Kentucky sweatshirt was ruined. I washed with Tide, hoping the bright red stain would fade enough to wear it around the house.
I was shocked. Tide removed the stain completely. Thanks, Sharon Cruz.
If it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide.
What a vacation.
Uh-oh, does he need changing?
No, I do.
Your son just planted this cheeseburger on my lap.
Man, I bought these white pants just for this trip.
So you'll wash them.
This is hamburger grease. I'll never wear them again.
Introducing Grease Fighting Tide. With amazing speed, new Tide beads up soaked in grease and floats it away.
Tide got my pants, especially white. Thanks, Chana Chakaruso.
If it's gotta be clean, it's gotta be Tide.
Don't miss the paper, September 10th.
Look for Pamper's Picture Perfect Sweepstakes.
Clifford's got the paper.
Smart as a whip.
Fill out the coupon, mail it with proof of purchase, and you could be one of ten to win a trip to New York for a photo shoot.
The chance to be in a Pamper's ad.
Bring home a $10,000 bond and a two-year supply of Pampers.
Enter Pamper's Picture Perfect Sweepstakes.
Check your paper, September 10th.
Clifford?
Sharp as a tap.
Recognize this?
Oh, come on, you've got one just like it. I know you do.
All those eye shadows you bought that look so great, until you tried to wear them.
Goodbye, shoebox.
I found Clarion.
I tried their computer, and it told me which shadows would look good on me.
Clarion, ultra-pure makeup, personalized for you.
I mean, which would you rather have?
Lots of terrific shadows that look pretty in a shoebox, or lots of terrific shadows that look pretty terrific on you.
Clarion, looking great and knowing it.
Our next movie is named A Dry White Season, and it tells the story of a white South African, an Afrikaner, who was a sports hero and now is a schoolmaster, and is pretty good at turning a blind eye to the injustices in his society.
He's comfortable, his family is happy, and so why should he rock the boat?
But then one day, the son of the black gardener that works for him disappears, and then the gardener also disappears while searching for his son.
It appears that both of them have died in prison, and so finally, the white man gets involved.
Will you take me to the funeral?
Are you crazy? That's no place for you, man.
That's Donald Sutherland as the white South African, and Zeke Smokai as a black activist in the struggle against apartheid.
As Sutherland continues to get more deeply involved in the case, he alienates his family, especially his wife, played by Janet Sussman.
A drunken cavern, an Afrikaner traitor. You deserve each other.
Sutherland goes to a well-known white lawyer for advice, a legendary barrister played by Marlon Brando.
This is Brando's first film appearance since 1980, and his character takes a wicked delight in playing with the government witnesses.
Would you have this court believe that this man tried to throw himself through the window forwards and being frustrated in that effort,
he turned himself round and with great force threw himself backwards toward the window?
Evidently.
But would you care to demonstrate that for this court?
A Dry White Season tells a simple story of how a man finds that he can no longer close his eyes to the injustices of the society he lives in,
but it contains a lot of information about South Africa too, about the lifestyles of the whites and blacks,
and the strange way in which the ruling segment is able to live in isolated comfort and never really confront the daily realities of the non-whites in their midst.
There have been two other major films recently about South Africa, Cry Freedom and A World Apart,
but this one does a better job of showing the whole spectrum of South Africa and not just a few white dissenters.
It's a powerful and important film, and I thought Donald Sutherland was just right in his performance as an ordinary man who stubbornly demands answers for his questions.
Well, I think that the material is familiar to a lot of us. We know the subject fairly well.
I thought what was special about it is that the director really confronted us with the brutality.
He didn't shy away from it, pushes the edge of it, shows us children being harmed and badly beaten up,
shows us adults and their bodies decomposing and cut up, and I thought that that kind of confrontation was very smart,
that it shouldn't be movie injuries happening to people, but let it look bloody, let people see what's happening and who's dying,
and I thought that was what made the film a little more urgent than just a traditional film.
This movie was directed by a 32-year-old woman from Martinique named Usain Palsy, who made a movie a few years ago called Sugarcane Alley
in Martinique that we both thought was one of the really best movies we'd seen in that year, as I recall.
What she does in both movies is she is able to involve us in the daily lives of the characters. She sees these people.
She doesn't just see a story when she's manipulating them for some effect. She sees how they feel, how they live, how they talk,
and more than in most movies that I've seen from South Africa, she sees how the black people live and how their daily lives are constructed
instead of just as in Cry Freedom, showing them the maid in the kitchen or the person down at the end of the street.
She puts them right up there on the street.
There is a documentary-like approach to her pictures, and I think it serves this subject very, very well.
Coming up next, how did Dixie, the story of three sorority sisters coming of age during the 1950s?
Oh, I've just got this mad thing for Mr. Elvis, Aaron Prezzi.
Orville and Gary Retenbacher on overachieving.
This picture we're taking when I was a senior in high school, which was my last year in 4-H club work.
This is some of the ribbons I've accumulated over the years.
He's always overachieving in 4-H and in the popcorn. He likes to show that his popcorn pops up lighter and fluffier.
Here we go, Grandpa, popping the top off once again.
No, that's the way I like to see things go. I like to see it go to the very highest possibilities.
And it blows the top off every time.
That's right.
That is overachievement, but it gives us great popcorn.
Camping out sure was an experience.
It rained for five nights, then it poured for three.
Home looks great, dinner looks great.
Mommy crisped a right of fries, just for me.
Next year, I hope they send my brother.
Is she lover?
