The Making of ''Evita'' (1996)

Releasing the how-we-did-it story before a flick is even in theaters smacks a bit of self-promotion. Even if we shelve that objection to Alan Parker's The Making of ''Evita'', however, others arise: the fat price tag versus its slim heft (about 100 pages); the captioning of movie stills as if they were the actual historical events (thus sun-dappled, gorgeously attired extras become ''The populist insurrection of October 17, 1945''); the whiff of exasperated condescension toward the Argentinean and Hungarian locations (director Parker calls modern Buenos Aires architecture ''hideous and mindless''). It's impossible to judge the performances from pictures, though a shot of Madonna captioned ''Eva collapses while receiving communion'' looks a lot like her Versace ad from about a year ago. La Ciccone's take? ''When I'm a very old woman...maybe I won't want to get out of my rocking chair and go to the movies. Maybe I'll just want to look at the book. Maybe you will, too.'' Maybe not. C-