Kim Basinger dreamed of Oscar... and then she woke up.

What's the perfect corrective to the now-in-the-Farmers'-Almanac Oscar Season? How about This Had Oscar Buzz, a blog compiling all those movies that the punditocracy--or the publicistarati, or just Harvey Weinstein--told you were guaranteed Oscars? It'll make the mere fact that any The King's Speech gets to the Oscars seem miraculous once you consider how many I Dreamed of Africas had to stumble.

A rancid load of swill called The Informers, from a depraved 1994 book by Bret Easton Ellis, is, like The Soloist, a look at the underbelly of L.A., but the resemblance ends there. This indolent trash wallow finds nothing of any redeemable value in the City of Angels, before or after dark. Mr. Ellis is the creepy, perverted literary soul mate of Jay McInerney, both of them chroniclers of the live and deaths of a generation of rich kids in the 1980s who have everything but remain clueless about what to do with it. They specialize in the burned-out boredom of self-destructive excess no amount of Botox can reverse. Like Mr. Ellis’ Less Than Zero and American Psycho, the human rubbish in The Informers thrives on his usual fictional trademarks—alcoholism, heroin addiction, infidelity, male prostitution, pornography and puttin’ on airs. The time is 1983, the people are sleaze bags with manicures snorting cocaine around heated pools overlooking the lights of Hollywood. The film opens when one of them is smashed and killed by a drunken driver in the driveway of a swank party where nobody runs out of cocaine long enough to mourn. What follows is a satirical rehash of every catatonic cliché.

Since The Informers is a plotless, meandering series of disjointed vignettes, there’s no point in attempting a coherent synopsis of the narrative. You just have to follow the bouncing lost souls from needle to needle while they all vomit and throw up on each other in a miasma of sickness and pain. Graham (talented newcomer Jon Foster) is a bisexual drug dealer whose father (a sallow, emaciated Billy Bob Thornton) is a dope-addicted movie producer working on a project about a rock star sleeping with an alien. Graham’s mother (Kim Basinger) is a doped-up sex addict who is sleeping with Martin (Austin Nichols), one of her son’s best friends. Sometimes Graham sleeps with him, too, alone or in a threesome with his girlfriend Christie (Amber Heard), a wanton slut whose father is “on location” but never seen. Sometimes Christie sleeps with four or five guys at the same time, complaining of a strange rash, while the radio blasts warnings about a strange “sexually transmitted new plague” that everyone ignores. Another friend named Tim (Lou Taylor Pucci) is dragged off to Hawaii by his alcoholic father, Les (Chris Isaak), who spends his time picking up underage “jail bait” while trying drunkenly to save his son from being gay. Graham’s miserable, brain-damaged parents talk about getting back together, although Dad is not over his affair with an over-the-hill has-been newscaster (Winona Ryder). When he drops by, he pulls down his pants, says, “I need a shot—do you have a needle?” His wife produces a syringe she keeps on the makeup table with her old lipstick tubes, and shoots him in the rear. With what? No attempt is ever made to bring any of these characters to the level of real life. They just shoot up with everything. Oh, I forgot. In the hotel where they stage all of their orgies, having no homes of their own to park their Jaguars, there’s a desk clerk (Brad Renfro) whose uncle (Mickey Rourke) kidnaps little boys and sells them to preppie child pornographers in the slave trade. Everything revolves around a stoned rock group called “The Informers,” which is as close as this thing gets to an explanation of the title. After the big concert, Christie gets left on the beach covered with lesions, to die of AIDS. Since she has already slept with just about everyone in the movie, I assume the other characters will soon die, too. Not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

The script, adapted by Mr. Ellis with an assist from Nicholas Jarecki, sounds like a death rattle already. The direction, by Australia’s Gregor Jordan, makes a wan attempt to establish Los Angeles as the field of action, although it seems to take place on the moon. Not only is it depressing, amateurish and stupid—it is also utterly pointless. We learn nothing from the 1980s we didn’t know already. So those rich, privileged kids with no guidance, role models or focus, and no moral centers, all came to a bad end and died young. Tough titty. Why do we have relive their trashed lives all over again? There is nothing pleasant, challenging, erotic, witty or thought-provoking here. Director Jordan, in the press notes, insists the film has renewed relevance in a post-conservative era “now that Bush is gone.” That’s the only laugh connected with The Informers.

rreed@observer.com

Susan Montford’s While She Was Out, from her own screenplay, based on the short story by Edward Bryant, begins as a crisis-laden contemporary Christmas story with Kim Basinger’s housewife being yelled at by her husband, just home from work, and finding the house a mess. I mean, he really yells at her, making her cower as he raises his fists and bangs them against the wall. As he mixes himself a drink, she goes downstairs to drive into town for some last-minute Christmas shopping. The sounds of Christmas carols are everywhere as she tries to find a parking space, and has to drive a short distance from the department store.

We soon learn that she has maxed out her credit card, and a casual conversation with a prosperous-seeming former high-school classmate drops her into the category of a woman who has lost her chances in life. When she gets back into the car, another car pulls up behind her, partially blocking her way out. Four hooligans looking for trouble, led by Lukas Haas, pour our of the car. They begin making lewd comments to the housewife, to which she responds with no lack of spunk, making us respect her for the first time. When a parking lot attendant orders them to move their car, an argument ensues, and the chief hooligan angrily shoots the attendant dead.

The housewife seizes the opportunity to drive away, but is quickly pursued by the hooligans because now she is the only witness to the crime. To make a long car chase short, the housewife crashes into a dead end at the edge of a forest. Realizing that she is in dire peril, she gets out of the car, takes a tool box out of the trunk and runs away into the forest, followed on foot by the hooligans.

