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There's a moment in Steven Spielberg's 1997 dinosaur sequel "Lost World: Jurassic Park" which has always stuck with me. The maverick big game hunter played by Pete Postlethwaite is nonchalantly leading a caravan of jeeps to round up various cloned dinosaurs. The ease with which the character hunts down the animals and scoops them up with zip-lines brings to mind Mr. Spielberg's recent directorial method.

Here's the man who is more or less credited with inventing the summer blockbuster with "Jaws" in 1975. He then enjoyed an almost unequalled string of success with (ignoring "1941") "Close Encounters of the Third Kind", "Raiders of the Lost Ark" (and its sequels) and "E.T. the Extra Terrestrial." However, recently, perhaps beginning with the original "Jurassic Park" in 1993, Mr. Spielberg's films have changed. He used to say that he makes movies that he used to like as a child. Now it's possible he's making movies that he knows the audience will like. He's not selling out necessarily because he is still a master of filmmaking, but it's possible that he's gotten complacent in his old age. Rather than take a chance on an ending or plot point that might offend a few audience members, he settles for the easy out. He's just leading the caravan, rounding up the summer blockbuster dollars.

"War of the Worlds" is a perfect example of this trend. Mr. Spielberg's take on the H.G. Wells classic – already adapted twice before – is a fine, competent film with very little to recommend it. The characters, a failed father (Tom Cruise, wearing his blue collar on his sleeve), his rebellious teenage son (Justin Chatwin, channeling a young Mr. Cruise) and his precocious daughter (Dakota Fanning, filling Drew Barrymore's shoes from "E.T.") have all been done to better effect in other films. The plot which revolves around an alien assault on the entire planet (I'm not sure why it's called "War of the Worlds" since humans can't do much to fight these things) provides the standard explosions and close-calls.

The efficient script by David Koepp ("Spider-man", "Panic Room") and Josh Friedman ("Chain Reaction") delivers the requisite thrills but holds up to precious little scrutiny. Why, for example, did the writers choose to have the alien war machines (called "tripods") already existing underground on Earth? How is it possible that hundreds of years of excavation have never uncovered even one of the many thousands necessary for an invasion force of the size shown in the film? It is also never made clear what the aliens want and why they're invading in the first place. Worst of the all, the aliens themselves, when they're finally revealed, are jaw-droppingly disappointing.

"War of the Worlds" is nothing more than a popcorn movie, but it's not a particularly satisfying one. Everyone involved has done better work. Mr. Spielberg has been very vocal about the fact that he made this film very quickly using digital techniques. For once, his alacrity shows. There's a wonderful moment in which the characters are trying to make sense of everything that's happened while driving in the only working car in town. Mr. Spielberg films the scene in a continuous sweeping 360 degree shot around the vehicle. This sequence alone is a wonder of spirited, inventive filmmaking. Aside from that, though, the film's special effects are less than special, the creature and tripod designs are derivative, the climactic scenes unravel with little momentum and the ending is nearly a slap in the face to everything that came before. Just when it seemed like Mr. Spielberg might be maturing into a filmmaker with some much-needed cynicism, you realize he's still just out there rounding up the dollars.

Intriguing title, but don’t be tempted: it’s the regardless Noachian slop with a young and disinfected country girl running away from her auntie’s farm (‘I must declare out what lies on the other side of our fields’) and discovering a unappetizing contemporary life in Munich. The chief perverter is played by Harry Reems, later to appear in Deep Throat. Sarno’s rule has a slim plodding charm, and the foreigners in the cast require deliciously wayward English.

A splendid split during the credits, with Lester displaying his dazzling skills in perfectly timed slapstick, sets the richness for the most satirical of the series so far. Here our superhero undergoes a psychotic nullification and turns into a natural sleazo as he comes up against a megalomaniac tycoon (Vaughn in fine form) who is using computer wizard Pryor as an accessory in his attempts to take over the world and annihilate Superman. Unfortunately the pacy humour of the first half soon dwindles to a simple-minded acme, and Pryor hams shamelessly, in spite of again proving that he’s wealthiest in honest parts or as a wood-up fetter. Enjoyable, nevertheless.

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Spiky yet vulnerable is an appealing combination that Annie Potts has in abundance; it was there in “Designing Women” and “Love and Antagonistic,” but it comes into the open air fullest extent strength in “Dangerous Minds,” the season’s latest film-to-TV-series transport. Potts takes over the role of ex-Seafaring turned inner-bishopric guru Louanne Johnson that Michelle Pfeiffer originated in the fade away.

No leap is required to believe Potts is Louanne, a diminutive white woman determined to succeed in a hostile cityscape of black and Latino kids who long ago figured out the odds against success and threw in the towel.

The show opens with images of a chain-link fence, clusters of students huddled and seething with suspicion, and a blast of hip-hop as Louanne makes her way through the school’s public spaces. She’s wrapped in protective layers of clothing, but her short-cropped red hair sends out a more pointed signal. It’s not long before she faces down the first threat to her authority a strapping young man who just doesn’t want to sit down. Of course, she wins.

Louanne is the latest in a long tradition of TV teachers who really care, from James Franciscus’ Mr. Novak to Lloyd Haynes’ Pete Dixon (“Room 222″) to Ken Howard’s Ken Reeves in “The White Shadow.”

