Screen

...The difficulty of discussing seriously Israeli foreign policy, including our apparently unlimited willingness to supply Israel with all the sophisticated weaponry it wants, without falling under suspicion concerning the depth of one's commitment to Israel's survival, is also implicated in the current state of affairs...

...I I I II I Screen II I I II IIII I I MYSTERY & TRAVESTY BUT ROCKY TO THE RESCUE ANE THEOgY has it that the foreshortening of horizons in America today is leading many to seek solace in "'trivial Upursuits" or the easy pleasures of generic literature, especially mysteries...

...B UT, it turns out, there is a candidate, a group we now construe in monolithic terms as not only foreign but hostile: the Arabs...

...Based on the Parker Brothers' board game of the same 17 January 1986:15name, Clue tries to cash in on this interest with a similar pity of three separate endings...

...Striking, but not beautiful, Turner seems perfect for her role: she's intelfigent enough to look out of place in these crackpot plots, but mischievous enough to enjoy herself thoroughly...

...The evil cult is given to nasty tricks like inducing nightmarish hallucinations in its victims...

...Isn't the satirical message clear...

...But instead of terror, the chubby Watson fantasizes animated custard tarts coming to life and forcing themselves into his mouth...

...Clearly Stallone is satirizing the macho absurdity of his hero: peace is good when the enemy is beaten...

...The latter is the film's executive producer, and, as in all his works, youth is too pure and winning, age too corrupt and incompetent...

...We know very little about the particularities of Arab history and the details of Middle East politics...

...Perhaps," one student remarked soberly, "we hold a racially tinge.d notion that there are so many Chinese, the loss of a couple of million wouldn't be that big a deal...

...Nowhere were these relations of knowledge to power more influential than in the articulation of the question which our culture demands that we pose to ourselves about ourselves, interrogations regarding the form of our reason, the nature of our finitude, the disciplines for human development, the meaning of our sexuality...

...His spiritual antagonist, a gentle holy man, is played for comic relief, a sort of Sufi Stepin' Fetchit, whose followers bop around to music on ghetto blasters...

...in the legions of private detectives on TV...

...The bombing attack on an office of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee in California, and threats of violence against ArabAmerican groups nationwide, provide sobering evidence of attempts to intimidate those working to counter demeaning, culturally-sanctioned images of Arab peoples...

...F ORTUNATELY, Rocky IV is here to save us...

...At the end of the bout, Rocky makes a ridiculous, contradictory speech in which he condescends to praise dttente -- all the while standing over Drago's bloody body...

...Soviets, he winks, have hot, cosmeticized, superstar sex...

...Taking a pair of apples, he aligns them and says, "Here was the Russian artillery...

...Their idea is a shrewd one...

...If we are to go to war we should be clear about whom we are fighting and why...

...His purpose is to belie his plot...

...Sadly, other special effects are too familiar from Gremlins and other animated horror shows from the Pixar Computer Animation Group (Star Wars' director George Lucas's hi-tech toyshop...

...Politicians, keenly aware of this fact, choose silence--or they themselves reinforce the popular image of "the Arabs...

...2, A History of Sexuality, provides the occasion for a brief review of this remarkable thinker's achievement...

...At first glance, it merely suffers the fate of most sequels that recall the superiority of their original, here Romancing the Stone, one of the better action comedies of the last few years...

...Stallone delivers an elegant symbolic inversion of the actual technological relationship between the superpowers at the same time as he chides each nation's fantasy about itself and its rival...

...Foucault's greatest legacy as a teacher was to make his students aware of silences which most of us ignored but he heard, and which gave an urgency to his words and his life: groups not listened to, hopes not articulated, historical I I I JAMES BERNAUER T HE PUBLICATION of an English translation of Michel Foucault's The Use of Pleasure.Vol...

...And here," he concludes, taking a giant pineapple and putting it squarely in the middle, "Here was I." TOM O'BRIEN The sounds of silence II profound gratitude for the privilege of having had those years, the distressing silence which accompanied the release of this study seems more comprehensible...

...Turner's mastery of sweet-and-sour femininity makes Jewel an entertaining Perils of Pauline...

...Clue's cast (with the possible exception of Lesley Ann Warren as Miss Scarlet) simply doesn't...

...The USSR is no paunch-bellied, aging empire but a hi-tech superstate of Nazi clones...

...Images on television show the Chinese hustling and bustling in a way that seems familiar to our speeded-up society...

...But," she went on, "then I think of television specials about travel down the Volga...

...There are many Asian students at the University, including a number from the People's Republic...

...and now even in Edwin Drood on Broadway, complete with its alternate endings to Dickens's unfinished whodunit...

...Conan Doyle provided the rough sources, but here director Barry Levinson (Diner) and screenwriter Chris Columbus (Gremlins) have collaborated to construct an engaging pre-history of how Holmes got his start...

...Watching, I could not help but recall the ironic classic that Stallone echoes, a scene from the 1930s British film, The Four Feathers...