Of course, we know that the top-billed housewife will find some way to survive the mad-dog predators. But how and with what? As the chase continues, the tool box takes on magical properties as it disgorges one deadly weapon after another even though it contains no firearms.

The action premise is undeniably ridiculous, but also very satisfying as the formerly hapless housewife turns into one “dangerous bitch” in the almost admiring words of her pursuers.

I can’t tell you any more without spoiling the ultra-feminist fun. But I promise you the spectacular ending will make every harried housewife in the world ecstatic. I found it interesting that the gifted Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, of Pan’s Labyrinth fame, served as Ms. Montford’s executive producer, along with Don Murphy of Transformers fame.

asarris@observer.com

While She Was Out opens in a tony suburb littered with McMansions and hoity-toity Christmas decorations. We meet Kim’s husband (Craig Sheffer), who’s a brute—we know this because he snarls as he walks in the door and immediately complains about the messy house and how Della (Basinger) has let herself go. (To be fair, the house does look pretty messy … but still.) They have a pair of spooky twins, and Della seems remarkably fragile and unable to do much of anything. She piles herself into the SUV and heads to the mall, where every single citizen of this town must have been because it felt like she was looking for holiday parking in real time. After seeing that a car took up two spaces, Della has had enough: She writes a searing note (“hey jerk”) and proceeds to shakily buy some tea; runs into a college friend, which further unhinges her; and gets her credit card rejected, forcing her to forage around for change to pay for wrapping paper. But all that is fine! It’s when she gets back to the car that things take a troubling turn. Mr. Haas, the driver of the selfish vehicle, apparently didn’t appreciate her note, so he and his slang-addicted gang surround her and insinuate they are going to rape and kill her. And then they actually kill a security guard! So Della flees and the gang chases after her, and with that, so goes what was left of the plot. Because where does Della drive; the police station? A crowded place with lots of witnesses? Florida? No! She drives into an abandoned housing lot in a dense forest. Sigh. The rest of the movie is an excruciating game of cat and mouse as Della (armed with a surprisingly handy red tool box) tries to hide and then, inevitably, finds inner strength to fight back. Ms. Basinger is as beautiful as ever, and no one can toss distressed tresses like she can. But there’s only so much one can do while peering behind a tree. As for Mr. Haas, we spent most of the time wondering if he was supposed to be Mexican and also where he learned to talk like he hails from New Jack City.

We’ll leave you with our favorite out-of-context line of dialogue: “He just wanted to see the ocean one time.” Yep, it’s like that.

While She Was Out opens December 12 at the AMC Empire 25 and Cinema Village.

svilkomerson@observer.com

Small wonder that Even Money is the most rewarding new film of the week. For one thing, it is directed by Mark Rydell, a real director instead of a hack. From The Reivers and Jeremiah Johnson to The Rose and On Golden Pond, the intelligence of Mr Rydell’s subject matter, the intense control of every aspect of his projects (from script to camera work), and the personalized intuition and compassion with which he inspires confidence in his actors have added up to an impressive body of work. Even Money is a cautionary tale about gambling addiction. The message is: “Never risk what you can’t afford to lose, because eventually everyone wants more.” The style is raw grit. The result is a shock to the system that leaves you numb.

Set not in Vegas but in any town in America where gambling is legal and souls go unprotected, the fates of nine people become interwoven in a web of intrigue, desperation and death. Kim Basinger, less ravishing than usual with dishwatery brown hair but no less riveting, is Carol, a housewife and novelist with writer’s block who pretends that she’s always doing her writing at Starbucks. Ray Liotta is her loyal, devoted husband Tom, a teacher who is ravaged to the core when he finds out she’s gambled away the family savings and their 13-year-old daughter’s college fund. Forest Whitaker is Clyde Snow, a plumber-handyman who talks his kid brother Godfrey into throwing a championship basketball game so he can pay back the gambling debt he owes to the vicious mobster named Victor (Tim Roth), who also controls the lives of two bookies named Augie and Murph (Jay Mohr and Grant Sullivan) and a crooked detective (an unrecognizable Kelsey Grammer, with Nicole Kidman’s plastic nose from The Hours). Factor in Murph’s innocent, honest girlfriend (Carla Gugino) and a has-been magician (Danny DeVito) who works the gaming tables for tips and talks Carol into betting her last dime to save her marriage and family, and you have a poison stew. And murder is the dessert.

Great acting informs the conflicted lives in Even Money. The anxieties are universal (This could happen to me!) and director Rydell balances every move on the head of a pin. While each vignette contributes to the whole puzzle, the characters’ shared obsession leads to such dark corners of the mind that your heart ends up in your throat and Mr. Rydell never lets go. Everything depends on the approaching game, and only one person can change the odds. Then the snafu, followed by a climax that is nothing less than electrifying.

Cleverly plotted, suspensefully structured, professionally acted and tightly written (Robert Tannen’s debut script is doubly impressive), Even Money shows what can happen when people are willing to screw up their lives for excitement and danger, risking everything for the next jackpot. It’s one of the best movies about gambling fever since California Split.

"I don't want to go all over the map here, but where is the protest against this war when almost on a daily basis, someone is dying over there?" he said between labored breaths. "Right when you would want to question the motives of an administration, the country has gone and taken a nap. They're hiding in their houses. They're afraid of bin Laden. They're afraid of Hussein. They're afraid of not being able to make their mortgage payment. They're just afraid in general. And while they're afraid, they're spectacularly inattentive," he said.

"There's less critical thinking going on in this country on a Main Street level-forget about the media-than ever before. We've never needed people to think more critically than now, and they've taken a big nap."

