ARTS Tuesday, March 5, 1991 ,The Michigan Daily Page 5 Was hi Book of Love dir. Robert Shaye by Gregg Flaxman In the same class as the many films that have the middle-aged glancing back on years past and mistakes made, Book of Love opens with Jack Twiller (Michael McKean) listening to his answering machine. His lawyer informs him that his ex-wife has won a hefty divorce settlement; on the brighter side, he goes on to say that one of Jack's high school sweethearts is back in town. This is the pretense for a post-pubescent retrospective in which Jack's own high school yearbook photograph - no joke - leads him through a mishmash of memories not unlike the Ghost of Christmas Past. There's something so harmless about Robert Shaye's first film that, gh scho in the more compassionate and sen- timental moments, it's worthy of cable schlock, or maybe even made- for-TV fare. Otherwise, Book of Love, with roughly three separate opportunities to laugh, is so wholly unconnected and so poorly conceived that it cannot even justify its con- clusion, much less its budget. It's 1956 and a naive young Jack (Chris Young) finds his family mov- ing to a new neighborhood. He's only assured of one thing: that he'll get the crap kicked out of him. Though this happens, Jack is even- tually befriended by Crutch (Keith Coogan) and two other socially-pe- ripheral types. They form a junta of wanna-be's who aspire to date the elite women, yet who seem to get rejected at every turn. Jack, in particular, has his sights set on Lily (Josie Bisset), but this is one sophomore tap-dancer who's off limits. She's in tight with Angelo ol that dumb? Gabooch (Beau Dremann), the mo- torcycle bully and New Kids on the Block clone who says a couple of words during the film, but generally reverts to a Cro-Magnon sneer. Shaye's film conspires to make us remember a time when getting the girl was more important than losing a limb, when the Prom seemed the convergence of every hormonal and social urge that we'd ever known. Of course, any penchant for nostalgia will have you identify- ing with Jack's plight, but the teenage angst wears thin. Book of Love does not have the complexity nor the mischief of any number of its predecessors, and what it does have is generally ignored. Of course, the older Jack Twiller's ex- wife is Lily; yet in the course of the hour-and-a-half flashback, they never consummate anything. It's only after Jack's gone to the prom with An- gelo's sister, Gina (Tricia Leigh Fisher), that it's explained that Lily got jealous and fell for Jack. The in- coherence is rampant. Jack, for instance, returns home at the film's opening to an enor- mous apartment, with the filmmak- ers literally tagging a sign on him informing us that he's "made it big." This is the same Jack that seems so incredibly average in high school, whose hormones remain consistently in line with those of every other male in the film, who is told by his guidance counselor that he can't get into any university. The filmmakers never give any indication that this really isn't the case; there's only the vague assurance that Jack is "unique" and has a "vivid imagination." The older Jack's success is nothing less than a non sequitur. At times, Book of Love aspires to be a "kinder, gentler" version of Porky's, as if America needed an- other film with characters named Crutch (Keith Coogan) and Jack (Chris Young) cleverly hide their naked bodies with cardboard boxes in Book of Love. "Drainpipe," "Meatball," "Bunny." Wait for it on cable. and BOOK OF LOVE is playing at Bri- arwood and Showcase. -o -a .In the wee hours, turn on the boob tube Bok by Mark Binelli It's two a.m. and you know exactly where you are and that is the problem, because you are sitting in your dorm room/house/apartment and you are not tired at all and ev- eryone you know is either asleep or studying or doing something else with somebody else that you weren't invited to do as well. So you think to yourself, "I'm going to finally start reading that Dostoevsky novel I bought at Dave's my first year here and haven't picked up since." Then you turn on the television. Someone is showing sports bloopers on Jay Leno. The first blooper is of a man in a rowboat be- ing bitten by a goose. You change the channel, but on Arsenio Hall, Arsenio is wearing a purple suit and explaining to his audience that Sad- dam spelled backwards is "Mad Ass." He then cracks a crowd-pleasing "I've fallen and I can't get up" joke. You know Dave will be on in a half- hour, but you wonder if it will be a re-run, and if so, what his hair will look like. You think to yourself, "I would trade my Ray Ban sunglasses for some information on what's worth watching after midnight other than Late Night with David Letter- man." (Any sunglasses or objects of equivalent value can be dropped off at the Student Publications Building, 420 Maynard. Ask for Mark.) The Top Ten