Rushes

MY BLUE HEAVEN

Talk about off-casting: brittle-romantic Nora Ephron (Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally ) writing a high-concept comedy about a Mafioso's troubles when the Federal Witness Security Program plunks him down in white-bread suburbia; humorless Herbert Ross (Steel Magnolias) directing it; Steve Martin (who needs no parenthetical citation) playing the gangster. Talk about miscalculation. One's natural curiosity to see if they can possibly get out of alien country alive must be resisted. Ephron imposes a few feeble gags on material she has evidently skimmed a few books about; Ross still doesn't know how to stage or shoot comedy; Martin does a nice rubbery parody of criminal body language but has no accompaniment, verbal or visual, to support him. Rick Moranis, Carol Kane and Joan Cusack are left similarly bereft by . . . Oh, let's not talk about it -- too painful.

PUMP UP THE VOLUME

By day Mark Hunter (Christian Slater) is the new kid at Hubert Humphrey High, too shy to speak to anyone. By night he is "Hard Harry," sole owner (and voice) of a pirate radio station on which he endlessly, maniacally articulates sedition, sexual and social, to his increasingly besotted schoolmates. His monologues -- raunchy and self-pitying, sentimental and hysterical -- very possibly constitute the most direct and original route into that junk heap known as the adolescent mind that any moviemaker has yet found. All the flotsam writer-director Allan Moyle picks up in there rings crazily true. Maybe Mark's enemies, uptight administrators trying to rid the student body of SAT slackers, are cartoonish; maybe teen innocence is romanticized. But Moyle and Slater are compulsively energetic operatives. They just won't take no for an answer; finally even adult dubiety yields to and is informed by them.