If anyone had a legitimate excuse to take a big nap, it would be Mr. Baldwin. Page Six editor Richard Johnson was telling W magazine that he had finally retired his nickname for the outspoken liberal, "The Bloviator," and after an extended career dry spell that took him from being one of the few box-office beauties who could play with Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey in the brilliant ensemble of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross and left him playing Mr. Conductor in Thomas and the Magic Railroad , the actor from Massapequa, L.I., was back in the game with a fine searing performance as an old-school casino operator in Wayne Kramer's The Cooler , which opens Nov. 26. Rolling Stone was mentioning Oscar, and other media outlets were shouting "comeback." When that happens, most actors-if they talk at all-begin jabbering the kind of glittering generalities favored by professional sports stars.

But on-screen and off, the 45-year-old Mr. Baldwin has rarely shown that kind of self-consciousness or vanity and that ability to submerge his ego makes him adept at comedy as well as drama, and versatile enough to play both Pan Am Airlines founder Juan Trippe in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator or Old Man Dunphy in Outside Providence . "There aren't that many actors who could bring the kind of cosmopolitan, real man's man intelligence to a role," said Edward R. Pressman, the executive producer of The Cooler , who is also planning to star Mr. Baldwin in a remake of The Swimmer and a movie about disgraced studio chief David Begelman. "Alec can play someone who runs a studio, who's a businessman, who's a ladies' man, who can curse and tell jokes. It's a kind of old-time movie-star quality, which, I think, there's not a lot of nowadays."

But Mr. Baldwin doesn't think in those terms. "I'm being very sincere with you when I say that I don't get up everyday and my first thoughts are about who I am in relation to the public and the media," he said. "I don't get up and say, 'Well, let's get dressed in such a way and comb my hair in such a way for maximum effect on my fans."

Indeed, like the scene in The Cat in the Hat where his unctuously well-groomed character snaps off his girdle and removes his false teeth, Mr. Baldwin has no qualms about showing us the ugly realities-whether they involve his hairy paunch or the Bush administration-and that's what makes him both one of the finest actors of his generation and one of the biggest targets when it comes to his own self-exposure. As Mike Myers told Mr. Baldwin during the opening bit of Saturday Night Live when the actor hosted on Nov. 15: "I admire ya, Baldwin. You got a big pair of hairy bollocks."

Mr. Baldwin certainly sports a brass pair in The Cooler , in which he plays Shelly Kaplow, a tough, omniscient casino operator still operating by and clinging to the old-school rules of Las Vegas while, all around him, the place is turning into what he calls "a Disneyland Mookfest." It's a complex role that's both noble and terrifying, and over a cheese plate at Ilo, the restaurant at the Bryant Park Hotel, Mr. Baldwin told The Observer that he was drawn to it because the screenplay, written by Mr. Kramer and Frank Hannah, was "very unequivocal and very tough" and because, he said, he saw something in the character that related to his life at that time.

"I try to look at the character and think, 'Am I going through anything that that person's going through?' And what I tend to think of now is, I hate change. I got divorced recently, and that was just this mind-blowing thing," Mr. Baldwin said. He was dressed in a tight-fitting magenta sweater and dark pants, beefier than his Jack Ryan days, but not as paunchy as his cameo as Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle in Pearl Harbor . "I thought, 'I really relate with this guy wanting to hold on to things as they are and hold onto something that he believes in'"-and here Mr. Baldwin began to laugh-"even if he's going to kill people in order to do it. And I thought, 'Wow, that's really incredible to me.' So I started from there."

Though it was announced in 2001, the breakup of Mr. Baldwin's seven-year marriage to Oscar-winning actress Kim Basinger still occupies a great deal of his time. Though he declined to talk specifics, he acknowledged that parts of the case were still being litigated in the California court system. Clearly, Mr. Baldwin blames his ex-wife's lawyer, Neal Hersh, whom he called a "gigantic scumbag," for the delays. (Mr. Hersh declined to comment.)

Previous press reports have alleged that Mr. Baldwin's and Ms. Basinger's marriage broke up in large part over his temper. (A judge involved in the divorce reportedly ordered Mr. Baldwin to attend anger management counseling.) Asked about this, Mr. Baldwin said: "I find that my ex-wife's divorce lawyers have taken a depiction of me on my worst day and said that that's who I am. And I don't think that anybody on the face of the earth wants to be characterized for posterity on the way they behave on their worst day."

Mr. Baldwin's voice turned steelier. "As most of my friends will tell you, whatever tension and whatever dissatisfaction and whatever frustration-that is the word-whatever frustration that I felt that led to the dissolution of my marriage, they've all recognized that that seems to have lifted now that I'm not married. That perhaps the answer for everybody was to get divorced, which I didn't want. I was so devoted to being married, I didn't want to give up. I didn't want to be a quitter," Mr. Baldwin continued. "I didn't want that failure hanging around my neck. It was a scarlet letter to me, and I didn't want that. I thought … I look back now and my perspective is that that was probably wrong and that everybody wound up exactly the way that they were supposed to end up. And the only thing I'm concerned about now is my daughter," Ireland, who was born in 1995.

In the wake of this personal upheaval, Mr. Baldwin sounded like a man who had put his career and image in perspective. "Yes, things for me career-wise have been less than wonderful for several years," he said. "But I've learned, as part and parcel of everything that I've gone through lately, to enjoy what I have. There are a lot of people who are a lot worse off than I am."