...We have already been desensitized to abstracted thinking in the case of "the Arabs" because we have been bombarded for several years with indiscriminate use of the term terrorist as a way to characterize particular persons and whole peoples, for example, the Palestinians...

...What it would take to chip away at this abstraction is difficult to say...

...Worse, they have to battle a monomaniacal Saharan dictator intent on taking over neighboring countries...

...We figure we owe them for the oil crisis, the Marine barracks, the Iranian hostage situation, the TWA hijack, ihe Achille Lauro...

...These silences were most frequently created not by repressive forces but by the incessant proliferation of languages which claimed they were saying all that was worth hearing, all that could be known...

...Dipping a finger in claret, he draws a line on the table and declares," Here was the thin red line" of English infantry...

...When I studied with him in 1979 and 1980, he was dev.eloping a unique approach to the history of sexuality and arriving at crucial intuitions into how human beings are diminished and governed by modern modes of thought...

...yet the welcome it would have received was transformed into grief when its author died, at the age of fifty-seven, a few days after its appearance in French in the summer of 1984...

...We shouldn't require the false comfort of abstract hatreds...

...Young Sherlock does some debunking of its own teenpix mode: its sensuality is chaste, even chivalrous, and its wit is kindly...

...victims of state repression in China have no such lobbying effort keeping the issue alive and before the public eye...

...So even with the Russians, my students believe it would take a concerted, all-out effort to promote an image of the enemy that would justify the barbarities of total, especially nuclear, War...

...He tackles the Egyptian cult as his baptism of fire, acquiring in the process his trademark hat, pipe, and lifelong enemy, Moriarity...

...In recent popular films, Protocol (with ever-bubbly Goldie Hawn), Into the Night, and The Jewel of the Nile, "the Arabs" are pictured either as crazed fanatics, ill-mannered buffoons and goons, or venal and corruptible clowns...

...Jewel, is short, feeds off an increased awareness of Islam, but travesties its politics, its moral codes, and its rejection of things Western...

...A rough consensus emerged in class, then, that the Russians are less individuated, less concretely and diversely alive to Americans than either Nicaraguans or Chinese...

...Americans, MICHEL FOUCAULT'S GUEST FOR FREEDOM I II by contrast, have permanently stable family lives...

...There, C. Aubrey Smith, mutton chops and all, recreates the battle of Balaklava on an English dinner table...

...He knows that filmgoers will realize that you can only get such a pumping-iron physique in the gym, not the woods...

...Played by a Swedish actor named Dolph Lundgren, Drago actually looks less Russian than Nordic, a Commonweal: 16six-foot-seven Superman still on retainer from the SS...

...And, for whatever reasons, Mao never struck us as being as demonic as Stalin...

...Young Sherlock reincarnates an old classic both on its own terms and for a new time...

...Organized, highly publicized efforts on behalf of Soviet Jews and dissidents are mounted daily in the United States...

...Of course, a really good mystery- has only one solution, the climax of evidence organically integrated with the plot...

...Meanwhile Rocky takes to a Siberian log cabin where he chops wood, does farm chores, and even grows an Abe Lincoln beard...

...Drago trains for his match with Rocky in a gigantic gym endowed with the latest computerized aerobic and fitness equipment...

...We tend to merge all "Arabs" together...

...Now, however, that the shock of sudden death has given way to a I memories not expressed, significant dimensions of human experience rendered speechless...

...While the young Sherlock and Watson of the film are true enough to the spirit of Conan Doyle, they are also classy versions of today's two everpresent cinematic teen heroes, the suave genius and the fat nerd...

...Its strengths include Kathleen Turner as Joan Wilder, a romance novelist who keeps on getting into scrapes as harum-scarum as those of her heroines...

...Clue is an elegant disaster, this holiday season's Titanic...

...Americans love Chinese food," one student chirped...

...Since the early 1970s we have seen the flourishing of the mystery genre in such writers as Amanda Cross, Gregory MacDonald, and the more profound P.D...

...Without young Holmes, the evil Egyptian meanies would clearly have their way...

...Unfortunately, Turner has co-stars: Michael Douglas, who has reduced his father Kirk's awful charm to just plain awful, and comedian Danny DeVito, vulgar and boring except for one late hilarious line...

...When Watson's turn comes, he's alone in a cemetery, surrounded by swirling mists and pointy gravestones...

...Positioning two pears, he says, "Here was the British cavalry...

...In a good synthesis of current marketing and literary backreading, Holmes is also shown exuberantly (and, alas, tragically) in love -- an explanation of the detective's later withdrawn loneliness and stoicism...

...One student said the first image that popped into her mind when Russia or the Soviet Union got mentioned was of a mass of soldiers high-booting it in a stern and disciplined manner under the humorless faces of the Kremlin elite during May Day celebrations in Red Square...