Late-Night Televi- sion Shows (Besides Letterman): 1. Later with Bob Costas - Monday-Thursday, 2:05 a.m., Chan- nel 4 Detroit (NBC) I used to picture all "sports fans" as overweight white men anxiously awaiting the outcome of the "Bud Bowl" in their Motor City Bad Boy T-shirts. Bob Costas has erased this unfair stereotype from my mind. The smooth-as-Miracle-Whip sportscaster turned graveyard-shift TV host runs the most intelligent talk show on television (that I watch, anyway - the PBS channel on my TV set is broken, you understand), featuring the guests who are too smart for Ar- senio and too young for Johnny and too afraid of being made fun of by Letterman, ranging from George McGovern to Robert Altman to David Crosby. Costas can even make someone like Ed McMahon seem hip. When he was a guest on Later, the Million Dollar McMahon explained that one of the reasons he's always laughing at Johnny's stupid monologues is because before the show, the two wild men crack jokes, "sometimes a bit risque," Ed can- didly admitted. So during the mono- logue, when Johnny says "Aren't those laws about tearing those tags off of mattresses just crazy?" he might really be making a subtle al- lusion to a dirty joke he made back- stage concerning Shelly Winters and Don Rickles.I And not only are his guests sentient, but Costas actually asks informed, probing questions, and he actually has almost an entire half- hour to talk to them. And most of all, Costas is one of people who can aptly be described by the word "earnest," literally jumping out of his chair, for instance, when Ed mentioned that his favorite Johnny character is El Moldo. When Bob grabs Ed's arm and shouts gleefully, "I love El Moldo," it's obvious that Bob genuinely means it. 2. Dragnet - every day, 3:30 a.m., Nickolodean Jack Webb is the ultimate straight-man in the ultimate sit-com about cops featuring the best Sahara- dry irony next to listening to Milli Vanilli's "Girl I'm Gonna Miss You." 3. People's Court - Monday- Friday, midnight, Channel 20 De- troit Judge Wapner is still a mean old prick after all these years, particu- larly to women and anyone who can't speak English very well. In other words, great fun watching peo- ple who are willing to subject them- selves to abuse, humiliation, and condescension from a stupid retired authoritarian asshole just to get on the TV. 4. Love Connection - Monday- Friday, 11:30 p.m., Channel 20 De- troit If you've ever wondered what kind of people actually call those 1- 900-LONELY-PATHETIC-N- HORNY hotlines. This show is the best way to find out without shellingout the seven dollars a minute. Good first-date gossip about people you don't know or care about and can laugh at and openly choose sides without feeling guilty. 5. Siskel and Ebert - Sunday, 1:00 a.m., Channel 7 Detroit We all know they're great, but the question of the hour is and al- ways has been: who is the greatest? My money still goes on Rog (a.k.a. "the Fat One"), friend of Russ Meyer who wrote the screenplays for the incredible Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (the psychedelic Citizen Kane, with Orson Welles' "Rosebud" death overshadowed by the decapitation of porn star Lance Rock by a nude hermaphrodite) and Who Killed Bambi?, the Sex Pistols movie that should've been but couldn't be made, which was to include a scene in which Sid Vicious raped his own mother. Remember this and smile the next time the guys start bitching about how there's too much violence in cinema these days. 6. MTV - all day, all night, ev- ery day, for the rest of your life That Australian guy is a real dickhead and they make all the VJ chicks wear tight sleazy outfits, but hey, that's what MTV has always been about, right? Dickhead guys with tight, sleazy chicks in their videos still abound (David Lee Roth's new video even features a Monster Jeep), as well as too many power ballads, but Iggy Pop in heavy rotation was good to see, and as long as you remember to take this type of output in VERY SMALL DOSES, preferably while you're also doing something else, like exer- cising or reading or sleeping, it only does a minimal amount of damage. 7. CNN Headline News - same as above "Hey, is it top of the -hour?" is probably the most frequently asked television-related question in my, apartment, rivalled only by the slightly more awkward, "Hey, is it top of the half-hour?" And come on, it was worth suffering through all of those Luther Campbell sound bites just to hear the insufferable Bernie Shaw crying "We're in the middle of hell!" from under a table in Baghdad. Any newspaper is still always better, but never as current. 