TELEVISION
Flare Up and Fizzle Out
Water electronically rationed, cautions a drinking-fountain sign. ECOLOGICAL LAWS STRICTLY ENFORCED, warns a road sign. After decades of environmental neglect, 21st century America is a mighty unpleasant place, a country of heat waves and hurricanes, skin cancer and typhoid. Like 1983's The Day After, which powerfully fantasized a nuclear attack, the mini-series THE FIRE NEXT TIME (CBS, April 18, 20) means to be a cautionary tale about the devastating effects of global warming. Part 1 is a stunner, combining epic special effects with sharp detail to tell the poignant story of an everyfamily struggling to adapt to a disastrous world. Part 2, alas, goes astray, slighting environmental and social issues for mundane family melodrama.
MUSIC
Forecasting Snow
This white Canadian ragamuffin's blazing debut album, Twelve Inches of Snow, fuses Jamaican dance hall and American hip-hop into the irresistibly slick mix many other musicians have been aiming for. SNOW'S groove-heavy beats and scatlike raps are burning up the charts from Kingston to New York to Toronto. Darrin O'Brien, who would rather be known by his ghetto moniker, Snow, is an alumnus of Toronto's housing projects and the Ontario penal system. Rap elitists who remember Vanilla Ice may doubt Snow's street credentials. But they need only listen to Snow's No. 1 pop hit, Informer, a tale about offing an undercover snitch, to know the man's music is bona fide. There's not a snowball's chance that Snow will melt like Ice.
CINEMA
One Ga-Ga Night
INDECENT PROPOSAL asks us to believe that a billionaire who looks uncannily like Robert Redford needs to buy sex. Granted, Diana, his quarry, looks uncannily like Demi Moore, but still, $1 million for a quickie? No doubt he gets off on control; there might have been an interesting movie in that. But this ga-ga film goes for the moral dilemma. Diana and her husband (Woody Harrelson) debate the offer forever before she accepts. They quarrel while Diana and her one-night stand get lovey-dovey, but then things turn out fine. Because director Adrian Lyne takes all this so slowly and seriously, Indecent Proposal is an inadvertent comedy. As such, it is much funnier than Honeymoon in Vegas, which tried in vain to be funny about the same idea.
THEATER
A Forest Without Trees
It seems to be the season for savvy playwrights to slip. Neil Simon's musical adaptation of his The Goodbye Girl left out the good parts, David Hwang's Face Value closed in preview, and now Lanford Wilson (Talley's Folly, Burn This) has opened REDWOOD CURTAIN, a would-be poetic musing on ecology, Vietnam, capitalism and multicultural heritage. If you think something is deeply sick in the national soul, then the play, for all its philosophical incoherence and melodrama (about a Vietnamese immigrant seeking her ex-G.I. father), may speak to you. If you live in the world most Americans inhabit, you will probably find it windy, vacant, awkwardly staged and ineptly acted, except by the superb Debra Monk as the girl's sardonic aunt.
BOOKS
Short Tall Tales