...Director Jonathan Lynn probably decided that the only way to film a board game was with high artifice and to employ actors who could carry it off with perfect aplomb...

...The Chinese, according to my students, have become more "human" to us than have the Russians...

...Language was the arena for the two great forces which his written works explored: power knowledge -- the privileged information and expertise which exert power in our lives -- and the powers which disguise themselves only as human science...

...The book at hand was long delayed and eagerly anticipated...

...Most of the latter is focused on Watson, whom Cox plays as a genteel Sancho Panza...

...Clue's mechanically alternate conclusions suggest just how contrived and randomly interchangeable its narrative elements and characters become...

...Moreover, he compounds his clues by casting his new bride and recent Playboy Playmate, Brigette Nielsen, as the Nordic superwoman girlfriend of Drago...

...This special effect provides splendid comic relief and even fits Watson's character...

...The scene also demonstrates the unquestionable status of Stallone (who not only stars in Rocky IV but wrote, directed, and produced it) as a genuine cinematic auteur...

...why, we're jes' folks close to the land and don't know nuthin' about computers...

...As soon as a student suggested this possibility, I knew she was right, and the rest of the class concurred...

...Stallone allows Rocky to beat Drago, but only to expose the American boxer's narcissism, confusion, and pretension...

...He stages phony miracles at Nuremberg-style rallies to trick gullible religious fanatics...

...Along with the leaders of French political and cultural life, the international body of his former students mourned the premature end of their Foucault years...

...As well, the excesses of the Chinese regime are perhaps less known to us than are those of the Soviet Union...

...Consider the Russian heavyweight, Ivan Drago, against whom the indomitable Rocky is pitted...

...Character is everything here, plot nothing...

...I enjoyed the good fortune of having had Foucault as a teacher...

...Indeed, Young Sherlock repeats the weaknesses of those other films from the Lucas-Spielberg empire...

...Theaters will indicate whether they are offering conclusion A, B, or C.) The film's makers hope to so enthrall puzzle-loving audiences that viewers will trek to separate theaters to take in the variant conclusions...

...Ah, but they have missed the whole point...

...Let me be clear: the question isn't whether individuals-- for example, the hijack killers of Robert Stethem or Leon Klinghoffer -- should be brought to justice, but is whether we make no distinction between those designated terrorists and most Arabs in general...

...As a critic, I'd love tO possess Stallone's sly ability to say exactly the opposite of what one means...

...Other students disagreed, acknowledging that they, too, saw the Chinese as less deadly, less abstract, more human than they did the Russians...

...T HE JEWEL OF THE NILE is similarly, but more seriously marred...

...The U.S...

...Three endings aren't much help without a beginning and middle...

...Foucault understood that our pursuit of these questions, formulated in the unique accents modernity has given them, has had the effect of binding us to a defined, 17 January 1986:17...

...James...

...The image we have in our heads of Arabs is of a uniformly ignorant, dirty, and fanatical people...

...The two leads are relatively untested English actors, Nicholas Rowe and Alan Cox, but both sustain interest despite a tale (shades of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) about a vengeful cult of fanatic Egyptians practicing murderous rituals in underground pyramids in central London...

...But this state of affairs is a dangerous one in a democratic society...

...Or interviews in which Russians say they most fear war, most want peace...

...Rocky, naturally, sticks with the reliable but dowdy Adrian (and son...

...There are an insufficient number of ArabAmericans to make much headway in protesting popular and media representations of Arabs or in lobbying for nuanced specificity in our responses to all those different peoples and cultures we call "the Arabs...

...Their presence is boringly typical, and marks another chapter in third-world stereotypes in contemporary film...

...Some reviewers are saying that this film marks a dangerous turn, a synthesis of Sylvester Stallone's boxing saga with his new interest in geopolitics -- Rambo Razes Russia...

...I realize Russians have women and babies and old people, too...

...Our media, almost without exception, inculcate stereotypes of Arabs...

...y OUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES, by contrast, makes genuinely creative use of some traditional materials, providing an imaginative and distinctive rendering of the world's most famous detective's first adventure...

...Even the fine set, a gorgeous New England country mansion, can't save the film with its visual associations...

...Perhaps it is a tribute to Stallone's dazzling subtlety that so many viewers have not realized that Rocky IV is actually a shrewd satire on the sources of misunderstanding in world affairs...

...Political cartoons portray a hook-nosed sheik out to grab Western goodies or blow up Western--or Israeli--planes, leaders, and innocent civilians...

...The clue to Stallone's real intentions, of course, can be found in the obvious misrepresentations with which he peppers the film like a series of deft jabs...

...Rowe~ appropriately long in the nose, makes a superb young detective, managing intellectualilty without precosity, and aplomb without arrogance...

...In this light, one begins to see why Stallone so often displays his near-naked body throughout the film...

...and that American innocence in such matters is mere pretense...

...It would take a lot of concerted, one-dimensional propagandizing to turn "Central Americans," or any particular group among them, into the enemy...