8. Movies So Bad That They Haven't Even Been Released On Video, And If They Have, You Sure As Hell Won't Find Them at Your Local Family Blockbuster Store - varies, you just have to be vigilant One recent example that springs to mind is Can't Stop the Music, the Village People vehicle in which they perform the wonderfully homo- sexually-undertoned "Milkshake" and frolic together in a swimming pool during "YMCA." The boys got a lit- tle help from their friends, most no- tably Bruce Jenner and a young Steve Guttenberg, but as one of the band members (the gay biker guy, I think) declared before they took the stage for their big final-performance finale-extravaganza, "Leather men don't get nervous." I missed the first half and wasn't able to tape it, so please don't send me MTS messages requesting copies. 9. Night Flight - Sunday, 2:30 a.m., Channel 7 Detroit Stream-of-consciousness pop-cul- ture at its finest, with a soothingly plastic female voice-over as your guide through videos, film shorts, stand-up comics, and profiles of people and things that you've proba- bly always wanted to see profiled, but only at 2:30 in the morning. The show used to be something like seven hours long when it was on the USA Network, but this newer tease- version is only an hour. The last one I watched featured segments on John Cougar Mellencamp, James Garner, Jane's Addiction, an Italian film en- titled "Goodnight, Michelangelo," and the obligatory tribute to John Wayne. 10. One Day At a Time - Mon- day-Thursday, 3:30 a.m., WGN The funny thing about the great- est sitcoms of the '70s is that every one had an Italian character, sort of greasy, usually related to the under- world somehow, with a completely ridiculous name, yet always by far the coolest character on the show (see Vinnie Barbarino from Wel- come Back, Kotter, Chaci and the Fonz from Happy Days, Carmine "the Big Ragu" from Laverne and Shirley, etc.) The only '80s Italian sit-coin star to even come close was Tony Danza, who played "Tony" on Taxi and now plays "Tony" on Who's the Boss, and who was first seen as the class- conscious gardner slapping rich young Marilyn Chamber's face with his three-foot penis in the porn classic Insatiable II, which is exactly why there are no longer any prime-time shows worth watching. But going back to One Day at a Time, Pat Harrington Jr.'s Schneider would fit perfectly, except I think he's supposed to be Polish, so that leaves us with the lovely Valerie Bertinelli (as Barbara Romano) who isn't really greasy or a criminal, but her last name in real life rhymes with mine (unless she changed it to Van Halen, in which case One Day At a Time automatically is rescinded from my list and is replaced by The 700 Club.) Nothing if Not Critical by Robert Hughes Alfred A. Knopf There are two types of people called "art critic": those who wishy- washily comment about art and those who really criticize it. Robert Hughes (The Shock of the New, The Fatal Shore) is one of the latter. Writing for such a pop-ish and superficial magazine as Time, Hughes has been able to consistently provide rich, incisive art criticism in entertaining and understandable terms. His best work from the past decade has finally been collected in Nothing if Not Critical. For a book about art, Nothing if Not Critical is initially surprising in that it contains no pictures whatso- ever. Maybe this is because he cov- ers something like 130 artists in the book's 430 pages, and to illustrate each one would have made the book five times as long. Or maybe pic- tures just aren't necessary. The art Hughes talks about, though ostensi- bly on canvas or paper, really works, as he puts it, "between the ears." Most of the essays, though su- perficially dealing with concrete works of art, are actually about the meanings, connotations, resonances, and effects of that art. Hughes never talks about how the art looks or what it's made of. Instead, he dis- cusses the art's context, and how that context relates to all of us. Moreover, Hughes does this in such a profound and enjoyable way that one soon forgets that there are no pictures here to look at (or that there were any pictures in the first place). Often, Hughes' statements tran- scend the current topic and become philosophical comments in and, of themselves. For instance, when commenting on the last disturbing works of Francisco Goya (anl8th century Spanish painter), Hughes ca- sually writes, "Hysteria, evil, cruelty See BOOKS, Page 7 1 991 Student Recognition Awards The deadline for receipt of nominations for 1991 Student Recognition Awards is March 6, 1991 Nomination forms must be submitted to the Student Organization Development Center, 2202 Michigan Union on or before that date in order to be considered. For more information, contact SODC at 763-5900 A -CLAS S ACT '91 A LASTING IMPRESSION The University of Michigan Department of Recreational Sports presents "MICHIGAN CLASSICS" ADULT SLOW-PITCH SOFTBALL ORGANIZATIONAL MEETING SPEECHMAKERS - wWANTED! Here's the chance to tell your classmates what your years here at The University of Michigan have meant to you. WHO: All eligible graduating LS&A seniors (through Winter Term 1991)