Louanne will take in a young single mother (Tamala Jones) struggling to extricate herself from an abusive boyfriend, and she mows lawns so Mr. Won’t-sit-down (Greg Serano) can study. When a sweet boy (Vicellous Reon Shannon) falls asleep in class, she wakes him with a kiss on the cheek, to the boisterous enjoyment of his classmates.

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“Now you get to remember me for the rest of your life,” she says, and you know he will, even while entertaining doubts about how long that troubled life may be.

In her classroom, Louanne brings the words of Steinbeck and Wolfe (Thomas, not Tom) to life. She’s a soft touch with respect to grades, which gains her a nemesis in the evocatively named Bud Bartkus (Stanley Anderson), who may be counted on to be scandalized by her methods several times per episode. Bud is white; Louanne also has a black foil in Jerome Griffin (K. Todd Freeman, replaced after the premiere by Michael Jace), a counselor who has seen too many Louanne types burn out after a semester or two. But he has his eye on her, and you can see an alliance in the making.

Yes, it’s sentimental and often strains credibility. But “Dangerous Minds” is also keenly humane, a belligerent bulwark against cynicism. Moreover, Potts heads a terrific ensemble that makes you care about these kids and this teacher.

The show itself may be dangerous business for ABC: Hourlong dramas about teachers are as popular as documentaries on the economy. Even the well-liked “White Shadow” never made it to the top of the Nielsen rankings. Then again, teachers are very big this season, and Louanne Johnson’s a pip.

By

Dennis Lim

Tuesday, Apr 17 2001

Coy and fitful as it might seem,

The Low Down

captures the latent anxieties of a hazy, ambling existence with pinpoint accuracy. No chic urban-slacker exercise,

Jamie Thraves

's wistfully amusing first feature sutures vignettes of nonevent and inaction into a decisive portrait of youthful malaise. The film, which concerns a group of fidgety going-on-30 Londoners, avoids both faux-eloquent, self-pitying assertions of ennui and the sweeping presumptuousness of a generational manifesto. It's simply a candid, unpatronizing account of a predicament that might be described as the onset of embitterment: the mounting pressure to choose between running a risk and revising an ideal; the creeping recognition that what lies ahead has, while you weren't looking, shape-shifted from a dauntingly vague expanse to a minefield of narrowing options.

photo: Nick Derange

Dear as folk: Gillen and Ashfield in

The Low Down

Details

The Low Down

Written and directed by Jamie Thraves

Shooting Gallery

Loews Formal

Opens April 20


The Claim

Directed by Michael Winterbottom

Written by Naive Cottrell Boyce

Of like mind Artists

Opens April 20

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Crippled by these (and other) gnarled neuroses, Frank (

Aidan Gillen

) has settled on a coping mechanism of sorts?mostly, he smiles and tries to recede into the background. An art school grad who works as a propmaker for TV shows, he lives in a flatshare next door to a crack den. A new housing arrangement is long overdue, but he may not be ready; in a nervous attempt at small talk with sweet-natured real estate agent Ruby (

Kate Ashfield

), he morbidly cites the French root for

mortgage

. They go out on a few dates, and though the rapport is evident and immediate, his habitual ambivalence soon gets in the way. As the rift between his two close mates widens (one burrows into cozy domesticity, the other clings to a lifestyle ostentatiously devoid of responsibility), nonconfrontational Frank flounders on in his self-imposed limbo. All the while, he battles a queasy, not-unrelated undercurrent of paranoia that freights the world at large with an almost surreal sense of menace.

Constructing a movie around a character who is essentially passive and inarticulate, Thraves dramatizes Frank's debilitating self-consciousness via a wealth of telltale detail. He's helped no end by Gillen, who first attracted attention for playing a ruthless slut on the original


Queer as Folk


, and here delivers a tour de force of miniaturist gesture?all bashful tics, wary silences, and increasingly ill-concealed aggression.

Cinematographer Igor Jadue-Lillo's long-lens, short-attention-span Super-16 work fosters an air of offhand intimacy. The camera is by turns supremely alert (pouncing on a symptomatic snatch of body language) and as easily distracted as the protagonist, trailing off without warning to . . . the trajectory of a discarded cigarette, the inscription on a T-shirt, the underbelly of a low-flying plane overhead. This rangy, immensely likable film quivers with a playful new-wavey syncopation (jump cuts, freeze-frames). The recurrent trick of nonsynchronous sound and image mirrors Frank's perpetual dislocation?the feeling that he's been reduced to a bemused spectator of his own life. Some of the weight is ultimately lifted off our brooding hero, but the film takes its leave without prescriptions. Thraves knows better than to equate the organic, open-ended process of "moving on" with the resolution of a chronic existential dilemma.

Michael Winterbottom

's gristle-and-grime adaptation of

Jude the Obscure

was an honorably bleak affair, and the director who has until now never repeated himself strives again for Hardy-sized wreckage with

The Claim

, which borrows the premise of

The Mayor of Casterbridge

and transposes it to snowbound post-gold-rush

Sierra Nevada

. A prospector (

Peter Mullan

) who sold his wife and baby for mining rights now lords over the settlement of Kingdom Come. Years later, the dying missus returns (and she's played by Tess herself,

Nastassja Kinski

) with their grown daughter (

Sarah Polley

) in tow. Winterbottom is in plain awe of the cruel, blinding landscape, and justifiably so. But he soft-pedals the tragic dimension, with the result that

The Claim

seems more than a little frostbitten?a numb, oddly dispassionate trudge toward predestined doom, inevitable in all the wrong ways.

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