Santa's Mixed Bag of Celluloid

By RICHARD CORLISS, RICHARD SCHICKEL

Cheap thrills, giddy giggles, damaged goods

Hollywood, the shotgun marriage of art and industry, is never more schizophrenic than at Christmas. With its few "serious" movies (Yentl, Silkwood, Terms of Endearment), Tinseltown acts as pious as a tot on Santa's knee, straining to prove that it has been a model of decorum all year long, daring to ask for a big shiny Oscar. But with its "entertainment"pictures, Hollywood yearns to play Kriss Kringle, filling every Christmas stocking with a cheap thrill or a giddy giggle. So slapdash are these entertainments that the industry looks to be holding a year-end fire sale, with damaged goods peddled to the holiday crowds. Here and there one can find a pleasant or ambitious film, but none fills the Christmas stocking with delight. Moviegoers are advised to ask for a lump of coal.

D.C.CAB

A bunch of mean muthas break down doors, dismantle fire escapes, throw people off balconies--and these are the good guys. They are the drivers for the D.C. Cab Co. One black dude (Charlie Barnett) gets scared and screams, "I'm goin' to nigger heaven!" Then there's the amazing Mr. T, who drives a cab with gold grillework and gives inspirational speeches from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. "You've got animal magnetism!" shouts the wife of the fleet's owner (Max Gail), a hippie Viet vet who enforces discipline with his old Nam flamethrower. "You attract animals!"

Writer-Director Joel Schumacher attempts to make up in bustle what his movie lacks in wit, character, coherence. He also takes an unseemly pleasure in glorifying vigilante vengeance. Even that deadly serious one-man jury, Dirty Harry, is more amusing than this ramshackle vehicle, which ends up totaling itself.

--By Richard Corliss

THE MAN WHO LOVED WOMEN

The womanizer is a great subject for farce, and a challenging one for tragedy. What he is not is a suitable subject for sympathy. This film, which turns Franc,ois Truffaut's delicious 1977 Gallic souffle into singles' restaurant quiche, suffers centrally from that miscalculation. Producer-Director Blake Edwards, normally a gifted farceur ("10," S.O.B.), turned to a psychologist for help with this screenplay, with predictably shrinking effect on the picture's sense of fun. Edwards' wife Julie Andrews is the doctor who eventually succumbs to Burt Reynolds, essaying the title role. Robbed of his truest voice, that of a self-satirizing satyr, Reynolds goes cute, little-boyish and awful. Even the photography is grungy; it looks like blown-up 16-mm. But maybe that is numerologically appropriate to a movie that is mentally arrested at a comparable age.

--By Richard Schickel

THE KEEP

For many of today's talented directors, moviemaking means swathing a scarecrow story line in rapturous images. Michael Mann's The Keep is one such Museum Movie. It boasts some pictures as pretty as any to be seen on a gallery wall, and, in narrative terms, it is a mess.

Deep in the entrails of a Rumanian castle, a malefic beast has been stirring for a millennium. Now it is 1941, and a platoon of Nazis have let the evil genie out of his battlements. On the side of Good, sort of, are a frail Jewish scholar (the great English actor Ian McKellen, sporting an accent that sounds like south central Iowa) and a preternatural Watchman (Scott Glenn), whose eyes go quilted when he gets really mad. With all these adversaries crossing swords, neither the Nazis nor the narrative stands much of a chance.

Considering that most of the movie takes place in a stygian cave, The Keep looks gorgeous. Slow motion and pixilation enhance the spooky mood; a telephoto lens turns the castle into a pointillist magic mountain. It is cinematic balm when a fantasy movie pays informed tribute to the decorative arts. It is also, most likely, box-office poison.

--R.C.

TWO OF A KIND

Did you love John Travolta in Moment by Moment? Did you swoon for Olivia Newton-John in Xanadu? Then you are a true connoisseur of incompetence, and you won't want to miss Two of a Kind. Five years ago, these two appealing stars teamed for the monster hit Grease. Now Writer-Director John Herzfeld has chosen a different 1978 hit to emulate and trash: Heaven Can Wait. God (the voice of Gene Hackman) sends a quartet of angels (led by Charles Durning) to earth to help a couple of mean-mouthed losers (guess who?). Nothing works: not the whimsy, not the melodrama, not even the food fight in the Palm Court of the Plaza Hotel. A stupefying shambles, Two of a Kind just noses out Staying Alive for Worst Picture of the Year.

--R.C.

TO BE OR NOT TO BE

When is a Mel Brooks film not a Mel Brooks film? When he produces but does not direct, when he stars but does not write. And perhaps when he is more interested in paying tribute than in parody. To Be or Not to Be is a remarkably faithful adaptation of Ernst Lubitsch's 1942 comedy about a troupe of ungood actors asked to take parts in a real-life espionage plot set in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. Lubitsch was contrasting the egocentricity and generosity of show people with the boorishness of their oppressors, representatives of a politics that monstrously parodied their values in the swollen street theater that was the public face of Nazism.

The situations of the original serve Adapters Thomas Meehan and Ronny Graham well, and if Director Alan Johnson is no Lubitsch, he could well reply, "Who is?" Brooks and Anne Bancroft play the old Jack Benny and Carole Lombard roles with harder edges and softer centers than their predecessors did--a criticism that could be applied to the entire enterprise. Yet the basic story remains surprisingly sturdy and entertaining in the retelling.

--R.S. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.