Suburbia

ERIC Bogosian, performance artist and occasional playwright, comes across best in person in a solo piece. His plays, Talk Radio and SubUrbia (1994), are less effective, except when a crazed character takes over in a frantic monologue. Suburbia (let's forget about the pretentious central capital U) had its moments on the New York stage; transposed to the screen, it works about as well as a poem in a prose translation.

We are dealing here with a bunch of shiftless middle-class youths of twenty or so in the fictional Texas town of Burnfield (the film was shot in Austin), who spend a typical night at their favorite gathering place: the parking lot outside a convenience store run by a young Pakistani couple whom they enjoy tormenting. On this night, a former high-school chum of the kids -- Pony, who is making it as a budding rock star -- comes through town and wants to hang out with the old crowd. He shows up in a stretch limo, accompanied by the record-company publicist, a rich, sexy, spoiled Bel Air brat. There follow clashes, binges, sex, and violence, as well as a near-tragic ending.

As Terrence Rafferty has correctly noted in his New Yorker review, this is "a kind of anti-American Graffiti, with a forlorn convenience store substituted for the bright, bustling teen hangout Mel's Drive-In, and with cynicism substituted for nostalgia." But the problem is not so much Rafferty's grievance -- the "narrow, mean-spirited view of the characters" -- as Bogosian's inability to make a compelling screenplay out of a passable theater piece, and Richard Linklater's ineffectual direction.

Some characters are actually viewed with sympathy, especially Jeff, the college dropout, who does show concern for others and (however melodramatically) for the world, and who is fumbling toward becoming a serious writer. Needless to say, he is the authorial alter ego. Similarly, there is some feeling for Bee-Bee, the mousy hanger-on of the sassy Sooze, Jeff's girlfriend. Bee-Bee has little ego, and has just come out of ninety days in rehab, where her unloving parents consigned her, and is now worse off than ever.

The others, to be sure, are viewed coldly, especially the pseudo-artists. These include Sooze, a punker claiming to be headed for New York as a performance artist; Buff, a mindless blowhard who works in a pizza parlor and owns a video camera he doesn't know how to use; and, of course, Pony, whose rock music we get to sample. Though no worse than any other, it allows Jeff to mock it, indeed rant against it in a spectacular outburst. Jeff and Pony are the antipodes here, with the remaining characters gravitating toward one or the other.

But the material, such as it is, is theatrical, not cinematic. Thus Buff's cavorting about on rollerblades creates a vivid effect on an otherwise static stage; with a movie camera racing along, it is mere standard cinema. When Jeff concludes that Tim, the cynical Marine dropout, has committed murder, it is much better for the seeming evidence to remain just off-stage than to have the camera traipse along and stick its nose into it. And when two adversaries face off, their circular stalking of each other seems, with all the camera gyrations, somehow stagy.

There is also the casting. Jeff, in the New York stage premiere, was played by Josh Hamilton, a charming, palpably intelligent, boyishly winning actor. Here, Giovanni Ribisi is a mush-faced, vacuous-eyed, slouching nonentity. And the movie's Pony, Jayce Bartok, is a big, soft yokel, whom I see not as a rocker, but in a rocker on the back porch.

Some of the other roles are decently played: by Amie Carey as a ring-in-the-eyebrow, mad-gleam-in-the-eye Sooze; Dina Spybey as a wistfully winsome Bee-Bee; Parker Posey as the sleekly blase Erica; and Steve Zahn, repeating his stage part, as the buffoonish Buff. Lee Daniel's cinematography nicely conveys the deadly plane geometry of a garishly lit Hopneresque nighttown, seemingly lacking the third dimension. But the characters, alas, blend all too seamlessly into the two-dimensionality.

And now a few capsules, the only way to catch up with the unprecedented avalanche of 1996's year-end movies. Everyone Says I Love You is one of Woody Allen's brighter efforts. A typical family imbroglio with various cross-wired love stories, it is, this time, a musical, in which essentially nonsinging and nondancing actors, performing old song numbers, become musical comedians with freshmanish desinvolture. There are also some real dancers to execute Graciela Daniele's more elaborately zany dances. There is a good cast, smart cinematography, and, until near the end, unflagging fun, and an astoundingly consummate comedic performance from Julia Roberts.

An almost completely unfunny comedy, however, is Mother, a major letdown from the sometimes erratic but usually at least intermittently riotous Albert Brooks. A scenaristic collaboration with one Monica Johnson, who seems to be scant help, this is a flaccid family spoof, in which the vastly less loved son out of two, whom his mother condescendingly introduces as "my other son," has just divorced and moved back in with eccentric Mom. There are a few funny lines and bits, but the film's only real distinction lies in a capital rendition of the guilelessly maddening mother by the amazing Debbie Reynolds.