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Show (jpnnii(glki h m-i. nrum. 'o JlvMfcr-tJy 'a V A r; &t i 11 r ; r ? i . . I 1 I yw-??"gy? Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep match their skills against the tic-tac-toe-playing chicken at a Chinatown arcade in Paramount Pictures' "Falling in Love." The chicken always wins. Pre-Christmas films feature romance and super stunts Her fondest dream comes true when she enters a contest to write a story in the Ryan mold, and wins the first prize, a trip to Paris. Her reaction to the news is sheer joy. That's typical; the daffy, radiant spirit of the actors makes this film work. Once in Paris, Williams is hit by a car and wakes up convinced she is actually Rebecca Ryan, which sends her dashing off in pursuit of imagined plots and continental spies. Along the way she attaches herself to the befuddled son (Tom Conti) of the authoress who pens the Ryan novels. And her antics accidentally uncover a couple of real plots! Williams is wonderful, whether she's the dreamy housewife, or the glamorous spy whipping her scarf around like it were a lethal weapon. Tom Conti comes into the film relatively late, but his befuddled reactions to "Rebecca" . are just what the film needs. (At an elegant dinner party "Rebecca" says she can drink a group of fun-loving diplomats under the table. Next scene: Conti is sitting alone at a table in agonized embarassment, trying to ignore the table quaking beneath him.) Giancarlo Giannini, the extraordinary Italian actor, has a funny role (but one beneath his talents) as an accident-prone politician ensnared in Rebecca plots. And James Staley is quietly infuriating as Williams' husband, who smugly insists she should settle for the mundane. vast sea of New York, they keep bumping into each other as if they're magnetized. Frank (DeNiro) and Molly (Streep) are two commuters, both on Christmas shopping trips, who brush shoulders unknowingly three times before they finally notice each other after colliding in a book store. They keep colliding until curiosity turns to fascination and finally romance. After that, however, the rest of the plot seems dull and predictable they suffer the usual guilty spasms, have confrontations with their respective spouses, etc. There's even a dilemma out of a Thirties romance. While DeNiro prepares to leave for Texas, Streep races to him for one last good-bye. The intent, I suppose, was to iniuse the old formula with the delicate, naturalistic style of the two stars. And on occasion they are good. For instance, note DeNiro' s slow take when he recognizes Streep several months after their Christmas meeting. meet-ing. You can see the light flickering in his head. Streep and director Ulu Gosbard also have a quietly amusing scene with an old bit the woman trying to decide what clothes to wear. But most of the film's emotion comes less from the story than the nostalgic casting. (Streep and DeNiro were in "The Deer Hunter." The role of DeNiro' s buddy is played by Harvey Keitel; the two men were paired in the urban classics "Taxi Driver" and "Mean Streets.") Among the supporting cast, Jane Kaczmarek is good as DeNiro' s wife. But "Falling in Love" only holds your attention for about a third its length. A Classic Recommended Good double feature material Time-killer For masochists only 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 W orld War H 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. (How they survived is never explained). Through an accident she loses an energy ball, called the Omegahedon, which sustains life in the city. The ball rips into the dimension of outer space and goes "plop" into a bowl of dip on a picnic blanket next to Selena (Faye Dunaway), an aspiring sorceress. Supergirl follows, masquerading as Linda Lee, and meets Lois Lane's younger sister (Maureen Teefy) and Jimmy Olsen as played by Marc McClure (the character's fourth movie and he's still dull). With the Omegahedron, Selena's grades in Witchcraft 101 improve dramatically, though she doesn't know why. Selena is an inept witch. She improvises incantations that rhyme badly; she looks for spells in her cabalistic volumes like a housewife rummaging through recipe rec-ipe books; and when she slips a love potion to a dumb-hunk gardener (Hart Bochner) he accidentally falls for Supergirl. "I can make the sky rain coconuts with pin-point accuracy, but I can't control men's minds," she laments. ' Unlike the other "Super" adventures, adven-tures, this movie puts a lot of emphasis on wizardry, with flashing lights, colored clouds, evil whirlpools of fog, demons, and visits to extra-dimensional areas like the Phantom Zone. Some of this is done jokingly, because characters like Selena don't know what the hell they' re doing with all this magic. But in reality, it's the movie that doesn't know what it's doing. The story throws in so many puffs of smoke and laser beams, it doesn't make sense. When Selena faces Supergirl, it looks like a case of "My special-effects can beat up your special-effects." Helen Slater as Supergirl has an unforced Girl Scout likeability. Peter O'Toole, as her inner-space mentor, ably pretends his mundane lines are enchanting and his role (an Obi-Wan Kenobi spin-off) is fresh. On the lesser side, Dunaway hesitates to play the role with full-throated hokiness. Playing her cohorts, Brenda Vaccaro tries gamely but Peter Cook is wasted. Falling in Love So why are the two pedigree actors of the age, Meryl Streep and Robert DeNiro, in an ordinary, fanciful . romance? You can ask yourself that question during the dull stretches of "Falling in Love." Streep and DeNiro are good, but they can't compete with the odd romantic premise of this film. Two people fall in love because, in the V2Supergirl . "Supergirl" is not a very good picture, so why is it likeable? I think it's because the movie has a rampaging tackiness, and won't be stopped unless it's shot with a tranquilizer gun. Superman's cousin Kara (Helen Slater) lives in an inner-space city called Argo which houses a handful of surviving citizens of Krypton American Dreamer In "American Dreamer" JoBeth Williams plays a housewife who escapes from dull suburbia into the pulp novels of a spy heroine, Rebecca Ryan. |