Mr. Baldwin acknowledged that he had the opportunity to have things "a lot easier than they are currently"-but, he added, "I wasn't willing to swallow that hook." He was referring to his decision to pass on starring in Patriot Games , the sequel to The Hunt for Red October . The part went to Harrison Ford, and everyone knows the trajectory of those two actors since then.

What was on the other end of that hook? I asked.

"I just think doing a lot of movies where they could have gotten anybody to do the movie," Mr. Baldwin responded. "I think that actors today who are very successful-not all of them, but many of them-wind up becoming marketing symbols. Their name is something that you hold up, and it has the same impact on a ticket buyer that the Coca Cola symbol has on people. You know what it is; you know you want it. You reach for it, and if you open the can, it's always the same. It never lets you down. It's very simple in its content.

"That's what people go for in movies. Movies become like soda and potato chips. It's snack food," Mr. Baldwin continued. "To the extent that I was willing make my life's work the manufacture of potato chips, I had to think about that. And you want to know something? There are days when I think it over and I think, 'I wish I had done it differently.' And there are other days when I say to myself, 'Well, they demanded an answer from me on that particular day.' On one given day, they said to me: 'What are you going to do? We want an answer now. Right now.'

"Yes. And I just said to them, 'Well, if you have to have an answer today, the answer is no.' And they were happy for me to give that answer, because they had somebody else they wanted to move on with, and everybody moved on from there."

But as Mr. Baldwin pointed out, he's far from a special case. "When you talk about people suffering as a result of career reversals, I think with anybody that does this for a long, long time, that's going to happen," he said. "Anybody that's overly sensitive about that, they're in the wrong business. I mean, Tom Cruise gets divorced and there's a lot of attendant pain with that. The risks don't necessarily have to be associated with your work itself. Or Mel Gibson makes the movie he's making right now and a lot of people are scrutinizing him, if not outright attacking him. I'm nowhere near as famous as those two people, but when you're in this business, you're going to get it on a personal level and on a professional level sooner or later.

"When you're offered what Hollywood has to offer, that's a great thing," he said. "I never want to say that it's meaningless or without value. It's just that when you get it, you start to learn about who you are because of what you are willing to do to hold onto it. I think I was upset sometimes because, like everybody else, I wanted things to go my way," he said. "And I wanted to control and manage the situation. But that is impossible, and you realize that you can't have things your way and hold onto the object in question. You can get upset. And what's happened for me now is, over the course of a few years, I've learned to live in such a way where none of my emotional well-being is dependent upon the business. When nice things happen in the business, great. When they don't happen, I try to let it go."

To hear Mr. Baldwin tell it, the easiest thing to let go are the media's attacks on his liberal politics. "It's meaningless," he said, because in today's climate it's inevitable. "I don't care if I came out tomorrow against abortion, wrote a check for $10 million for the Reagan library and married Georgette Mosbacher," he said. "It still wouldn't change people's perception of me. If they want to hate you, they're going to find a way.

"This is a very new thing, by the way," Mr. Baldwin continued. "Ten years ago, you didn't have people choosing certain figureheads-whether it be in politics or entertainment or the space in between-and riding them year in and year out: Hillary Clinton, Michael Moore. And they attack you from every angle-your language, your physical appearance-and they celebrate all of your reversals. And they sack-dance when you go down in the end zone and all that kind of stuff. It's something that's rather current."

So, Mr. Baldwin said, "I resign myself to the fact that that's what they do." And that's why, he added, he wasn't placing any significance on Page Six's decision to retire its Bloviator moniker for him. "I'm sure that when it suits his purposes, he'll let me have it again." As Mr. Baldwin put it, "The Post is a tentacle of the octopus of Murdoch's ultra-right-wing media syndicate, and it all works in harmony. And the thing about it is, people always say-which is so interesting to me-they always say, 'Are you suggesting that these people are operating in collusion? That there is a conspiracy there?' And I say no."

Then Mr. Baldwin gives them what he called his "favorite" analogy. "I say, 'If I go up to bat in a baseball game and I hit the ball to third base, and the third baseman throws the ball to the second baseman and gets the lead runner out, and then the second baseman throws it to the first baseman, I don't walk up to the third baseman and say, 'How did you know to do that?'"

Meaning, Mr. Baldwin added, "when we come and we execute a defensive or offensive play on a team sport, no one needs to explain anything to everybody-they already know how to play the game. And that's how the conservative right-wing media works.

"That's how it worked in the Monica Lewinsky case, in Clinton's impeachment case. When his wife talked about the vast right-wing conspiracy, I totally agree that she was right." But Mr. Baldwin said it was more like "a vast right-wing sandlot game. No one really had to explain very much. All the players knew what to do; all the players had been down this road before. They know how to hose somebody …. They know how to attack someone that way-eviscerate them in the media-and how to entrap someone, in the case of Clinton.

"And a lot of this is the dividends paid to the Republicans from Clinton fatigue as well," Mr. Baldwin said on his cell phone. "People are tired of watching the president. People are tired of scrutinizing the president. People are tired of prosecuting the president. Sometimes, you know, the president is a father-like figure in American society, to most Americans, even today, no matter how cynical we've become. And people don't want to think that daddy's a bum all the time. They don't want to think that Daddy's a liar, a cheat and a fraud. They just don't want to believe that.

"And you had a bunch of people who, for their own political purposes, didn't hesitate to raise those observations about Clinton. Then people get exhausted. And now Bush comes in. And right when you most want to question an administration, right when you most have a group of people who, more than any other group of people in American history, will use the power of the United States government. In cooperation with two other branches, it kind of is a magical moment.

"By the way, between now and a year from now, next November, is an eternity."

Then just as abruptly, Mr. Baldwin changed the subject.

