Everything New Is Old Again

By RICHARD CORLISS

Saturday-matinee serials, gangster dramas with hearts of fudge, airhead romantic comedies. Think they don't make movies like these anymore? Look around, think again and weep a little for the art of cinema. The first reel of a picture will tantalize with originality of story or tone. Then genre anxiety sets in--the filmmakers' compulsion to return to the formats that have worked, and been worked to death, for decades. Can't take the risk of challenging those people out there in the dark; it might frighten them. Movies have to be like TV now: a medium not of surprise but of reassurance. Give 'em what we think they want. More of the same.

But with an ironic twist that can pass for 1980s modernism. We're so hip, we know that every movie thrill is a fraud. We know the technique behind each matte shot, each jive emotion. Perhaps the audience at some B-minus sci-fi thriller in the 1950s solemnly attended to the stilted dialogue, leaden performances and not-so-special effects. But today's cognoscenti find the dew of nostalgia on these pictures, then wink and say, "They're so bad, they're good." Smart directors stoke the trend with camp updates of the olden turkeys. In Tobe Hooper's remake of the 1953 Invaders from Mars you can see tongues burrowing into cheeks on both sides of the camera. Sometimes, though, directors can outsmart themselves. Invaders from Mars is so good at mimicking '50s mediocrity, it's bad.

Sometimes a film is so exhilarating, it's exhausting. Big Trouble in Little China describes itself as a "mystical action-adventure-comedy-kung-f u- monster-ghost story." It is plenty savvy in deploying plot devices from a dozen hoary genres while playing up the absurdities in the familiar Deadpan Facetious style. A Frisco truck driver (Kurt Russell) and his Chinese-American pal (Dennis Dun) amble into a battle beyond death fought by a 2,000-year-old bad guy (James Hong) and a Yoda-esque mensch (Victor Wong). In this Temple of Doom there are girls with green eyes and beasties with red ones; the sword- flashing legerdemain and wind-whipping backflips of martial-arts movies; a tough guy who literally explodes from rage when his master dies; oh, and a giant uggy insect in the caverns under Chinatown.

Director John Carpenter (Halloween, Starman) propels things faster, and way smoother, than a speeding '40s serial. But Co-Screenwriter W.D. Richter, who directed the definitive smarty-pants action picture, Buckaroo Banzai, is the evil genius behind Little China. He has everybody talking as if time-warped in some poverty-row thriller. "My destiny rests in your capable hands," the engaging Dun tells Russell, who is trying to be Harrison Ford trying to be John Wayne trying to be the Surly American. Everything else in the film is at the same three removes from reality. Little China offers dollops of entertainment, but it is so stocked with canny references to other pictures that it suggests a master's thesis that moves.

Mona Lisa, a lavishly praised new British film, proves you don't have to be in Hollywood to go Hollywood. It begins with a powerful perception: when a man looks at a woman, he sees the fiction he has created of her, and out of this visionary myopia, this need to fashion a Galatea or a Bride of Frankenstein, come love, lust, violence and art. Simone (Cathy Tyson), a chic London call girl, understands this impulse in men and knows how to indulge it to her profit. Well, it's a living. But to George (Bob Hoskins), assigned by a mob boss to be Simone's chauffeur, it seems a living hell. How can she endure these rough hands and tawdry nightdreams? How can she not respond to his courtly Cockney love? Simone does respond, in the only way she knows, by using him. She sends her squire out to play knight, searching the Soho underworld for the girl who will fulfill Simone's fantasies and pry open George's blinkered eyes.

Hoskins plays this dear wet simp with a rude winsomeness. Tyson (Cicely's niece) finds dignity and pathos in a whore's hauteur. As the gang lord, Michael Caine exudes satiny menace. And Director Neil Jordan (who wrote the + script with David Leland) tells the story from George's point of view while filming it in a style as fancy and knowing as Simone's. No wonder audiences have taken to this gritty romance as to a mongrel puppy; for at heart Mona Lisa is an old-fashioned poor-soul weepie, and George is less a Cagney rakehell than a Chaplin tramp. Ever clever, though, Jordan massages the viewer's sentimentality like Simone servicing a dim, fond client.

Sentiment scotches the wit in "About Last Night," an expansion and dilution of David Mamet's 1974 one-acter Sexual Perversity in Chicago. Written as a series of blackout scenes involving two working-class pals and the two young women they fancy, the play was rancid, funny and dead-on-target. So why would Screenwriters Tim Kazurinsky and Denise DeClue want to turn it into a Pillow Talk for the nouveau quiche set? Now the story is about a nice girl (the exemplary Demi Moore) and a pretty guy (Rob Lowe) who triumph over their busybody buddies (Elizabeth Perkins and the splenetically funny Jim Belushi) to form a profoundly modern relationship. The movie is so intent on ingratiating itself with its audience that it betrays the meaning of its source. One of Mamet's themes--that friends are more possessive than lovers --remains as a vagrant motif. The rest is obscured in the mist of soft- focus cuteness, as yuppie lust conquers all. Welcome to St. Elmo's Fizzle.

Toward the end, worn down by their geek chorus of friends, Lowe and Moore split up. Faced with this boy-loses-girl plot, Director Edward Zwick might have tried dramatizing the poignant detumescence of a love affair. It's part of the emotional nitrogen cycle: people do get over the people they have loved. But not people in Hollywood movies--at least not in movies made by directors so ruthlessly intent on imitating models they could never believe in.