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.