King genre will probably have less trouble with the movie than first-timers to his work. Inside jokes are abundant and often distracting, serving less to move the plot along than to wow his followers. The audience spends more time nudging one other and pointing out the trail of cute clues to past works (propped in bed a woman reads Pet Semetary; the car Christine flashes past a street corner; a King movie appears on a television screen) than being rapt in the unfolding mysteries. mys-teries. It's hard to be drawn into the suspense if you're constantly maneuvered man-euvered away from it. But the tales suffer from more than damage to their timing. Each seems to be an elaborate edifice built around a basic flaw. In the first, Alan King is the Mafia-style head of Quitters Incorporated, a stop-smoking stop-smoking organization that will not only encourage you to give up a bad habit, but will teach your wife to dance on an electrified grid if you fail ("First offense, your wife gets the juice," says the merciless King). To test the hotfoot cubicle, the cat is thrown in for a littler exercise. The best scene here shows the waves of incredulity and fear that pass over the face of James Woods as a new member who sits in the waiting room watching another man weep and fall apart before his eyes. By scene's end he has carefully tucked his cigarette away. But the problem with the story comes when you ask yourself what the godfather-like King is getting out of this. The Quitters truly quit and they're properly terrified, but the King character seems to be more of an intimidating humanitarian, sort of an EST mentor gone awry, than a businessman. The second story lines up another mob-type figure and his dumb henchman against the boss's wife's washed-up tennis-pro lover. Here the cat plays a hero's role, tripping up the baddies at the right moment. This is probably the best suspense offering of the trilogy, as the tennis pro is forced to take up another sport, circling the exterior of a downtown hotel on a five-inch ledge fraught with cyclonic winds and killer pigeons. The twist ending is satisfactory to everybody but the wife, who ends up in a bag, and her husband, who learns something about acrophobia. But still there's a problem: the pro makes it but he's as enraged as you would expect. What you don't expect is that he'd consider for a moment accepting the boss's bribe in exchange for freedom. But he worries over it for a while. Why? Tale number three has Drew Barrymore (the little girl from "E.T.") and the omnipresent cat confronting the nasty, toothy, grunting, red-eyed hobgoblin (a nifty Yoda-like creation) that lives in her bedroom wall. They vanquish the little beast, and the cat seems to find a permanent home. But here come the questionswhy ques-tionswhy do you see the cat on the parents' bed while the next moment it arrives on the chest of the child? Why can't two people break down a door behind which their daughter is screaming? And is the cat actually sucking the kid's breath at the end? But the biggest puzzle of the trilogy is the ghostly child (Barry-more) (Barry-more) who in each story calls to the cat from inside a mannequin. It's a real problem to the viewer all the way through. And it's never explained. But for all the frustrating loose threads, "Cat's Eye" has some decent intrigue. Lewis Teague directed it and it also features Kenneth McMillan, Robert Hays and Candy Clark. ViThe Purple Rose of Cairo Have you ever seen a dream walking? Cecilia (Mia Farrow) does, as the suave, pith-helmeted hero of her favorite escapist movie, "The Purple Rose of Cairo," strolls , off the screen into her drab life. It's the Depression and Cecilia works in a greasy spoon. She has a mean husband and an imagination filled with romantic Hollywood cliches of the way life should be. She's as dazzled by the movie's escapee, Tom Baxter (Jeff Daniels in a dual role), as he is touched by her sweetness and her plight. He refuses to return to the fluffy intrigue on the screen that is his only reality. Meanwhile his movie's other characters a testy baroness, a playgirl, a natty nightclub habitue-are habitue-are stalled onscreen, peevishly awaiting Baxter's return and the next step in the plot. Will Tom take his other-worldly innocence (he stumbles into a house with a red light and wonders to the girls' delight if they are a kind of club) and climb back through the moving picture's frame? Gil Shepherd (Daniels again), the actor who created Baxter, arrives on Cecilia's doorstep to see that he does. And he too falls for Cecilia's gentle charm as she ingenuously bolsters his already sturdy ego and fans his ambitions for his career. Rescued from an emotional Sahara, Cecilia now faces a plenitude of romance and a dilemma. Will she stick it out with Tom who, though everything a girl could want, has one drawback he isn't real or will she fall for the slick Gil? In the end, all the characters go back where they belong Tom reluctantly rendezvous with his movie comrades, Gil climbs on a plane for the West Coast (not entirely a cad, he appears to suffer at leaving Cecilia) and Cecilia resumes her seat in the theater, perhaps waiting for the wonderful and unexpected to repeat itself. We sense it won't, and this is where director Woody Allen's dark side shows itself some people find the movie's conclusion unforgivably sad. But Allen's fascination for his medium is joyously explored here too, as he reminds us there's a thin line between what we see and what we think we see. |