"I just hiked to my house," he said. He sounded wide-awake, like a man who'd gotten his second wind.

Kim Basinger never struck me as an easy pushover willing to do anything just to keep her career afloat. But here she is in Bless the Child , a turgid, pretentious religious thriller that is anything but thrilling. Why would an actress who finally proved to the doubters she could act (and won an Oscar doing it) lower her standards now? Was L.A. Confidential just a fluke? As career moves go, Bless the Child is a 10-pound coffin nail. In a summer notable for trash dumping, Bless the Child is practically an infomercial for enforced recycling.

The plot outline is so absurd that just remembering it induces pain, but here goes: Ms. Basinger, lovely as ever but looking extremely bewildered, plays Maggie, a New York nurse whose screwy younger sister Jenna (Angela Bettis) shows up full of heroin and hostility with a six-day-old baby daughter named Cody, whom she abandons for Maggie to raise. Maggie doesn't know it, but Cody is the reincarnation of Jesus, who has returned to Earth to fight the evils of Satan. Six years later, Cody is making the Tupperware spin and bringing dead birds back to life while a gang of killers is on the prowl, ridding New York of all children born on Easter Sunday under the star of Bethlehem. Are you still with me on this? Pay attention. This requires concentration.

Jenna makes an unexpected reappearance, still strung out on drugs and married to the Devil's chief disciple, Eric Stark (Rufus Sewell), the freaky head of a New Age satanic cult called the New Dawn Foundation, whose orders are to convert the Jesus girl to the Dark Side before Easter Sunday. A number of unexpected angels show up to deliver Casablanca lilies and miraculously open the doors to the Brooklyn-bound F train, but it's up to Ms. Basinger to save the child from the rampaging devil worshippers before Satan tattoos a pitchfork into her flesh. It's a risky business. First, Ms. Basinger gets a concussion, then wakes up drugged with her car on fire, hanging from a bridge. Anybody else would wisely move to Kansas, or St. Bart's. But Auntie Kim is tough (and stupid). She goes to church.

Enter the rest of the cast, all lucky enough to be resigned to walk-ons. First there is Christina Ricci, who is on the screen for all of three minutes (I timed it) as an escapee from the devil cult who gets beheaded in the subway. Then there is Jimmy Smits, a failed Catholic who investigates occult murders for the F.B.I. He can't even find his way through the fog. "Where's our backup?" he barks on a country road. "They were right behind us," says the head-scratching state trooper, staring into pea soup. The movie may be preposterous, but you gotta admit it's funny. Finally, there is a defrocked priest in a wheelchair (Ian Holm) who opines: "Today, the concept of evil is politically incorrect." They all end up in Vermont.

But why go on? By the time everything bursts into flames and the angels battle the demons in divinely inspired combat, the noise from Hell is benign next to the sound of an audience in hysterics. Even for veterans of such schlocky soufflés as Stigmata , The Devil's Own and The Omen , this is cheesy clabber. The direction, by Roger Corman alumnus Chuck ( A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors ) Russell, is unspeakably corny, and the script, by Tom Rickman and the husband-and-wife team of Clifford and Ellen Green, is mind-boggling. Among the many lines that kept the audience roaring: The Satan freak perches the six-year-old Jesus girl on the roof ledge to jump, and the child says, "After you."

I mean, can't Kim Basinger read? As beautiful and talented as she is, she can't bring this dead turkey to life. Bless the Child is asinine, and so is everybody in it.

Hackman's Hail Mary

Another perfect performance full of wit and irony by Gene Hackman lifts The Replacements above the level of the average formulaic football flick. On the eve of the playoffs, the Washington Sentinels go on strike, creating a crisis for the team's owner (Jack Warden) and fans alike. Mr. Hackman, a legendary coach beyond his prime, rushes to the rescue, with only one week to recruit a "replacement" team of non-union scabs to finish the season. The new team is a motley crew of screw-ups and misfits that includes a deaf mute who can't hear the plays, a drunken Welsh barfly, a sumo wrestler, a Whitman's Sampler of assorted black criminals and one bloodthirsty white cop. The cheerleaders are X-rated strippers, bimbos and lap dancers.

The NFL is not amused when they break every rule in football: mooning the press, smoking on the playing field, beating up the opposing teams, and firing bullets through the windshields of striking sprinters and halfbacks in the stadium parking lot, while famed sportscasters Pat Summerall and John Madden are forced to call the unconventional plays in a whole new way. But by the time the strike is over, Mr. Hackman has turned a wild bunch of renegades into a winning team with an abundance of heart, and elevated a has-been fishing-boat bum (Keanu Reeves) to the status of an $8 million quarterback. In the end, the replacements have proven to be better athletes than the overpaid gridiron stars they replaced, and although they must return to their old jobs and lives, they will never be the same.

It's a classic theme-ordinary slobs with a common goal who get a second chance at the brass ring through loyalty and bonding, learning new values along the way. The characters are so well drawn and their relationships so funny and touching that you probably won't notice Keanu Reeves' dramatic limitations. He's billed as the star, but he's just another team player. Brightly directed by Howard ( Grumpier Old Men ) Deutch and crisply photographed by the great cinematographer Tak Fujimoto, The Replacements offers much to enjoy, even if you're not a follower of the NFL. I'm willing to bet it will even appeal to the oddball date who thinks pigskin is a Judith Lieber handbag.

