Fall Movie Preview: October 1993

Short Cuts
Starring: Anne Archer, Bruce Davison, Robert Downey Jr., Peter Gallagher, Buck Henry, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Jack Lemmon, Huey Lewis, Lyle Lovett, Andie MacDowell, Frances McDormand, Matthew Modine, Julianne Moore, Christopher Penn, Tim Robbins, Annie Ross, Lori Singer, Madeleine Stowe, Lili Taylor, Lily Tomlin, Tom Waits, Fred Ward.
Directed by: Robert Altman.
In the opening sequence of The Player, the knowing satire of Hollywood that reignited his career, director Robert Altman lampooned the standard Hollywood pitch meeting, in which desperate writers and directors sell the movies they want to make as weird hybrids of movies that have already scored (''It's Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman''). Though Altman has thrown many a beautiful curveball in his long career, he has stubbornly refused to master the pitch: Witness Short Cuts, his expansive new human comedy. It could never have been pitched because it can claim no precedents, not even previous Altman multicharacter panoramas like Nashville or A Wedding.

Based on nine short stories and one narrative poem by the late Raymond Carver — who specialized in capturing the small, often desperate, moments in ordinary lives — Short Cuts follows 22 characters as they wander through the suburban sprawl of Southern California. Unlike Nashville, this film has no one moment in which they all converge. Instead, the director invites his audience to eavesdrop on a series of muted dramas: An L.A. newscaster (Davison) and his wife (MacDowell) lose a son in a freak accident; on a fishing trip, three friends (Henry, Lewis, and Ward) discover a young woman's corpse; a coffee- shop waitress (Tomlin) and her limo-driver husband (Waits) toast their marriage in the middle of a minor earthquake; a doctor (Modine) and his wife (Moore) share a hot tub and a host of hostilities with another couple (Ward and Archer).

With a different group of actors assembling each week to film their stories, Altman savored the experiment. ''I'm always looking for something that isn't just a plot,'' he says. ''Here we have multiple stories that are going on concurrently. I'm taking great liberties with the characters in the stories, crossing them from one story to another, but I'm trying to keep the general ambience of Carver.''

The departure from Carver's stories has the blessing of his widow, poet Tess Gallagher, who says that Carver frequently rewrote his own stories after their first publication. ''Ray often said that he'd rather rewrite than write a story,'' she says. ''The stories have been so revised during the 11 years we were together, I just decided, well, this is another rewrite, only it's Altman doing it. I had a lot of trust that Bob loved the things that were genuine in the stories, and he would not leave those things behind.''

Fine, but does the darn thing work? ''I'm not saying this is going to be successful,'' says Altman, ''but it seems to be working. No one's going to know what it is until we put it together.'' (Oct. 3)
Buzz: Short Cuts is assured a rapturous critical reception, but its deadpan style and 187-minute running time could prove wearying — especially to audiences used to seeing movies that wear their emotions on their sleeves.

Mother's Boys
Starring: Jamie Lee Curtis, Peter Gallagher, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Luke Edwards, Colin Ward, Vanessa Redgrave.
Directed by: Yves Simoneau.
If she must play the mom, Jamie Lee Curtis figures she might as well be an evil one. ''I've made quite a few movies with children,'' she says. ''I'm at that age [34], you know? That will be my ride for the next 10 years. But this time I liked not having to be liked.''

Likable she isn't, but her character could have been truly hideous. In Simoneau's loose adaptation of novelist Bernard Taylor's grim 1988 psychological thriller, Curtis' twisted, manipulative Jude blithely returns to reclaim the family she abandoned three years earlier.

Although Mom warps her eldest son (Edwards) in an attempt to exact revenge on her hubby (Gallagher), Curtis shied away from the incestuous implications in the story. ''It would have been very difficult for me to use that just as a tool in a thriller,'' she says. Her sensitivity also had a business-side payoff. Well aware of their R-rated film's eventual home, the producers, according to Curtis, shot ''TV versions of quite a bit of the movie.'' (Oct. 15)
Buzz: One part ''Yikes!'' One part ''Yuck!''

Malice
Starring: Alec Baldwin, Nicole Kidman, Bill Pullman, Bebe Neuwirth, Anne Bancroft, George C. Scott.
Directed by: Harold Becker.
The minds behind this twisty thriller are so jittery about giving away its intricate plot turns that ''we had a hell of a time getting a trailer up for it,'' says director Becker (Sea of Love). This much we know: A serial killer is stalking students at an ivy-covered Northeastern women's college, complicating the lives of a well-meaning dean (Pullman) and his wife (Kidman). Which leaves Baldwin, playing a surgeon, as the bad guy? Maybe, maybe not.

As shooting was about to start at Smith College in Northampton, Mass., a campus rumor spread that Malice's closely guarded script contained violent scenes against women; students threatened a protest that would halt production. Producer Rachel Pfeffer met with a student rep. ''I told her that this is a smart thriller,'' says Pfeffer, ''and it has nothing of the violence of Basic Instinct. The next day we had half the student body watching us make this movie.''

Meanwhile, the stars were wrapping up an intense month-long rehearsal period. Kidman consulted with a psychiatrist about her role, and Baldwin observed more than a dozen surgeries and learned to apply stitches. For Pullman, who plays Meg Ryan's hapless fiancé in Sleepless in Seattle, the role of educator came naturally: He taught theater for two years at Montana State University in Bozeman. ''There were some aspects of academia that I'd love to have gotten into the script,'' he says. ''You know, that feeling of what it is to be poor and teach.'' (Oct. 1)
Buzz: Some say there may be a few too many red herrings.