Rushes

BABY BOOM

Management Consultant J.C. Wiatt (Diane Keaton) and her investment banker beau (Harold Ramis) snuggle up for some robust yuppie sex. The camera pans to the bedroom clock, which reads 11:46 p.m. Dissolve to the clock at 11:50, and pan back to our lovers, already postcoital, catching up on some paperwork. It is a clever laugh at the expense of a business class so busy making it that they have little time to make it. And it is the only amusing moment in this comedy about a brusque career woman put in charge of raising an infant girl. The script, by Director Charles Shyer and Producer Nancy Meyers, indulges every grating cliche about working women and cutesy-poo children. The insistent background score sounds like Muzak from hell's elevator. Keaton (who looks great) and, as an aw-shucks veterinarian, Sam Shepard (who looks embarrassed) waste their charm on a clockwork satire. The whole thing is a sitcom that plays like kiddie porn.

BEST SELLER

For the sake of argument, or an excuse to go to the movies, one can accept the premise that a conglomerate might have a professional killer in its employ. There must be some deals too hard for the lawyers and C.P.A.s to crack without muscle. But would any company have long tolerated anyone as obviously eager to blab its dark secrets as James Woods? One has to think personnel would have terminated him long before he began to seek a collaborator, Cop-Author Brian Dennehy, for his tell-all book. By all rights, Best Seller should have been over before it started; Larry Cohen's screenplay is an outrage against common sense. Still, Director John Flynn rattles one past all the stops where common sense means to disembark, and Woods' wiry intensity and Dennehy's beefy choler are a volatile and hypnotic mix. This pair can make you believe anything. Almost.

ORPHANS

With its grungy mannerism, its obscenities and banalities used as incantations, its wily truckling to down-and-out sentimentality, Lyle Kessler's 1983 play was an instant anthology of Bad Modern Theater. Kessler's plot was nothing new either. It blended The Ransom of Red Chief with Pinter's The Caretaker: two games-playing brothers kidnap a mysterious stranger. But Orphans held a certain awful fascination as a Method exercise, with the actors turning the stage into a kind of existential trampoline. Alan J. Pakula's screen version perfectly preserves, and thus ruthlessly exposes, the play's hyperactive emptiness. Matthew Modine (the tough brother), Kevin Anderson (the soft brother) and Albert Finney (the stranger) try bravely to find home truths in an enterprise that is all metaphor and pretense. Moviegoers have a more thankless job. They must pretend any of this matters.