FT923-5998 _AN-CH1BVACOFT 920827 FT 27 AUG 92 / Arts: Four dudes search for a plot - Cinema By NIGEL ANDREWS JUICE (15) MGMs West End, Electric BFI NEW DIRECTORS Metro THE CUTTING EDGE (PG) MGM Haymarket BODY HEAT (18) Barbican HITLER: A FILM FROM GERMANY ICA from next week TAKING the rap used to be something people did for a crime they had or had not committed. Now it is what filmgoers do (with or without criminal record) when pinned to their seats by black movies whose plot sense is as minimal as their musical variety. Ernest Dickerson's Juice is a Harlem-set rap-scored melodrama about four young blacks who fall out with the law after a robbery with murder. Since it marks the writing-directing debut of Spike Lee's longtime camera-person, the film has gained encomia from those publications that worship at the altar of Political Correctness. 'Energetic, entertaining and engagaging, and without the feeling of difficult truths being forgotten' says Time Out. And right-on ideologues will no doubt applaud the film's 90 percent non-white cast, the dialogue rich in local argot ('I'm gonna beat your ass', 'You gonna beat my ass?' 'Yes, I gonna ..' etc.) and the screenplay that weaves and feints through half an hour of tired street comedy before standing stiffly to attention to give us a 'plot'. This concerns aspiring disc jockey 'Q' (Omar Epps) and his two friends Steel and Rahim who are appalled when a fourth friend Bishop goes gun-crazy during a shop hold-up. Why he does so is unclear; but perhaps an earlier glimpse of Cagney on TV in White Heat has wired him up for mayhem. Either way, the film soon turns into a throwback Warners melodrama, with Bishop gunning for his former friends, and the early sub-Spike Lee street comedy is forgotten in a hail of B-movie cliches. We especially note the tilted angles and harsh-lit close-ups of the police interrogation sequence: these look as if they were kidnapped, feebly protesting, from Public Enemy or The Roaring Twenties. With its two-dimensional characters and trite moralising, this film would have been laughed off the screen if presented by white film-makers with white actors in white roles. But we cannot laugh around - or we are not supposed to - with the cinema of Spike Lee and his acolytes. Although some of those film-makers, like Lee himself, are talented social satirists, most like Mr Dickerson are bargain-basement disciples empowered and encouraged only by the mighty karma of PC How mighty that karma is is evident in the 1992 New Directors programme of shorts sponsored by the British Film Institute with Channel 4. This is the fifth year's fruit from the annual scheme whereby six aspiring film-makers receive Pounds 30,000 apiece to make calling-card movies. The quality is so low this year that we need not detain you with an autopsy on each film. But I wonder if the reason for the cinematic poverty is not that ethnic tokenism is being exercised in the choice of directors. Three are white (one male, two female), one is black, one is Asian and one is Dutch-Trinidadian. For good measure, lesbianism, the environment and cultural colonialism are among the Important Themes treated. This would be fine if the films were any good. But they are so banal that one wonders what the 990-odd submissions apparently rejected by the BFI were like. Were they bad? Were they banal? Or were they just Politically Incorrect? Better luck, and much better selection, in 1993. It is not a good week - it is not a good summer - and Hollywod fails to come to the rescue. 'I wanna see your ass in the air' shouts the trainer to the figure skater in The Cutting Edge; much around the time that that part of the filmgoer's anatomy has slid deep into the upholstery in response to this dotty tale of love and ambition on the ice rink. Tony Gilroy wrote the script, Paul M. Glaser (TV's Starsky) directed, and DB Sweeney and Moira Kelly play the ice partners for whom initial antagonism is a prelude to - yes] - passion. The wiser characters realise this early on. 'Foreplay]' they chuckle avuncularly as Sweeney slings Kelly life-endangeringly on to the ice or she screams at him down a hotel corridor after a drunken dinner date. Never mind. We can always turn to more peaceable matters like the reception accorded our hero's career-change - he used to be an ice-hockey player - by his redneck bar-owning father ('Are they gonna make you shave you legs?'). Or for tragicomic relief there is Roy Dotrice as the duo's trainer, struggling with his Russian accent much as Laocoon struggled with his consignment of snakes. Hokum so wholehearted earns affection if not admiration. It skates over every known emotion in the pop-melodramatic rink, while never pausing to make an original incision on any. Revival corner this week features Lawrence Kasdan's 1981 directing debut Body Heat, launching a Barbican season in honour of actor William Hurt. Adultery and murder; Hurt and Kathleen Turner; and a shameless set of plunderings from the fatal-woman thrillers of yesteryear. Double Indemnity, The Woman In The Window, Out Of The Past: bring on the Venetian blinds, paint the dialogue in wisecracking monochrome. But if Body Heat is plagiarism posturing as art, it is still more enjoyable than anything director Kasdan has made since. Main reason: a script is served up with a salty crackle by Hurt and Turner, aided by Mickey Rourke's debut cameo as a soft-spoken bomb-maker. Jostling an 11-year-old American film is a 15-year-old European one. Hans-Jurgen Syberberg's Hitler: A Film From Germany, revived at the ICA, is a monstrous 7-hour cabaret from the man who brought us Ludwig: Requiem For A Virgin King and Parsifal the movie. On soundstages thick with smoke, puppetry, slide projections and other theatrical-pedagogic devices oft called 'Brechtian', modern German history is recounted for us as if by a mad schoolteacher with a runaway props budget. The good news is that Syberberg both absorbs and contextualises the kitsch associations that grew around Hitler in 1970s culture, when in such musicals as Cabaret and such films as Visconti's The Damned Herr Fuhrer became a superstar. The bad news is - well, actually there is no bad news. Against expectation, Syberberg's seminar is horribly compulsive. Even at its most hectoring - a toga'd Adolf rearing from a grave marked 'RW' (Richard Wagner), Goering or Goebbels puppets cavorting against Leni Riefenstahl back-projections - Hitler has a passionate wit about the fatal windings of politics and an absurdist ferocity that puts the hiss back into history. How disturbing, though, that the summer has brought us so few new films from Europe and so many old ones reminding us of her former glory. The European Film Award nominations, just announced, pour salt on the continent's wounded self-esteem. The awards are nicknamed 'Felixes' in reference to Neil Simon's odd couple. They were Felix and Oscar, you recall, of whom Oscar was the flamboyant shambolic one while Felix was the fastidious introvert. Oh what wisdom from careless sobriquets] While Oscar wassails loudly and untidily each April, Felix dons his dinner jacket each autumn graciously to honour films that few people have heard of and fewer have seen. The Financial Times London Page 13