FILM: Science Friction. - Review - movie review

THERE is nothing strange about a film having been written by four scenarists-in this case, Garry Shand ling, Michael Leeson, Ed Solomon, and Peter Tolan. What is strange is that the four of them-not to mention the dis tinguished director, Mike Nichols-couldn't come up with something better than What Planet Are You From?

On a distant planet (unnamed in the film, so I'll call it X), where cloning has replaced birth, and there are only men with atrophied penises and no women, the plan is to colonize Earth. But the conquest must come from within, for which reason someone must impregnate an Earth woman. (If this makes no sense to you, that makes two of us.) A sinister bigwig, Graydon (Ben Kings ley), is training an academy of uniformed males in how to seduce Earth women by, among other things, complimenting them on their shoes and then proposing marriage. The best student, renamed Harold Anderson and supplied with a phony vita, is dispatched to Phoenix, Arizona, and immediately acquires a high- echelon job in a bank.

You'd think that X, with such earthly expertise, could have picked someone more seductive than Shandling, and given him better seduction strategies than ones that earn him nothing more than a slap in the face. After many failures, he hooks up with Perry (Greg Kinnear), an adulterous officemate, who will fix him up. That the great technology on X could supply Harold only with a male organ that, in erection, rattles like a tin lizzie being revved up is as amazing as that the women fall for him anyway.

Even more preposterous is the way Harold and Graydon infiltrate Earth, through their spaceship's quasi- collision with a commercial plane, in whose lavatory they materialize. Later meetings between them take place similarly, with Graydon exiting through the toilet bowl.

It seems to me that valid science fiction, after an initial leap of faith, must adhere to some kind of logic or consistency. Here nothing makes even minimal sense. Even the business of Perry's taking Har old to an Alcoholics Anony mous meet ing for easy pickups is a steal from Fight Club, and the business of exploiting the fragile egos of struggling AA members for easy conquests is pretty unsavory.

Here Harold picks up Rebecca, the stewardess who had originally slapped him. More or less frigid, she nevertheless goes to bed with him now, though barely uncrossing her legs. When the married man she really craves calls up when she and Harold are in flagrante, our hero is unceremoniously kicked out. Finally, he connects with Susan (An nette Bening), a touching young AA member, now sincerely seeking marriage and motherhood. He marries her, wanting, at first, nothing but a baby- supplier. Slowly, however, he begins to care for her. There are minor roadblocks, as when Perry's sexy but neglected wife, Helen (the terrific Linda Fioren tino), makes a play for him. Also major setbacks, as when he abducts his baby to Planet X, only to promptly repent.

And all this doesn't even include an important subplot in which a blowhard FAA agent (John Goodman) comically pursues Harold but cannot stop his jealous wife, who does not believe in extra-terrestrials except as cover-ups for marital infidelity, from leaving him. Nichols says what drew him to this project was that it is really about "the different things men and women want," i.e., sex versus commitment. But if that is what interests you, you don't allow half the film to be sci-fi, and so absurd as to undercut the supposedly real half. And you know better than to have a stand-up comic and lousy actor play your hero, even if he is the producer.

Annette Bening gives a superb performance, totally wasted on this trash. She again plays a real-estate agent, as in the dismal American Beauty, in which she overacted ridiculously. Here she is warmly, vulnerably, heart- meltingly real, and you want her to get someone much better than Shandling. But is this enough to recommend an otherwise inane movie? Which raises the question of what are a fine actress and able director to do when the choice is between a lot of garbage and no work at all, which seem to be, more and more, the prevailing options? For that, I have no answer, only tears.

Jasmin Dizdar, a Bosnian filmmaker living in London, has come up with Beautiful People, a film so dazzling and dizzying that I feel rash to review it after just one seeing. It concerns four families, British and Bosnian, whose intersecting lives make for farce and satire, sadness and anguish, a carousel of carefree-ness, carelessness, and caring. The characters are so numerous, the crosscutting so rapid, the situations so bizarre, the editing so elliptical as to require utmost, but never unrewarded, concentration.

Connections can be made only gradually, but the very confusion makes dramatic and philosophical contributions. The survey here is from upper- crust to lower-class, from the benighted to the sentient, from Croat to Serb. Only briefly does the action move to war-torn Bosnia, but the offhanded horror-comic if it were not so dreadful-makes a huge impact. Through out, suffering verges on grotesquery, madness, and absurdity, as when two ethnic adversaries, wounded and hospitalized, still keep fighting, and the British nurse admonishes, "You're here to heal, not to fight. So start healing." There is a strange, detached sympathy, or sympathetic detachment, and Dizdar's language is as penetrating as his direction.