The Michigan Daily - Monday, September 18, 1989 - Page 15 A' - 4 4 Oh; the difficult lives of whites in the South. Maggie (Ally Sheedy), Tuck (Kyle Secor), and Hoyt (Treat Williams) deal with a crisis over some mixed drinks. Sheedy and Williams were far better actors in their longer-haired days. Ridiculous Dixie has a heart, but doesn't have much brain Cookie, er, crumbles Confused direction meets stale stereotypes BY DAVID LUBLINER It's not all Cookie's fault. Emily Lloyd, who portrays this young Mafia princess, tries aw- fully hard to make this film work. It's a very demanding task, espe- cially when you're part of the most recent in a long line of Mafia movies (most of which were better). Add to that an overly complex script and terribly con- fused direction and what's left is this new Susan Seidelman film. Emily Lloyd (Wish You Were Here) plays Carmela Maria An- gelina Theresa (Cookie) Voltecki, the 16-year old daughter of Mafia kingpin Dino Capisco (Peter Falk). Dino never married Cookie's mom Lenore (Dianne Wiest) and has been in the slam- mer for the past 13 years. After Dino is released from jail, Lenore thinks it's a great opportunity for them to become one big, happy family. Dino is more concerned about hunting down his Mafia peers than raising a rebellious teenager. Dino puts Cookie to work as his personal chauffeur and (no surprise here) she proves to be as cunning and savvy as most of the professional mobsters. The plot becomes unnecessarily compli- cated as Cookie and her dad team up to take revenge on other Mafiosos who owe him money. The story lacks originality and simply rehashes Italian stereo- types used countless times before. Unlike Jonathan Demme's Mar- ried to the Mob, Cookie lacks any real insight into Mafia cul- ture. Seeing Peter Falk up front, one might feel like this a more colorful version of old Columbo reruns. The script, written by Nora Ephron and Alice Arlen (the BY STEVE KNOPPER Someday, some filmmaker ought to design a mov- ing portrait of the turbulent years before the Civil Rights Movement. Heart of Dixie fails. It's drab. It's predictable. And the ending is pure mush. It's also frustrating, because the film's basic premise has potential. Ally Sheedy (The Breakfast Club, Wargames) plays Maggie Deloach, a confused sorority member who discovers racial enlightenment during an Elvis Presley concert. Maggie, though, is the only one who seems to care about equal rights. The rest of her friends and sisters have more simple goals - garnering a pin from some fraternity man, winning a class queen election, and ap- proaching the toughest, meanest-looking guys to dance at parties. Her unenlightened friends - with the exception of hunk Associated Press photographer and pretty-face Hoyt Cunningham (Treat Williams) and "God-damned independent" and even-prettier-face Aiken Reed (Phoebe Cates) - have all sorts of problems. One of her sisters comes home from a date and re- veals to Maggie that the guy tried to rape her. Though Maggie offers to report the guy and get him kicked off campus, her sister stops her. "I thought he was going to give me his pin," she says. Later, after southern belle Delia June Curry dances slow with some young hood at a party, her drunk boyfriend "Jenks" drags her off and winds up dead in a car crash. It's okay, though, because the recuperating Delia later breaks out of her depression to announce that she will still serve as the sorority's nominee for Honeysuckle Queen. Maggie soon tires of this and transforms from a naive sorority girl whose hair bounces all over her face to an embattled civil rights defender. At the movie's start, she loves her boyfriend - Boots - even though his father owns a plantation and treats Black workers See HEART, page 18 Emily Lloyd struggles valiantly in herrole as Peter F Cookie remains another tired Mafia movie.. former now particularly known for penning When Harry Met Sally), is convoluted and bogged down with too many details. The ulti- mate result is that the audience loses interest in the plight of the characters onscreen. Susan Seidelman (Desperately Seeking Susan, Making Mr. Right) is one of the more talented and creative directors today. Here, though, she thinks that by dress- ing Cookie up in clothes recylced from her past films, she will ef- fectively recreate the Mafia lifestyle. Seidelman toses in too many muscial sequences and tries to over-dazzle her audience with excessively colorful sets and backgrounds. The flair with which she pre- sented downtown life in New York City in Desperately Seek- ing Susan is lost in the subway ride over to Brooklyn. 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