Reviews Short Takes

CINEMA

Outcasts of The Universe

ALIEN 3 IS SET IN A MAXIMUM-SECURITY prison at the far, forgotten end of the universe. This dark landscape bespeaks an ambition to rise above sequel status. So does a glum, distancing story, in which Sigourney Weaver's Warrant Officer Ripley, depressed and, yes, alienated, feels pretty much at home in the society of outcasts where her spaceship has accidentally landed. Eventually they join her in the fight against one of the big, nasty creatures she has unknowingly brought with her. But 29-year-old director David Fincher doesn't yet know how to scare us witless, and the script neglects to develop the kind of human relationships any movie needs to draw us into its web. A lot of good, serious work went into this film, but it lacks the conjurer's touch.

TELEVISION

Iowa Corn

JULIE CARLYLE IS THE STAR OF A NETwork TV variety show who marries a veterinarian, moves to Iowa and still manages to do her show every week from a local TV station. That is known as having it all. JULIE, a new ABC sitcom, doesn't have much of anything except Julie Andrews, who puts a little sparkle into the drab material. Her dedicated husband (James Farentino) tends to ailing heifers and brings home an injured dog to share their bed. His two kids at first resent their stepmother (sure, who wants a TV star for a mom anyway?) but are won over by her sunny, motivational lectures. Andrews' husband, Blake Edwards (Victor/Victoria, 10), directed the first two episodes, but it helps not a bit.

BOOKS

Dark and Stormy

THIS WINDY, CINEMATIC SPY NOVEL RElies shamelessly on quick cuts and spectacular scenery, and never mind logic. Anthony Hyde's CHINA LAKE (Knopf; $22) takes its title from a secret Naval Intelligence station in the Mojave Desert, where a 25-year-old mystery -- Who gave the heat-seeking Sidewinder missile to the Soviets? -- has never been resolved. Hyde leads us lengthily through the murk of old lies, from California to a wave-swept cliffside in Scotland to another cliff in Wales to East Germany and back to the black depths of a lost gold mine in the Mojave. Quick, light a match! Nope, despite tireless soliloquizing by hero and villain (which is which constitutes the book's main puzzle), motivation and plot remain obscure.

MUSIC

The Vibrant Cry Of the Wolf

THE BORDER BETWEEN TWO CULTURES can be a barren place. But for LOS LOBOS, a scrappy garage band born 18 years ago in the Chicano barrio of East Los Angeles, the gap between American music and its Mexican roots has been inspirational. The band reached a commercial apex with 1987's La Bamba, an international hit that was elevated beyond pop predictability by its intricate acoustic coda. That flourish of integrity was no fluke. Los Lobos' new album, Kiko, blends rock, jazz and Mexican folk styles with authority and panache; David Hidalgo's lambent vocals transport songs about hardship and redemption to a numinous state. More than a mere blending of two vibrant traditions, Kiko forges a new American sound.

THEATER

Linked Sins

LEE BLESSING'S PLAYS ARE KNOWN FOR elegant language and stately topics, epitomized by his witty dialogue of nuclear disarmament, A Walk in the Woods. But in LAKE STREET EXTENSION, at the Ensemble Theater of Cincinnati, the characters are feral, the action grim and the vocabulary redolent of the ! gutter. Lake Street sets a father who sexually molested his son against a Salvadoran soldier who joined in the mass murder of peasants. The 90 taut minutes strip away layers of secrets and suggest a link between the men's sins -- a dependence on the propensity of bourgeois Americans to look away from ugly facts rather than decry them. A compulsively watchable young actor, Keith Brush, portrays the incest victim grown up into a punky, self-pitying male prostitute.