THE FLAMINGO KID
There is the sweet air of an authentic memoir about The Flamingo Kid, which recollects an adolescent experience in gentle but nonsoporific tranquillity. The time is 1963, and Jeffrey Willis (Matt Dillon) is a poor Brooklyn boy working for the summer at an upper-middle-class Long Island beach club. There he meets a car dealer (Richard Crenna), slightly shady and blatantly materialistic, who tries to tempt him away from the good values of his decent dad (Hector Elizondo), a plumber whose trade may be humble but whose spirit is not. There is originality and poignancy in Neal Marshall's story about competing father figures, and Garry Marshall's direction is unforced but never lackadaisical. The movie is rich in the eccentrically comic details of club life. It is good to see Dillon's quiet manner as a sign of intelligence, not sullenness, and Crenna and Elizondo are both superb as the grownups competing for his soul.
MICKI &MAUDE
The main problem with Micki & Maude is that Dudley Moore is manifestly not a moron. If he were, one might just possibly entertain Writer Jonathan Reynolds' premise, which tries to set Moore up logically, and without loss of the audience's sympathy, as a bigamist brought farcically to his knees when both his wives (Amy Irving and Ann Reinking) go into labor simultaneously and are assigned adjacent hospital rooms. As he nearly always does, Director Blake Edwards delivers the low, knockabout goods, and Moore is funny as he tries to attend both ladies and still keep his secret from them. But that secret is a nasty one, and all his good nature cannot wash it away. Nor can it allay the suspicion that his character, an otherwise sensible TV newsman, would never have got into the predicament. Eventually one's doubts Moore on these points nag laughter into pained silence.
2010
Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey was a star child of the '60s. It yoked trail-blazing technical wizardry to intergalactic mysticism, propelling man into space and through the time barrier to confront his own past and a new race's future. The film was about quests, not answers, and at its conclusion an air of benign befuddlement lingered over its hipper audiences like a corona of reefer smoke. Now, in the quick-solution '80s, comes 2010, a sequel whose sole purpose is to explain the ending of its predecessor. Working from Arthur C. Clarke's novel, Writer-Director Peter Hyams lets his movie waltz in place for an hour or so before enlisting the surviving members of the original cast (Keir Dullea, HAL 9000, the monolith) to help provide the inspirational capper. Flash: There is intelligent life in outer space. More, anyway, than in this amiable footnote of a movie.
MAN OF FLOWERS