John Waters at His Worst

Calling Cecil B. DeMented the worst thing John Waters has ever done is saying quite a mouthful. The Baltimore filmmaker has dedicated his life to grossing out sane people everywhere, but I cannot deceive you. With this hopeless disaster, the maker of such epic swill as Mondo Trasho has lost even his basest and most putrid instincts for tackiness as entertainment. Despite a budget big enough to send the opening credits flying off the marquee of a shopping-mall multiplex and the star presence of Melanie Griffith, this violent, filthy sendup of Hollywood commercialism is so witless and over the top it almost makes me nostalgic for Divine crawling through pig shit.

The hastily scrawled synopsis that passes for a plot involves an insane guerrilla filmmaker called Cecil B. DeMented (moronically played by hapless Stephen Dorff) and his criminal cult of movie-buff followers called the Sprocket Holes, who kidnap a brainless movie star visiting Baltimore on a promotional tour. Ms. Griffith plays Honey Whitlock, a star of blatantly excessive incompetence who is also a vicious, temperamental and foul-mouthed slut. When the kamikaze gang of teenage cinema terrorists drag their hostage back to their hideout in an abandoned art-deco movie palace and force her to act in their underground film, she fights back like a cross between Jayne Mansfield and Marjorie Main. But when the gang starts destroying malls showing Patch Adams : The Director's Cut , firing bullets through cinema books on the films of David Lean, and performing ritualistic chants to the memory of Andy Warhol, Honey likes the taste of anarchy, becomes a willing soldier in the war against popular, commercial and mainstream values, and turns into Patty Hearst (who also makes an "inside joke" guest appearance, along with Waters regulars Mink Stole and Ricki Lake). Protesting the filming of a $65 million sequel to Forrest Gump entitled Gump Again , the revolutionaries turn Baltimore into a battleground that looks like ice cream parlor vomit.

Mr. Waters is clearly staging a one-man broadside against the Maryland Film Commission's attempts to turn his native Baltimore into the "Hollywood of the East," but he expands his battleground to mock family sitcoms, G-ratings, video games, expensive remakes, pull-quote ads, 35mm cameras, Hollywood studios and the William Morris Agency, creating an even worse Cinema Hell of his own in the process. Even from a hack like John Waters, this childish idea might work in black and white, with a 300-pound drag queen like Divine, but with a big budget and no talent to back it up, Cecil B. DeMented turns out to be the worst example of the kind of hermetically sealed, air-conditioned cinema Mr. Waters seems to hate.

You can't use Melanie Griffith the same way you used Divine. She's a bad actress playacting a bad actress who doesn't know the difference. Parody becomes reality when she's on the screen. As her deranged captor, Mr. Dorff is described in the press poop as a charismatic combo of Charles Manson, Andy Warhol and Otto Preminger. It's enough to barf. Add hypodermic needles, homosexual couplings of every description, and a fiery finale in a drive-in (where everyone in Baltimore seems to die in a blast of gore), and the generally rotten taste of Cecil B. DeMented makes the Farrelly Brothers look like the Warner Brothers.

Weaned on Technicolor adventures about the Dark Continent like King Solomon's Mines and Mogambo , I've always had a weakness for movies about the challenges of Africa. Lions and tigers and crocs, oh my! So I am pleased to report that I Dreamed of Africa fulfills my lust for danger and exoticism heroically. Beautifully photographed, though sometimes dramatically inert, this saga of life in a strange land of passion and hardship is based on the best-selling memoirs of Kuki Gallmann, an Italian dilettante who emigrated with her seven-year-old son, Emanuele, to a 100,000-acre cattle ranch in Kenya in 1972, oblivious to the pain, joy and heartbreak that awaited her. She is still there, a leading conservationist and defender of animal rights, despite great personal sacrifices. Africa has shaped her destiny, and if this film doesn't exactly live up to everything she has learned in this mystical, unsentimental outpost, it still captures the essence of her experiences memorably.

Directed by Hugh Hudson, who explored the terrain with disastrous results in the awful Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes , the story of Mrs. Gallmann benefits hugely from a spunky and indefatigable performance by alluring Kim Basinger in the leading role. The film begins when she survives a near-fatal auto accident that propels her to find new meaning and focus in her frivolous Venice life of cocktail parties and charity balls. Restless and eager to make a new start, she marries a reckless adventurer named Paolo Gallmann (Vincent Perez) over the strong objections of her cultured, protective and dubious mother Franca (Eva Marie Saint) and follows him to Kenya where, despite the absence of creature comforts, she finds self-fulfillment and prevails against all odds.

She chases an elephant out of her vegetable garden. A lion kills the family dog. There are confrontations with murderous poachers who butcher elephants for their ivory and endless fights with Paolo, who disappears for weeks at a time on hunting trips with his chums, leaving Kuki alone while pregnant with her second child. Her mother arrives in time for the rainy season, getting her new Guccis stuck in the syrupy mud. A ferocious sandstorm nearly destroys the ranch and the entire world Kuki has carved for her family in this lovely, but punishing, environment.

There's the arduous task of building a dam, a bonding with the natives and two tragic deaths that would send most women shrieking to the nearest airport for a flight back to civilization. But Kuki survives every test of Job that Africa can dish out, even when her husband is badly injured in a hunting accident and Emanuele, at l7 and ready for college, is bitten by a poisonous viper.

These detailed accounts of life in the wilderness, accompanied by herds of galloping antelopes and sunsets that take the breath away, add up to little more than insertions in a family scrapbook, and there is no strong sense of perspective in either Hugh Hudson's flat direction or the often turgid script by Paula Milne and Susan Shilliday. To make matters worse, there is no chemistry between the alluring Ms. Basinger and the vapid, one-dimensional Mr. Perez to help explain why the real Mrs. Gallmann stuck it out, undaunted. You might also wonder why Kuki and her snobbish, aristocratic mother, Franca, both fiery Italian brunettes, are played by two all-American blondes like Kim Basinger and Eva Marie Saint. But who cares? It's great to have them both on the screen, intriguing and lovely as ever, and I really believed they could be mother and daughter, no matter where they came from.

