Short Takes

CINEMA

Twentynothings in Seattle (90210)

BRIDGET FONDA HAS OUR FAVORITE mouth in movies, and a spirit to match; we'll happily watch her for the next 40 years. Matt Dillon is perfecting a comic shagginess. Funny Jeremy Piven steals a scene at a check-out counter. The other actors in SINGLES are stuck with playing cliches -- twentynothings. They mate, they muse, they inhabit soap-opera plots. Meet urban planner Campbell Scott ("a realist slash dreamer"), Greenpeacenik Kyra Sedgwick ("This whole decade is going to have to be about cleaning up"), maitre d' Jim True ("I live my life like a French movie"). Writer-director Cameron Crowe's movie lives like too many others. Singles may aspire to be a Big Chill from Seattle, but it is really a fizzled St. Elmo's Fire with rowdier music.

MUSIC

Electronic Venture

MAYBE THIS IS THE LIBERATION OF SUZANNE VEGA. Hearing DNA's hip-hop remix of her popular tune Tom's Diner has obviously encouraged the breathy folk singer to venture beyond the safety of her acoustic guitar. Her latest album, 99.9 F degrees, is a bold experiment in both verse and technology, with Vega's haunting images now pegged to electronic percussion and warped-sounding keyboards. Two of the more raucous songs, Rock in This Pocket and Fat Man and Dancing Girl, are even hot enough to hit the dance circuit. But unvarnished Vega fans need not fret: the album still sports tunes like Blood Sings, in which she breaks from technopop and delivers straight folk with Dylanesque force.

TELEVISION

Top Cops

TV COP SHOWS (FICTIONAL ONES, ANYway) have gone so decisively out of fashion that THE HAT SQUAD looks downright fresh. The new CBS series, about three brothers who wear black fedoras as members of a police special-crimes unit, is in many ways the most preposterous new show of the season. In last week's premiere, the villain, a sadistic ex-con, was an unstoppable monster straight out of Friday the 13th, and the action scenes (including a bungee-jump knockout) made Road Runner cartoons look realistic. Still, creator Stephen J. Cannell (The A-Team, Hunter) has a knack for vivid characters and punchy dialogue, and he invests the genre with the good-vs.-evil intensity of an old- fashioned western. Also, the hats are cool.

BOOKS

Whirling Electrons

WHILE MOST READERS HAVE BEEN LOOKing the other way, writer Eric Kraft has turned out a series of whiz-bang novellas about a kid named Peter Leroy who does a lot of neat stuff, like thinking, squidging for clams with his toes and noticing the fantastic legs of his new science teacher, Miss Rheingold. Now the out-of-print novellas have been published by Crown as LITTLE FOLLIES ($22) and Peter's new adventures as WHERE DO YOU STOP? ($15). Kraft misses endless opportunities to be poisonously cute about a smart boy who likes words (spline, ontology) and worries about the universe being mostly empty (and since it is expanding, every day emptier) space between whirling electrons. His books are good, luminously intelligent fun.

THEATER

A Trip to Fanciful

HORTON FOOTE'S GIFTS FOR MOOD, DIAlogue and vignette won screenplay Oscars for To Kill a Mockingbird and Tender Mercies and gave Geraldine Page unforgettable moments in The Trip to Bountiful. But his stage plays suffer from haphazard , structure, predictable plot and an inability to invest poignant incidents with larger significance. These faults beset THE ROADS TO HOME, which opened off- Broadway last week under the author's direction. The cast of nine, an army on the tiny stage, seems thin and the story wan. But Emmy winner Jean Stapleton and the author's daughter Hallie glow as two Texas housewives, one full of repressed fury at a hollow marriage, the other retreating from reality into dark memories of her father's violent death.