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...But maybe this would have been "conservative...

...It is not "conservative" to resist a stranger's rude stab at seduction...

...A Disney spokesman says this means "anyone over twenty-five...

...the film's press notes describing Hagerty's character as ' 'fairly conservative" reveal the bias...

...Durang may be to blame as well, but, as director, Altman has the primary responsibility to make the adaptation work...

...But Burstall allows her to play no vital role in the ultimate resolution of his flirtation with his demi-fiihrer...

...But some scenes are among the best humor on screen since Tootsie: Long's reaction when she first sees Midler's apartment, her outrage that Midler should use acting talent to lie to get information, her utterly hypocritical use of the same technique at an airline counter, and a Cagney andLacey imitation when, as such films often require, the naifs (here girls) finally get to handle guns...

...I saw it on a Saturday night after standing on line in the cold...

...Tossing in "prop" characters, whose function seems only to sit or run about throwing either sexual hints or tantrums, Altman seems bent on proving the tedium of incoherence as an art form...

...In his new film, Altman employs his characteristic overlapping dialogue, blunting much of Durang's wit...

...But he has never come up from radicalism, instead fixating on now tiresome gestures of adolescent artsiness that were fresh, if ever, in the late 1960s...

...In her best scene, she fires away at her husband's little boy machismo, to which Friels responds that he '' should be lord and master'' in their relationship...

...Watch how quickly, for example, Dixon gets her girls to New Mexico, where they try to track Coyote down...

...The writing is by newcomer Leslie Dixon, who seems to have memorized all the tricks of comedy thrillers and "buddy" films, and then innovatively applied them to an odd couple of women...

...Dying, the General asks (for the umpteenth time) if the Poet loves him, but we wonder how the latter could ever have considered it...

...Daring economy makes Outrageous Fortune work as excellent light entertainment...

...Often there is too much broad humor, especially from Midler, and one scene too many depicting feminine foibles...

...TOM O'BRIEN...

...A small note: I missed the advanced screenings of this film—in a private studio with plush seats, no waiting, and other critics...

...Julie Hagerty (the tall, sweet nutcake from Airplane and Lost in America) plays a winsome young woman searching the Personal ads...

...Rangaroo, based on a story by D. H. Law- rence, disappoints in a peculiarly literary, uncinematic way...

...At times the film edges towards a genuine psychomachia—a battle for the poet's soul between the wife and the general—but Burstall never lets Davis get far enough into the story...

...She finds Jeff Goldblum (The Big Chill), who quickly offends her at a restaurant rendezvous with some brazen sexual suggestions...

...I wish them luck...

...Of course, if Altman's head was on, he might have noticed enough about changing times to have included some reference to the fear of AIDS, especially since Goldblum plays a bisexual leaving his lover (Christopher Guest...

...Maybe Altaian's heart belongs in Paris, away from us Philistines...

...Burstall fails to do enough to save us from Lawrence's world of capital letters and characters who are made to carry more symbolic weight than they can sustain...

...The farcical script comes from Christopher Durang's successful off-Broadway play, and is directed by Robert Altman...

...There's a delicious irony here: just as everyone in Hollywood is courting youth, Disney has completely reversed itself...

...Burstall censors the best one...

...The acting is by Shelley Long and Bette Midler, whose contrasting characters and comic timing are so strong that they cover over the few lame parts of Dixon's screenplay...

...Beyond Therapy is far enough beyond bad as to be beyond comment—if it were not for its waste of real talent...

...Altman was once one of our finest directors—the iconoclastic maker of M.A.S.H., of the masterpiece McCabe and Mrs...

...Farce begins when fake teacher and actual spy Peter Coyote secretly seduces both...

...I honestly wonder if the conditions of criticism don't affect judgment...

...Worse, he seems hardly conscious that stage-based farce is only credible because of the power of fine acting to force a willing suspension of disbelief...

...hyperactive camerawork continually blurs the focus on character...

...Burstall has also provided Kangaroo with a weak screenplay, following Lawrence too closely and failing to translate his periodically insufferable bombast into credible and compelling terms...

...Kangaroo is marred by the weak acting of Friels and of Hugh Keyes-Byrne as the title character—"Kangaroo" is a code name for a general who, in the aftermath of the war, feels that Australia needs a dose of paternalism and military vigor to cure society of the weaknesses of democracy...

...The play itself is flawed by its ease with sexual promiscuity...

...To their credit, Hagerty and Goldblum humanize the sordid tale and even make their search for sexual love sympathetic...

...The rhetoric of the General, his desire to have a Poet on the side of 182 his Movement, and the Poet's affection for the General ring false throughout...

...It all might have worked...

...Only a next-door neighbor, superbly played by John Walton, makes the temptation of fascism understandable...

...Long and Midler play two actresses—Midler a vulgarian and sometime porn star, Long (blonde, WASP, and willowy) a Yalie taking extensive postgraduate years of ballet, fencing, and elocution lessons in New York...

...A la Lawrence, a woman's voice cannot be allowed to affect the action...

...On the one hand, it takes chauvinism, both male and national, too seriously...

...Some reviewers have 183 noted how Beyond Therapy switches wildly—with no doubt some stab at deep meaning—between New York and Parisian locales...

...She leaves, but their paths keep crossing, especially at the adjacent offices of their oddball therapists (Tom Conti and Glenda Jackson...

...That Saturday night, he was right: the crowd was positively ancient, with few moviegoers under twenty...

...it is hardly "conservative" to answer a Personal ad at all...

...This Australian movie, directed by Tim Burstall, stars Colin Friels as the Lawrence stand-in, a writer named Somers, who takes to that island continent after World War One...

...There, sadly, is the rub...

...Lawrence needed an editor...

...Then, without resolving the issue, Friels simply walks away from her...

...Friels's real wife, the fine actress Judy Davis (My Brilliant Career smdA Passage to India), plays Lawrence's wife, Frieda, and provides the film's only pleasures...

...But Kangaroo makes the mistake of never establishing a coherent attitude toward its subject...

...Lawrence raises complex issues, but sixty years should have led to greater clarity about them...

...He never allows Hagerty and Goldblum to carry Beyond Therapy...

...Miller, and of Nashville...

...on the other, it creates a strong critical voice, then exiles her...

...Another small note: the film is by Disney Studios, which signed Midler to a three-film contract for "older audiences...

...like other ordinary filmgoers, I might have appreciated this film more only because I was grateful to get in...

...Judy Davis has some strong moments as an ironic observer of her husband's search for what she calls "David and Jonathan" relationships...

...Down-under male chauvinism can be hilarious—for example, the camp star of Crocodile Dundee, Paul Hogan...

...The final pan away from Goldblum, for example, includes too much of the real world to let us enter fully into the character's concluding and summarizing soliloquy...

...The two wind up in the same acting class and instantly despise each other...

...No detail is wasted, as Dixon matter-of-factly employs material at the beginning of the film that comes back perfectly at the end, providing the comic exhilaration of apt method inside zany madness...

...Such notions of self-referentiality are de rigueur in two places: film schools and France, revered as sacred ''inter textualite'' by those who would have no other gods before them...

...The worn ways of Epater le Bourgeois (Part ?) fit him like a glove...

...The bisexual theme allows Altman to throw in references to 197l's Sunday, Bloody Sunday and the role played there by Glenda Jackson —as if there were some automatic merit to art sophomorically cross-referencing with art...