Still, I must admit, the soul of Africa in its never-ending astonishments is the soul of the movie, and in my opinion, I Dreamed of Africa triumphs over its weaknesses to capture the imagination, holding you in its moody narrative grip. It is less pretentious and not so much of what I call "a coffee-table movie" as the overrated Out of Africa . Much of the film's success is due to the fascinating, underrated Kim Basinger, who remains gorgeous and natural even when the script is too minimal to provide much range for her emotions. Grumpy comparisons to other game gals like Sigourney Weaver in Gorillas in the Mist and Meryl Streep in Out of Africa are obvious, but Ms. Basinger holds her own ground admirably. Surrounded by hippos, rhinos, bush spiders and puff adders, she is never upstaged, and her spirituality and brio are a perfect contrast to the rugged landscape of Africa, a dark and mysterious world that still offers extraordinary peace while extracting an extraordinarily high price.

I Wanna Dance in a Movie

Ballet films are rare, and Center Stage is the best one since The Turning Point .

With heart and energy, director Nicholas Hytner traces the dreams and ambitions of a dedicated band of young dancers seeking scholarships to a fictional New York dance academy. At the end of a year of sweat, tears and backbreaking work, a production determines which dancers make the American Ballet Company. Only six will make it. Among the fiercely competitive students, there is Jody (Amanda Schull, an apprentice with the San Francisco Ballet), the hardest-working dancer with the worst technical problems; Maureen (Susan May Pratt), perfection itself but a potential star with no drive; Eva (Zoe Saldana), the black girl from the streets with obvious talent but a bad attitude; and Charlie (Sascha Radetsky, who dances in the corps de ballet of American Ballet Theatre). Cooper, the Harley-Davidson-riding choreographer who puts them through their paces and falls for Jody despite her problems, is played by Ethan Stiefel, the 26-year-old Ballet Theatre superstar.

All of the dancers are making their film debuts, but you'd never know it. They are marvelous in a backstage story that incorporates human drama with dancing pyrotechnics, music that ranges from Tchaikovsky to jazz and two complete ballets choreographed by Susan Stroman, the creator of Contact , and New York City Ballet star Christopher Wheeldon. Surrounding the newcomers are such veterans as Donna Murphy, Peter Gallagher and Debra Monk.

The film invades the world of dance like a laser. You get the pain, blisters and bandages that accompany their sacrifice, but you also get the real personalities of kids who bowl, disco and eat pizza. The ballets are fantastic, and in the jazz exercise class you can also spot many of the dancing stars from Contact . Everything about dance–the idealism, rivalry, artistry, failure, physical punishment and soaring sense of accomplishment–permeates Center Stage , a film bursting with passion, electricity, excitement and joy.

Wonderful Town: Why Did It End?

The real blockbuster of the past week was the third and final Encores! production of the season, a brilliantly mounted concert version of the rollicking 50's musical Wonderful Town , which could only be described as sensational. Betty Comden and Adolph Green wrote some of their wittiest lyrics for this show about two sisters from Ohio who hit Greenwich Village in search of fame, fortune and guys; and Leonard Bernstein's score experimented with a wide variety of musical styles and tempos that included rag, swing, Irish jigs, dreamy ballads, patter songs, a rousing conga and a ballet reminiscent of Slaughter on Tenth Avenue .

An almost perfect cast under Kathleen Marshall's innovative direction sang and danced with show-stopping gusto. In one of the year's most polished and professional personal triumphs, Donna Murphy was a stupendous Ruth. With flawless timing, a soaring voice and an assured sense of comedy, she was every bit as fabulous as I imagine Rosalind Russell was in the original production. And who knew she had such great legs? Only Laura Benanti seemed out of time and place as Ruth's younger sister, the ditsy man-magnet Eileen (a role that made a star of Edie Adams). With frizzy modern hair like moss hanging from a live oak tree and a take-charge attitude that seemed as canny as her older and wiser sister, she was nobody's idea of what critics of the day called a cream puff.

Better than anything currently running on Broadway, Wonderful Town was the perfect antidote to the blahs that engulf us all. I cannot remember the last time I prayed for a show to never end. Compare this masterpiece with something as vulgar, stupid, depressing, unmusical and pointless as The Wild Party and you can only wonder why, when and how the American musical went so badly off the track.

"Tennis was a very social sport in the 70's," Mr. Mason said. "That was the way you met women. We were all single. There were so many tennis clubs. There were no aerobics. Tennis was the fun way to stay in shape. All the Italian tennis fashion that was so interesting and so beautiful came over to the U.S. and became streetwear. Customers would come in, people who didn't play tennis, and buy the clothing."

In the days of Bjorn Borg and Chris Evert, boutiques like Tennis Lady, Feron's, Cutler-Owens, Court Set, the Racquet Shop, Courts and Sports, and Tennis in the 70's were almost as common in Manhattan as Gap stores are today. Now Mason's is the last one left. And the celebrities just aren't stopping by the shop the way they used to.

"Robert Duvall used to be a very good customer, and we used to play together. Fun guy to play with. Walt Frazier used to shop here, but he was always worried about someone touching his Rolls-Royce, which he parked outside. Kim Basinger used to come in, with her first husband, who was a big player. She was shooting 9 1Ú2 Weeks . He was a nice guy, but I could feel that it was a very tough thing being married to Kim Basinger."

