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Show by Rick Drough ' t ; , l ' " ' It V ,-. - - ' - Sf " t - ..... v- ' ' Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon dispel the myth that friends cannot be lovers and lovers cannot be friends in the romantic comedy "The Buddy System." Sticky sitcom leads the parade of movies to come in 1984 ( A Classic Recommended Good double-feature double-feature material Time-killer For masochists I only j The Buddy System When the cute widdle hero of "Buddy System" picks up Richard Dreyfuss' dog, the mutt snarls at him. That was our reaction, too. Scrawny, bespectacled young actor Wil Wheaton, as Tim, is pretty charmless, but you have to bear him to see the two adult stars transcend tran-scend the sticky sitcom plot. The kid tries to match up I1 his mother Emily, (Susan Sarandon) with Joe (Dreyfuss), a school bus driver. But he's so clumsy about it that the two adults get on each other's nerves immediately. Even when Joe and Emily soften up, there are reasons they don't quickly get into a romantic clinch. Joe is a hopeful novelist with a knack for gimmick inventions like a talking weight scale. He's also willing to serve the fickle needs of the neurotic girlfriend (Nancy Allen) who pops in and out of his life. Emily lives with her domineering mother (Jean Stapleton) and has been submissive ever since her last big risk turned into a mistake. (She fathered Tim out of a high-school pregnancy, while the father took a hike). The two stars make you believe their mental blocks are real, not just plot contrivances. con-trivances. He has a kind of prickly humour. She is affectionate, affec-tionate, but a little snitty to cover her insecurities, ing pair you'll hang in even when the picture starts to get overlong. Stapleton's rendition of the mother is also a gem so annoying you could shriek, but she still wins you over when the script gives her a streak of pathos in the fourth act. But Nancy Allen's dithery dame, forever boring Joe with her adventures adven-tures in group therapy, is dead weight. Wheaton is supposed to be charming because he's nosey, manipulative and swears a lot. But he's more like an argument for birth control. Dreyfuss and Sarandon form a good buddy system, and they're almost enough to get you through this sojourn in TV romance land. dency to over-act. But if they die in front of a Gestapo audience, they'll really die! Brooks is good when he punches out the occasional decent joke, but otherwise he's unremarkable. The real revelation here is Bancroft's comic savoir-faire. Charles Durning is also good as a squawking bumptious Nazi (even if director Alan Johnson John-son underlines the gag with a big close-up of his mouth ) . "To Be or Not To Be" also hits a dead-serious note, as Bancroft's homosexual dresser is threatened with deportation to the death camps. Otherwise, it is strong by virtue of following the plot (and copping the best lines) from its predecessor. V2TW0 of a Kind John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John are a good love team. The best-kept secret of the year, however, is that their picture is a Heaven-Hell Heaven-Hell fantasy. And it's not much of a musical. In fact, Oliver Reed as the Devil gets to sing before Olivia does. Travolta is an inventor of See, she doesn't have time for him now. And their folksy lesbian rommate (Cher) complicates things by bringing in a snooty beautician. These scenes are okay, but not in a political drama. Cher's spirited portrayal catches your eye, but Russell's quiet lover, while good, tends to disappear. Meryl Streep holds the picture pic-ture together, breaking away from her past refined suffering parts. As Karen, she's got a down-home easiness, spunk, and an unaffected moral concern. And she controls the emotional temperature of the picture - which tightens up again toward the end as Karen catches increasing doses of radiation (maybe not by accident). The picture is also affecting affect-ing when it shows Karen losing her homey circle of friends at the factory. (They want to keep their jobs, not ask annoying questions about safety). With a script that only goes limp in the middle, and Streep's strong portrayal, "Silkwood" is worth a viewing. y2 Silkwood A natural screen subject is bolstered by a strong performance per-formance from Meryl Streep. But the script oddly dissipates the impact of "Silkwood." It almost gives the impression that her struggle against unsafe nuclear-energy practices was hard because it disrupted disrup-ted her love life. The opening is an amiable, but foreboding look inside the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant. The employees don't practice safety drills; there's no time for them with their heavy production schedule. The company doctor doc-tor tells tour groups that a radiation dose is like sunburn. sun-burn. Karen Silkwood and the other workers chuckle when the P.R. folks call them "trained technicians" they're just locals in a company town. Karen joins the union and surreptitiously starts collecting collec-ting evidence on safety hazards, but the picture flattens flat-tens out into domestic drama (as director Mike Nichols bathes the home scenes in shadows that are a contrast with the well-lit workplace). Her lover, Drew (Kurt Russell), complains that Karen is now "two women." gimmicks (edible Punk glasses) who is so desperate to pay off a loan shark that he makes a clumsy attempt to hold up a bank. Newton-John Newton-John is the bank teller, also impoverished, who absconds with the money and lets Travolta get the blame. Unknown to them, they're also test cases being watched by a grumpy God who wants to destroy mankind. The human race will be saved if these two can redeem themselves, them-selves, so four angels (Charles Durning, Scatman Crothers, Beatrice Straight, Castulo Guerrua) try to nurture nur-ture a romance. And Reed, as Satan, tries to break it up. Despite the sneering they attract, the two stars have the chemistry to become one of the screen's better love teams. You can tell they're in love, even while they rub each other the wrong way. The creaky part comes when the Heavenly agents try to manipulate reality to save the love affair. In particular, a restaurant food fight is one 01 the messiest scenes around this season. "Two of a Kind" has two good reasons for watching it. To Be or Not To Be A restrained, non-smutty Mel Brooks is a relief, and also quite funny at times, but he's no replacement for Jack Benny, the star of the original 1941 classic "To Be or Not To Be." In the Brooks remake, he is the "world famous, in Poland" actor Joseph Bron- S" His alty is the Hamlet soliloquy, but he's been upset because the same young man in the audience (Tim Matheson) leaves the theater every night. When Bronski hears the Nazis have invaded Poland, he reflects, "This is bad, too!" He'll be even more upset when he finds that the young man is rendezvousing with liis wife Anna (Anne Bancroft) Ban-croft) when he's busy with Shakespeare. In the meantime, mean-time, the Bronski acting troupe turns to espionage to foil the schemes of a traitorous Polish professor (Jose Ferrer) and a bumbling bum-bling SS captain (Charles Durning). The actors are wonderfully qualified to be spies, except for their ten- |