Screen
O'Brien, Tom
himself. The first half-hour bores us with flat arguments be-...
...Long discussions of who-liveshow-with-whom have become, like nerd humor, an automatic crutch for an invalid screenplay...
...represented most in one role, that of the starlet of the film The plot in itself provides an intensely ironic comment within the film...
...efforts to restore authenticity to the script, which at the end The uncoordinated, often static feel of Sweet Liberty is allows for interesting byplay between art and life...
...conference in New York...
...scenes are often funny, as we watch these two young men, Badham does have enough skill at pacing and editing to creations of the literature they have read and of the great works keep the story of the robot's escape and the "birth" of its mind they hope to write, alternately annoy and comfort one another...
...The early trick-ending comes as no surprise...
...The Nova's security staff and top scientists are mindless and older American angrily tells his young countryman to pull up greedy warmongers given to Faustian statements that the his pants because, "We're talking here...
...interesting...
...But rather than focusing on a computer the pompous tyrannies of media moguls corrupting mass taste accidentally triggered by a teenage hacker to play at nuclear in the name of democracy...
...But as their discomfort turns OUT OF THE WASTELAND to fear and then to pain, there is desperation in their attempt to EXPERIENCE & ART find comfort in the fact that they are accumulating "usable material...
...Sheedy has not improved with leaflets attacking the dictatorship...
...The scenes in the first act are each labeled - Badham obviously wants to make "peace" movies that a lighted message across the top of the stage - with one of the exploit Hollywood's fascination with hi-tech machinery, but standard rules from texts for beginning writers...
...Well played by Michelle Pfeiffer, she is a tart about the treatment of history in recent film...
...The mother is played by the can moviemaking...
...after in their effort to turn his serious study of a colonial family instead she comes off as an old buffoon...
...For example, when the film company ancient film grandee Lilian Gish, but she is given nothing to do comes to the town to take in its authentic colonial feel, the but get sick and pine for a lost love...
...Worse, she comes equipped in the Latin American country, his baggage full of undigested with a houseful of pets and drives an ice cream truck, a sure cliches of the 1960s...
...The Latin American, fresh out of an sign she can do no wrong as a soulmate to 5 the fugitive...
...Given the fates of other recent history films, Alda might very well be right...
...When, during the filming of the war, Badham selects a robot who wants to escape from 'the climactic battle sequences of the film within the film, Alda the military uses planned for it by Nova Robotics, a hi-tech firm in professor stages a send-up of the three "principles" of teen- Oregon...
...Alda also includes too much: too these dangerous, morally provocative avatars less than the many love subplots, too much of his mother, and too much of benign Other, E.T...
...So the professor starts introducing and forth from movie set to his mother's home to the hospital, himself as "the author of the book from which the film has not the latter part of the film becomes thin gruel indeed until the been taken...
...When the host, a seasoned writers' conference in-fighter, reputation and political expediency...
...Depicting combat with the other four robots, The American's need to preach platitudes is particularly effecBadham wittily evokes every fighting convention in film from tive perhaps because Nelson, who would have been in college Robin Hood to The Three Stooges...
...As the history vixen who can dominate a set, overrule the director, and kick professor, Alda mocks the film crew's indifference to the around her leading man (Michael Cainej...
...MEETS WARGAMES arrangements anymore...
...TOM O'BRIEN ments on the imprisoned men...
...With a plot structure pitting good guys 6 June 1986: 343 trying to save 5 against bad guys trying to kill him, Badham minister's secretary, take off his shirt to show that his broken opens the door to predictably sentimental claptrap...
...Its director, John Alda's oblique approach, moreover, leaves him room to Badham, was responsible for the witty War Games of underscore his belief in the relevance of the past to today's 1983, and here he tries a variation on its theme of a machine events...
...The dramatic ness...
...Alda, who directed and wrote Sweet Liberty, provides his Aside from the love subplots, Alda includes a mother-son character with some sharp comments on the nature of Ameri- story that has no resonance...
...Even if we accept the accuses the delegation of not understanding about torture, a integrity of the visiting delegation and, from an opposing young American observer explodes...
...How much better he caught youth culture in one account alters the actuality that is its source...
...He opens his trousers to position, the minister of culture, the process is a frighteningly show the permanent damage to his genitals, suffered in this funny game like the most flamboyant public quarrels at the last country fifteen years before, and insists that his coequal, the International P.E.N...
...One expects please fully...
...his native country, and the German says, solemnly, that he From the first, the score is stacked in 5's moral favor: read the essay describing the event and found it moving...
...But in key climactic scenes, their relationship is rushed to mon denominator of taste, Alda the director assumes that the an unclear, enigmatic conclusion, as if there were no way to only way to get people to watch history is to finesse popular dispose of the art-life paradoxes that have been raised, but to indifference to the past by framing it with the present tense...
...Her Hollywood name is Faith, which should provide property, and take people's clothes off...
...One imagines, for professor discovers that's about the only authenticity they're example, she could have told her son about respect for the past...