At 51, the slender Mr. Mason looks young enough to be Anna Kournikova's prom date. If only tennis had aged as well in Manhattan. Now New Yorkers with money have turned to golf and "extreme" sports. When they shop for sporting gear, they do it at EMS, New York Golf Center or Toga Bike Shop. Leafing through a Manhattan Yellow Pages from 1976, one finds 20 listings for "tennis court construction," and 31 for "public tennis courts." In the most recent edition, the numbers are 3 and 16, respectively.

The United States Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows, Queens, may be sold out for the last days of the U.S. Open, but it's a safe bet that few fans will be rushing out to purchase the outfits the players are wearing. Mr. Mason recalled the days when "people would grab the clothes right out of the box, before we had a chance to unpack them." By now the white-hot fervor for Fila and Ellesse has ended. "When department stores stopped carrying tennis gear, it meant that tennis was no longer, in any respect, a hot category," he said.

At least one aspect of the business has stayed the same over the years. "We sell a can of tennis balls for $3," he said. "They have not gone up at all. We could go up to $4 a can, but then we wouldn't sell any tennis balls."

-Daniel Green

The Spacey Method

"Most of the women I know haven't heard about the article. If they have, they know not to believe what they read. Then there are a few women who think the article might be true. It's a challenge for them: They want to be the ones to turn me around. I let them."

–Kevin Spacey, in an interview in the October Playboy magazine, on how women have reacted to the 1997 Esquire article that strongly hinted he was gay

Hugh M. Hefner

Editor, Playboy

Dear Hugh:

Thanks to your magazine, my run as a man who pretended to be gay has finally come to an end. Of course, I have mixed feelings about this. As I've been telling my friends-and I look at them real serious when I say I it-"The biggest trick this horndog ever played was convincing the world he didn't exist!" In fact, on the set of my new movie, American Beauty , I told that one to Annette Bening. How she laughed! And while she was laughing, I looked down her shirt. I did!

I may be presumptuous in trying to teach the master, but have you ever thought of following my lead? It's simple, really, and I can't imagine it would impinge too much on your lifestyle. Those silk bathrobes, after all …

Here's how you do it. Do learn to sing a few Marlene Dietrich songs. Do notice what color walls are painted and be able to identify all the colors in the Ralph Lauren palette. Do pretend to get chills every time somebody mentions Steve McQueen. And do buy some expensive German furniture. But, for goodness sake, don't let anybody abbreviate your name. A James must be James. Not Jim or Jimmy. Although "Hef" may be a hard habit to break, Hugh is a very, very lucky name to have.

Then, just when the babe thinks she's got a special shopping buddy who shares her fascination with shoes- whammo! -sneak up behind her and slip your tongue into her ear. Just like that! Their knees buckle every time, Hugh. Trust me.

Of course, as I remarked in my interview, I have nothing against homosexuals. (After all, without their help, I'd be just another David Paymer!) In fact, on recent trips to Central Park, I've noticed that Legacy-my black Labrador retriever-has been known to do some off-leash same-sex "cruising." I certainly do not hold this against Legacy. He is still my dog, and I love him, although I can assure you that after watching him in action, my dog is not faking being gay. He loves it!

You may have noticed my picture on the cover of New York magazine. There I am, letting my hetero flag fly on a Harley-Davidson. Oh, well. Since my secret seems to be permanently blown, I guess I will finally be able to engage in my private habits publicly. Finally, a live Jets game!

Your bud,

Kev

P.S. I hear you're still throwing those parties at the Mansion-parties I have fantasized about ever since I was a youngster. Can you get me on a list or something? And does Barbi Benton still come around?

-Andrew Goldman

Morning's Makeover

Cock-a-doodle-doo? Apparently, morning isn't just for breakfast anymore.

A grab-bag coalition of cultural activists, image-makers and hip trendsetters are working to rid morning of its old workaday image and replace it with something racier and zestier for the new millennium.

"Morning starts at midnight," said Ted Coster, director of the Morning Council, "and midnight is sexy. This old idea of morning as the start of the workday just doesn't cut it anymore."

In these days of increased "flex time," say activists, the notion of morning as something that occurs between the hours of 5 or 6 A.M. and noon may have run out of time.

"Think about it," said Donald Forster, a Web site designer based in Manhattan. "At best, afternoon covers a five-hour period, from noon to 5 o'clock. But with morning, you get a full 12 hours, midnight to noon."

Dr. Claude Westgate, a cultural anthropologist at Gettysburg College, said the long-dominant view of morning goes back hundreds, even thousands, of years. "It's really an agrarian model," Dr. Westgate said. "For hundreds of years, farmers got to work at first light. Night was what happened when it was dark outside and they were sleeping."

But here on the cusp of the 21st century, with Internet I.P.O.'s proving far more lucrative than collecting eggs from the henhouse, sunrise has been known to mark the end, not the beginning, of the workday for some.

"I go to bed at 6 A.M. and wake up at 5 in the afternoon," said Chloe Barnes, a Web site designer based in Manhattan. "At 2 A.M., I'm hard at work. Does that make me a morning person? I'd like to think so. Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to go along with that."

Abdul Sharma works at a 24-hour delicatessen in Greenwich Village. "People come here 1 in the morning, 2 in the morning, 3 in the morning, 4 o'clock, 5 o'clock, 6 o'clock," said Mr. Sharma. "I get customer each hour. They buy condom, newspaper, mango. I don't care."

Some traditionalists are resisting the change in morning's image, however. "I'm a night person," said Jane Stewart at a downtown bar at 1 A.M. "I smoke my cigarettes, drink my booze. Don't tell me it's morning. I'm grouchy in the morning, and I don't want to be grouchy now."

-Jim Windolf