Scenes From a Mall (KTLA Monday at...
Scenes From a Mall (KTLA Monday at 8 p.m.), Paul Mazursky’s comedy-drama, stars Woody Allen and Bette Midler as a successful L.A. couple whose marriage busts up during a shopping spree at the Beverly Center. The comic premise is highly promising, but the film never takes off. But the incidental jokes make it almost worth seeing.
In the 1990 Nuns on the Run (KTLA Tuesday at 8 p.m. and Friday at 5 p.m.), two gangsters fleece the mob and take it on the lam to a nunnery. Eric Idle and Robbie Coltrane give director Jonathan Lynn’s drag comedy--sort of a “Some Like It Hot” in Catholic school--a little bawdy class. But it’s mostly half-funny and mechanical--filled with crude jokes.
The 1985 National Lampoon’s European Vacation (Fox Tuesday at 8 p.m.) finds Chevy Chase, Beverly D’Angelo and their kids on just as lousy a trip as their unfunny first outing, the 1983 “National Lampoon’s Vacation.”
Great ensembles don’t necessarily make great films. And the 1989 remake of the 1955 We’re No Angels (KTLA Thursday at 8 p.m.) is not what we would have expected from a collaboration by Robert DeNiro, Sean Penn, director Neil Jordan, writer David Mamet and cinematographer Philippe Rousselot. It’s a coy, somewhat crowded Depression-era comedy of good and evil, where two escaped cons--DeNiro and Penn--hide out as priests during a Northern border town’s annual religious festival. Great ensembles don’t necessarily make bad films either, and this one has more than a few redemptions and graces.
It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a $60 million movie to genuinely touch the heart, and Hook (ABC Saturday at 8 p.m.), director Steven Spielberg’s mega-version of “Peter Pan,” shows you why. Its expensive Neverland set effectively suffocates the simple emotional wizardry that Spielberg is able to work from time to time. Nicely acted by Robin Williams, Dustin Hoffman, Julia Roberts and the rest of the gang, but mostly it feels as if they’re whistling in the dark.
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