ARTS
Page 10
Sunday, August 12, 1984
The Michigan Daily
'Grandview' is a one horse town
By Byron L. Bull
G RANDVIEW U.S.A. is a movie so
thin in substance and style that it's
difficult to get a full impression of it.
Although I just saw it. my memory is so
vague and my feelings so ambivalent
that it seems like years ago.
For a teenage exploitation movie, it's
surprisingly mild mannered, and
relatively free of the expected cheap
innuendos and drug jokes. The absence
of such cliches, I suppose, is a
refreshing change, but otherwise it's a
movie without any discernable direc-
tion or sense of purpose.
The setting is supposed to be a small
town in the heart of America, but it's
the usual homogenized version with a
grand two story Victorian home and
blandly handsome residents.
C. Thomas Howell plays Tim, the
bright, good looking boy who wants
desperately to get out of town and see
the real world. His father, in the stock
unsympathetic-but-deep-down-gentle-
father stereotype, just wants the boy to
get his heads out of the clouds and take
over the family real estate business.
Somehow, probably because Tim
doesn't mention his plans until the day
before graduation, it's hard to take the
dilemma seriously.
Though a veteran of several films
now, Howell doesn't have the strength
to flesh out his character with any per-
sonality quirks, nor does he have a
naturally appealing presence that can
survive without character weight. The
best he can do is mope about the
scenery, looking lost and self-pitying.
Enter Jamie Lee Curtis, whose low
burning sensuality and statuesque
beauty entrances the boy. Curtis'
character, Mike, a young woman who
struggles to keep running the
demolition derby her father left her, is
more thoroughly sketched out, and at
Jamie Lee Curtis and C. Thomas Howell share a tender moment in 'Grandview, U.S.A.' Their tenderness doesn't save
this sloppy youth flick.
times what little information we get
about her is preposterously silly.
Still, Curtis, while not a strong ac-
tress, does have a warm screen per-
sonality that is natural and unforced.
Unfortunately she speaks with a
distractingly phony accent that does
much to dilute the simple grace she
radiates.
In a little time Tim and Mike end up
in bed, though to little apparent cause.
The circumstances under which their
romance begins are poorly contrived,
and there isn't the slightest spark of
electricity to fuel it.
Their love making and shows of af-
fection are cool and dispassionate, and
not convincing for a second. Even in
the worst coming of age exploitation
films there's some hint that the young
man and older womatrearn-something
from each other, but not here. Perhaps
that's why the affair quietly fades from
the plotline without much elaboration.
The one character to have any degree
of liveliness is Mike's one time flame
Books we all should have read
WASHINGTON (AP) - The works of Shakespeare, the
Declaration of Independence, Mark Twain's Huckleberry
Finn and the Bible lead the list of works which every high
school student ought to be required to read, in the opinion of
some scholars, journalists, teachers and government and
cultural leaders.
They were surveyed informally and unscientifically by
William Bennett, chairman of the National Endowment for
the Humanities, after he was asked during a meeting with
reporters this summer whether there are some books that
every student in the country "might reasonably be expected
to have studied before he or she graduates from high school."
Bennett put the question to a list of experts of his own selec-
tion. Response from 325 people were compiled-73 replying to
Bennett's letter, 94 to an article that syndicated columnist
George Will devoted to the project and 168 high school
teachers who took part in summer seminars sponsored by the
government agency and the Mellon Foundation. Thirty
works were mentioned most frequently. Bennett commented
that any 10 of them "would compare favorably to what is
read in many schools," adding that he himself hadn't read all
30 on the list.
No book published in the last 30 years made the list.
Shakespeare's plays - especially Macbeth and Hamlet -
were the only works listed by a majority of the participants
- 71 percent. Fifty percent cited such documents of U.S.
history as the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution
and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Next came Twain's
classic novel, the Bible and these works of literature,
philosophy and politics.
Homner's dykse and Ihad
" Charles Dickens' Great Expectations and A Tale of Two
Cities.
" Plato's The Republic.
" John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
" Nathaniel Hawthorn's Scarlet Letter.
*Sophocles' Oedipus.
" Herman Melville's Moby Dick.
" George Orwell's 1984.
" Henry David Thoreau's Walden.
" The poems of Robert Frost.
' Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.
SF. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby.
" Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.
' Karl Marx's Communist Manifesto.
' Aristotle's Politics.
' The poems of Emily Dickinson.
' Feodor Dostoevski's Crime and Punishment.
' The novels of William Faulkner.
' J. D. Salinger's Catcher in the Rye which appeared in
1951.
' Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
' Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice.
' Ralph Waldo Emerson's essays and poems.
' Niccolo Machiavelli's The Prince.
' John Milton's Paradise Lost.
" Leo Tolstoy's War and Peace.
' Vergil's Aeneid.
Some of those who were surveyed objected to the project
..'e> k Yaee Tl N 1 lJ, ag 1 * ' 'a r
Slam, a derby driver whose own
marriage is on the rocks and whose
suppressed desires for Mike begin to
surface. Played by Patrick Swayze,
he's the only actor in the cast who is
convincing as a small town character.
=ishickish mannerisms and slurred
speech, coupled with a fiery temper,
make him the one lively member of the
cast. As well, he brings a touchingly
subdued beliveability to the scenes with
Curtis.
The screenplay by Ken Hixon is a
mess. It sets up potentially dramatic
situations such as Tim finding out his
father is trying to steal Mike's proper-
ty, then clumsily, seemingly absently
throws them away. Screen time that
should have been spent developing the
film's characters is instead wasted on
needless throwaway scenes of crashes
at the derby, or a tasteless bondage
sequence involving Slam's philan-
dering wife.
By the time the film ends, and
everybodys problems are cleanly, all too
easily, wrapped up in a matter of
minutes, you don't feel happy for the
characters but relieved that you can get
up and leave.
Director Randal Kleiser (Grease and
Blue Lagoon) deserves as much of the
blame as anyone. The film's sense of
pace is nil, without any highs or lows,
and so lacking in any mood that it might
have been directed by a ZOMBIE. The
closest Kleiser comes to trying to cap-
turing a tone is to dilute the soundtrack
with some muffled electronic ambient
sounds during the "poignant" scenes, a
technique stolen from Ron Brickman
and Risky Business.
Grandview is not just a bad movie,
it's an unmovie. It doesn't have enough
elements to qualify as a finished
product. It's so bleached out and dif-
fused that instead of borfng you, it
anesthetizes you.