*Atts
The Michigan Daily
Thursday, June 3, 1982
Page 7
A selection of campus film highlights
Fahrenheit 451 American Graffiti
(Francois Truffaut, 1966) (George Lucas, 1973)
In the far, far future reading is Before Lucas brought you Star
illegal and firemen start fires in- Wars, he set his sights on a small
stead of putting them out. Ray town in California and captured the
Bradbury's tale of a man who takes confusion of what to do with one's
a book home to read is particularly life in the early '60s. The whole
compelling in today's world of multi- movie takes place in one hilarious
channel cable tv and videotapes. night of misadventures and stars
(Friday, June 4; Nat. Sci. 7:15). Ron Howard, Paul LeMat, Cindy
The Buddy Holly Story Williams, and the irrepressable
Richard Dreyfess. (Saturday, June
(SteveRash, 1978)- 5; Lorch Hall, 7:30, 9:30).
Gary Busey gives a startlingly real Body Heat
characterization of the late great
(Lawrence Kasdan, 1981)
In the heat of the night, William Hurt
C> .. : . ifalls passionately in love with
another man's wife. The sparks fly
: as one thing leads to another, and
Fi m s the stage is set for muider most foul.
our basic mystery with a twist kind
of love affair. (Saturday, June 5;
Buddy Holly in this film biography. Auditorium A, 7:30, 9:35).
Even though the movie is a tad short The 39 Steps
on drama, the infusion of plenty of
Holly classics, "That'll Be the Day" (Alfred Hitchcock, 1935)
and "Peggy Sue," makes the whole In typical Hitchcock fashion, Robert
thing work. (Friday, June 4; Donat and Madeline Carroll find
Auditorium A, 7:30, 9:30) themselves handcuffed to each other
as they race across England sear-
Breaking Away ching for a killer and the answer to
(Peter Yates, 1979) the musical question, "What are the
Subtitled, "What I did during sum- 39 Steps?" (Monday, June 7, and
mer." The story of four friends as Tuesday, June 8; Michigan Theatre,,
they whittle away the summer after 4:00, 7:00, 8:30).
high school swimming, dating, and Ashes and Diamonds
racing their bikes. Screenplay by .d
Steven Tesich, who also wrote the (anrze ja, who
screen version of The World Accor- Fremthe man who brought you Man
ding to Garp, based on his own tur- of Marble and Man of Iron. (Wed-
bulent youth in Bloomington, In- nesday, June 9; Michigan Theatre,
diana. (Saturday, June 5; MLB 3, 4:00, 7:00, 9:00).
7:30, 9: 30). compiled by Richard Campbell
New cable channel
to rely on BBCs ows
'Death Wish II': A
By Christopher Potter
W HY DID John Hinckley have to go
pick on Taxi Driver?
The tunnelvision obsessions of our
most noted botched assassin have alas
lent a nouveau respectability to that
barnacled old hobgoblin censorship, in
recent times the exclusive swampland
property pf paranoics and little old
ladies in tennis shoes.
Hinckley's rapt, vocalized allegiance
to Taxi Driver's psychopathic
protagonist Travis Bickle seems to
have activated the dormant hostilities
of the book banners and celluloid bur-
ners among us. Once again the cry
"Unclean! Unclean!" is heard in the
land; once again moral crusaders and
vote-seeking congressmen rumble and
thunder over Hollywood's predilection
for glorifying murder in the streets.
The tragedy of it all is not Hinckley's
particular obsessions so much as his
aesthetics. Why, oh why did he have to
single out Martin Scorsese's brilliant
study of urban loneliness when he could
have gone after a piece of sludge the
natureof the current Deathwish II?
The later is a movie that surely gives
censorship a good name. A violent,
lumpish work concocted solely as an
economic investment, Deathwish II
makes one ashamed of the very
medium itself. For those fortunate
enough not to recall, forgive me for
refreshing your memory: The original
Deathwish (1974) dealt with Paul Ker-
sey (Charles Bronson), a politically
liberal New York architect whose wife
and daughter are set upon by a gang of
urban thugs. The wife is murdered, the
daughter raped and left a catatonic
vegetable by the attack.
Traumatized, Kersey drops his
ideology along with his three-piece suits
in order to personally search out and
destroy the killers. Once he's dispat-
ched them, he finds he's reluctant to
abandon his new cathartic; he thus
"
censorship
becomes a one-man vigilante crew, a
hooded avenger stalking the ghetto
streets ferreting out the human vermin
lurking in the shadows.
Kersey's activities prove effective
medicine: As his anonymous notoriety
spreads, New York's streetcrime rate
plummets dramatically until an em-
barrassed police department ap-
prehends and deports Kersey to
Chicago, presumably to continue his
eye-for-an-eye activities.
DEATH WISH II finds Kersey unex-
pectedly ensconced in Los Angeles; the
movie is otherwise identical to its
predecessor. This time our apparently
de-fanged hero is galvanized into action
when first his maid, then his daughter-
still in a mental hospital eight years
later-are raped and murdered by a
See BRONSON, Page 8
t ,
INDIVIDUAL THEATRES
5AAe .at 'ber' 7*1-700
r The most critically
acclaimed movie
of the year!
MY DINNER WITH
ANDRE
NEW YORK (AP) - Arnie Huber-
man took charge of programming for
The Entertainment Channel 18 months
ago, with the British Broadcasting
Corp. as his primary resource - an im-
posing, tough, rather vague, commit-
ment to the future of the country's
newest pay-cable network.
"I inherited a BBC schedule that was
nothing more than a generalization,'
Huberman says. "We looked at 5,000
hours of BBC shows and selected 217.
Those programs make up an important
part of our schedule, but only a part of
it.
"With the exception of the Broadway
plays we will show," he says, "most of
our programming is not well known in
this country. It's original - 90 percent
of the product is made-for-pay. That
means it's being seen for the first time
by the American public."
Rockefeller Center Cable Inc. and
RCA Cable Inc. will launch The Enter-
tainment Channel at 6 p.m. EDT
Friday. Programming, a mix of
theater, TV drama, comedy, action-ad-
venture, movies and family entertain-
ment, will continue round-the-clock.
Programs, most of them introduced
on weekends, will be repeated several
times in the succeeding weeks.
Huberman concedes the reality of the
marketplace demands a distinct
prodct.
"There are some things here that
come close to conventional television,"
he says. "But we're a pay service, so
we've got to give people something dif-
ferent, something that they'll pay for.
SUNDAY, JUNE
gam-3pnm
POTTRS W
Thurs, Frj-7:20, 9:25
SAT " SUN
only 52.00
, shows bhoe .
8:00 p.m.
SYLVESTER STALLONE
IS
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(PG)
Thurs, Fri-7:00, 9:00