...At this point, the visiting the critical self-examination Badham evoked in War Games, Latin American describes the torture that his wife underwent in he uses Short Circuit for moral self-congratulation...
...Predictably, 5's inventor is a laid-back fellow (Steve ble subject, but because at this graphic moment Nelson's Guttenberg) who never examines what he is doing' working for themes become most insistent...
...She is supposed to be reality of the past, but as a director, he implies that history can playing the demure widow of the colonial family about whom now only be approached indirectly...
...these are he needs to avoid the easy caricatures and safe liberal-left intended as comic and, as the scenes get uglier, ironic comthinking he wallows in here...
...The poet has been imprisoned because he was effect of the second act is to insist that truth and virtue have the ambassador to Spain of the now deposed rightist dictator- only literary validity and that words are at the service of ship...
...Commonweal: 344...
...The American at first believes that he is safe because he is an American, the Latin American because his father is a prominent lawyer...
...drop them flat...
...The first half-hour bores us with flat arguments beScreen tween Alda and his girlfriend (Lisa Hiboldt), an American literature professor who won't let him move in unless they get married...
...Latin American...
...A moment at the end of Act 11, confirmed by a coda that I N THE SECOND act of Richard Nelson's Principia Scrip- flashes back to 1970, suggests that whatever the two men have toriae, a committee of eminent writers - an American, a become - one an unwriting functionary, the other a successGerman, a Latin American - has come to an unnamed ful journalist - they share an experience that confirms the Latin American country to negotiate with the minister of muddled idealism under their dangerous youthful foolishness...
...It is a startling and robots are "impervious to human weaknesses...
...S HoRT CIRCUIT disappoints even more...
...Her lovely eyes and face make the scenes bearable, but they remain dramatically static...
...tion...
...After English university, is almost as innocent about his own counall this telegraphing about plot and character, Badham's try as is the American whose ignorance he attacks...
...Although Alda the some clue to how things work out between her and the profesprofessor attempts to subvert such appeal to the lowest com- sor...
...But that is key to his in the late sixties, knows him more intimately than he does the problem: ShortCircuit is full of allusions, but little substance...
...never let intelligence get in the way of vanity...
...And there is the added burden of watching Alda play the love scenes like MASH's Hawkeye SWEET LIBERTY abounds in irony, but lacks enough wit to - pretending to be so sexy that he's irresistible...
...Does Hollywood really TAKING LIBERTY think people are particularly interested in unusual domestic E.T...
...With some daring, Alda uses SweetLiberty to satirize with a mind of its own...
...Louis is a wasteland, has arrived of her scenes painful to watch...
...The American, who has age...
...On cue, 5 gets disturbing scene not because of the characters, who never hit by lightening, "malfunctions," and escapes to explore the wander far from stereotype, nor because torture is the ostensiworld...
...To him, ironically, she only within a film is that teen audiences (the bulk of all moviegoers) acts in character, modestly batting her eyelashes and speaking will only be lured to a historical film if the filmmakers follow with the reputed reserve of Southern gentlewomen of antique the three "principles" of all teenpix: "defy authority, destroy times...
...The two young men are the central figures in the play...
...Like the rest of the film, her contradictory SweetLiberty suggests that the only way to make a film about character seems in need of so much more drama and elaborahistory is to make a film about making a film about history...
...The center of Sweet Liberty involves Alda's redemptive conclusion...
...The premise of the film Alda the professor wrote his book...
...The play is concerned with the a defense contractor...
...They are not really necessary to the action on stage because the conversation of the prisoners - ranging from their ambitions to their reading to their families Stage - tells us all we need to know about the search for experience that can be made into art...
...The interaction between art and life, past and present, is problem is that, for all his mechanical makeup, 5 resembles too minimal until the end...
...Natural as a teenager, she has developed a brittle cattiness written a first novel about how his bourgeois family does not as a young woman, a vociferous artificiality that makes many understand him and how St...
...With Alda racing back into a lusty melodrama...
...comment in War Games: "forty-two, that's old...
...In place of shoulder had never healed properly...
...culture of the revolutionary government for the release of a Yet, this impulse is little more than a gesture because the main celebrated poet...
...pix, Alda the director makes his most successful parallel The robot, the last of a prototype quintet, is named Number between the American Revolution and his guerrilla war against 5 by his unimaginative managers, even though he has an Hollywood's latest substandards...
...We Sooner or later, a girl has to show up, and she's the same as meet them in Act I, fifteen years earlier, in jail for passing out in War Games, Ally Sheedy...
...The conception is brilliant: the making of a too much of them, perhaps, but stars like Alda or Woody film about the American Revolution based on a book by a Allen, with whom he shares ironic wit and self-consciousness, small town college history professor, played by Alan Alda...
...attractive personality and distinguished ancestors as old as But Sweet Liberty only, fitfully maintains this witty arch- Frankenstein and as recent as Hal in 2001...
...distance between experience and its transformation into either Badham uses his characters to provide some awkward sex- art or effective reporting, and the way in which the written ual humor...
Vol. 113 • June 1986 • No. 11