Or killer? Tom Selleck and Polina Poroskova star in a comedy that proves falling in love with a beautiful woman can be murder.
Her Alibi. Bring it home on videocassette tonight.
The Nissan Marathon's been extended a few days, so your Nissan dealer has to keep on running.
He's still passing along dealer cash in centers that can save you hundreds on Sentra and on every Nissan hard-body truck.
He's going all out on Maxima, the most trouble-free car sold in the U.S., and giving up to $2,000 cash back on Stanza.
But see your Nissan dealer today, because when he crosses the finish line, this event is really over.
The Nissan Marathon, the best event we've ever run.
Denver. There's a new 4x4 with the power to run circles around Toyota.
Introducing the 1990 Mitsubishi Mighty Max 4x4.
It has a standard V6 engine to give it more power than the Toyota Deluxe.
More standard features than Toyota, too, like auto-locking hubs and side window defoggers.
The new Mitsubishi Mighty Max 4x4 with the power to run circles around Toyota.
And now factory dealer incentives could mean great deals, but only at your Denver-area Mitsubishi Motors dealer.
Our next film is the predictable college reminiscence called Heart of Dixie about a couple of traditional Southern bells in Alabama in 1957
trying to decide what to do with their lives after graduation.
Just like in the movie called Shag a couple of months ago, one of the girls is considering marrying the richest guy in school,
but of course that won't happen.
Heart of Dixie also follows the classic formula of the good girl brunette and the bad girl, the loose girl blonde.
Here we meet the girls in a bar.
I want to dance now, and I want to do it slow.
You know, I tell you what, why don't we wait for the next faster or not dance so pretty looking behind the...
Come on!
The blonde is played by Virginia Madsen in an all-too-familiar scene.
The only fresh wrinkle in the story, Ally Sheedy's character confronts resistance when she tries to speak out against racial injustice.
Even her sorority house maid asks her not to interfere.
Honey, our praise, him and him, point the way.
Take care of all of them that been vanished to death.
Keefe, I still can't believe that's enough.
Because you still believe in Santa Claus, baby.
I can see how this story might be informative to a teenage girl wondering about the pressures of college life and what it's going to be like,
but I can't see anyone who's ever seen a movie not go tired of the cliches in Heart of Dixie.
We saw two entirely different movies.
This movie wasn't about the cliches of college life in 1957.
This was a movie very much like the last one, the movie in South Africa.
This is about a person living in a white society with all of its perks and all of its prerequisites and all of its protection,
who is confronted by racial injustice and who decides to speak out and who at the end of the movie does so,
calling herself a sister of a black woman who was the first student to register at this college
and therefore earning the ostracism of all of the other whites, all of her friends.
She steps out of her society in order to do what she feels is the right thing.
And that's what the movie is about, Gene.
It's not about predictable southern girls in 1957.
Well, I mean, it certainly is about what you said it's about.
It's about her society and how she leaves it.
Roger, do you seriously think that I don't know that that's what the story is?
Your review didn't really seem to understand that it's about this moment, this turning point.
This one thing, it's 1957 and she's registering the first student, as you said,
and she's going to have a romance with the photographer, the press service photographer,
in the sense that he's going to inspire her to be more authentic and all that.
She doesn't even have a romance with him. They say goodbye at the end of the movie.
Well, there's an implied romance.
I don't want to pull rank on you that I'm three years older than you are,
but I was alive at this time and I remember the fraternity sorority system, the racism,
the fact that there weren't black students around, that you didn't talk to blacks, that they were someplace else.
And then suddenly this tremendously dramatic moment when this young black woman registered in a southern university
and everything changed and this is about one student who sees that that's right and it isn't wrong
and she is able to turn her back on her sorority, to turn her back on all the values,
including this stupid fiancé that she has, and move forward into the 1960s and into a new world.
And that's all well and good. It's noble and wonderful.
And there isn't a person that's going to disagree with you.
The only thing that you're pulling rank on is, presuming that I'm not intelligent enough to pick that up.
Wait a second, I'm telling you very specifically that the movie couldn't be more predictable.
I knew exactly what she was going to do every time from hair color, which I talked about,
to which guy she was going to be involved with, to which side of this issue of racism she was going to be on.
It would have been more exciting frankly if she had caved in like everybody else.
Okay, difference of opinion. Now let's take another look at the movies we reviewed on this program.
We both voted thumbs down for Black Rain, the Michael Douglas thriller set in Japan.
Two more thumbs down for Heavy Petting, a lame compilation of old footage and nostalgia about adolescent dating practices.
We both voted thumbs up though for In Country, with its inspired performance by Emily Lloyd,
as a young woman who wants to know more about how her father died in Vietnam.
And two more thumbs up for A Dry White Season, with Donald Sutherland as a white South African who takes a moral stand.
And finally, a big disagreement over Heart of Dixie, with Ally Sheedy as a Southern sorority girl who speaks out against racial injustice.
A Dry White Season and In Country are the two we're agreeing on this week.
Yes, I'm amazed at how well, when I think of In Country, of how well the sequence is shot by that Vietnam War memorial.
The creator of that memorial did a real spectacular job and the film is equal to it.
It's a great memorial and Norman Jewison does a very good job of bringing all the emotions together at the end of the film.
That's it for this week. Next time we'll be back with reviews of more new movies, including Johnny Handsome,
a thriller about revenge starring Mickey Rourke and Ellen Barkin.
And also Welcome Home, a Vietnam drama with Chris Christopherson and JoBeth Williams.
That's next week and until then, the balcony is closed.
We'll see you then.