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Show by Rick Drouth Lonely guys, hit men and torrid young rebels f A Classic Recommended Good double-feature double-feature material Time-killer For masochists L only j 12 Angel Young schoolgirl Angel (Donna Wilkes) is asked out by the storky-looking boy in her class, and she tells him her mother doesn't allow her to date. If he only knew that she's a 14-year-old prostitute on the Sunset Strip! The movie is familiar stuff about the "innocent by day, hooker by night." Cliff Gorman is the sympathetic cop who wants to get her out of the strip, though it's hard to see why the hooker's life is so bad. Life along the vice district is depicted as rather cute peopled with street entertainers and old Hollywood Holly-wood types. The only spoiler is a bicepped psycho (John Diehl) who kills prostitutes. The plot combines sleazy violence with a cheap moral. It asks us to believe that Angel, abandoned by her parents, hooks to finance her way through a private school where she's an honor student. stu-dent. (Most of the school scenes are set, peculiarly, in the girls' shower room. ) Donna Wilkes is an awkward awk-ward actress, especially when she tries to get tough. The movie only escapes .total boredom because the supporting sup-porting actors are having so much campy fun, particulary Dick Shawn as a transvestite adorned with a feather boa, and Rory Calhoun as an old cowboy actor. When all these characters gather in one room, this becomes a really weird-looking weird-looking movie. At its ridiculous ridicu-lous best, "Angel" has a cidal gesture. He practices braking his motorcycle on the very edge of a platform over a sheer precipice. Daryl Hannah, as Tracey, is a cheerleader; she has a boyfriend (Adam Baldwin) who smugly looks forward to running his father's mill, and she occasionally frets a little that she's too good. ("I've never had an abortion; I've never even had the measles!") Hannah is good at the fleeting amounts of confusion or fear, but she doesn't show any building frustration that Johnny helps ignite. When he goes crazy, she just arbitrarily follows along. The picture's best contribution con-tribution is its raw energy and atmosphere, particularly when the two kids trash the high school at night, a foray that leads to love-making in the red glow of the furnace room. The erotic humidity in this segment is worth all the rest of "Reckless." chase scene with (a) the killer, disguised as a Hare Krishna, pursued by (b) Angel, blasting away on a huge pistol, followed by (c) cowboy Calhoun in his Custer outfit riding a motorcycle behind a burly Hell's Angel! The Lonely Guy Steve Martin plays a greeting-card writer in New York who gets dumped by his fickle girlfriend, whose affairs last about as long as a washer's dry cycle. He's now a Lonely Guy, as he learns from a veteran Lonely Guy (Charles Grodin) whose girlfriend girl-friend just ran away with the burglar who broke into her apartment. In the witty script from Ed Weinberger and Stan Daniels, Lonely Guys become a feverish sub-culture within the city, like gays in San Francisco. A whole industry furnishes products for them plants they can talk to; video cassettes of aquarium life they can stare at; and fake sweat to convince athletic-looking women they've been jogging. When Martin asks for a "single" at a fancy restaurant, restau-rant, an accusing spotlight falls on him. And the nearest high bridge is festooned with suicidal Lonely Guys jumping off every few minutes like suicidal pigeons. He even meets famous Lonely Guys-like Guys-like a certain ex-politician from Georgia. Martin finally writes a . book about the Lonely Lifestyle that becomes a national bestseller. He's got fame at last, but all he wants is the Lonely Gal that he keeps bumping into and then losing in the New York streets. (Judith Ivey plays the girl with unaffected niceness. ) Director Arthur Hiller directs the movie, which is styled somewhat like the early films from Woody Allen. The story is chock-full of one-liners, brief gags and little sketches. But Steve Martin clearly has a style here different from Allen's neuroticism it's loony hearts and flowers. And like the previous "Man With Two Brains," Martin plays it well and with more discipline than his erratic TV moods. Charles Grodin is a marvelous mar-velous Lonely Guy, introverted intro-verted and inert. Some of Martin's gags fall a little flat (why does he think appearances appear-ances by Merv Griffin are so funny?), but the Lonely Guy is also a very funny guy. Reckless Aidan Quinn is not the new James Dean. But "Reckless" director James Foley sure tries to make him look that way, by surrounding him with tokens of the youth-rebellion youth-rebellion movie. Minus its special sexual charge, the film may remind you of a dozen past movies. "Baby, It's You" was a better treatment of the basic plot-that plot-that is, a romance between a punk and the school's good girl. And even the weak "All the Right Moves" was better in its treatment of a similar setting a steel town where the kids are itching like crazy to escape. Quinn, as Johnny Rourke, rides a motorcycle, has a drunken steelworker father and a mother who deserted the family, and on school Career Day, writes on his class card that his life goal is "MORE!" Quinn can be emotionally torrid when he really has to be, but he has no real electricity. He's augmented by effects good lighting, throbbing rock music as he streaks down the highway, the suffocating gaunt smoky look of the steel mills. Most importantly, he gets a "Rebel-Without-a-Cause" sui- At the Holiday Village Cinemas: Footloose (Not yet rated) V-i Hot Dog Lassiter (Not yet rated) Uncommon Valor |