Showtime (Thurs., March 26, 10 P.M. ET)
B+
In this 30-minute short, James Remar, the heavy in 48 HRS., plays a seasoned session guitarist who gets summoned to a recording studio in the middle of the night. The world's greatest rock band, the Raging Kings, have just tossed out their guitarist and need a new player.
The story is all hot licks, rock-and-roll attitude and good fun. And the plot couldn't be more timely, with Vince Neil having just been booted out of Motley Crüe.
HBO (Sat., March 28, 8 P.M. ET)
A-
In 1911 a starving Indian (Graham Greene of Dances with Wolves) wanders into a slaughterhouse in Oroville, in the foothills of the California Sierras. The last survivor of the Yahi, a people thought to be extinct, he is brought to San Francisco to live with anthropologist Dr. Alfred Kroeber (Jon Voight), who is delighted to have a chance to study "the last truly primitive man on our continent." Over time, the starchy and pedantic Kroeber ends up learning a good deal more than dialect from the Indian he names Ishi. Anne Archer, David Ogden Stiers and Jack Blessing costar.
Lustrously shot by director Harry Hook, the fact-based film is a thoughtful exploration of the noble-savage theme, made memorable by fine performances, especially that of Greene, who invests the role with dignity, an implicit sense of grief and a deep spirituality.
ABC (Sun., March 29, 9 P.M. ET)
A
The young woman tells an auditorium full of New York City high schoolers: "I was a white, 22-year-old, heterosexual female from a good family living on the Upper East Side. I never used intravenous drugs. I wasn't promiscuous. I never had a blood transfusion. No way I had AIDS. No way."
She was wrong. This movie vividly dramatizes the story of Gertz, who believes she contracted AIDS from a onetime fling, at 16, with a bartender from the notorious Manhattan disco Studio 54. (Gertz was the subject of a July 30, 1990, PEOPLE cover story. For a look at her life today, see page 59.)
As Gertz, Molly Ringwald gives a richly nuanced performance, fighting through denial, anger and the other stages of impending mortality until she finds courage in adversity. Ringwald is supported by one of the season's strongest casts, including Lee Grant, Martin Landau, Perry King, Roxana Zal, George Coe and Peter Spears.
Director Tom McLoughlin frames the story in an engrossing fashion, jumping back and forth in time. Using tints, smoke and echoes, he also manages to evoke the fevered state of serious illness. Rarely is a cautionary tale told so artfully.
CBS (Tues., March 31, 9 P.M. ET)
B-
Nobody knows that the 11-year-old son of an unmarried woman (Loni Anderson) was conceived in a rape—until the man who brutalized her (Anthony John Denison) returns from prison, professing he wants to serve as the boy's father.
Despite a very soft middle section, this is a decent thriller with such nice Hitchcockian touches as gliding zoom shots and a sound track streaked with shivery strings.
Syndicated (Check local listings)
B
Timed to coincide with the NCAA basketball tournament that is winnowing its way to next week's Final Four on CBS, this is the story of a Loyola Marymount University basketball star who collapsed because of a heart irregularity during a game two years ago this month and died shortly afterward. His death came one season after he led the nation in scoring and rebounding. (Members of Gathers's family had filed two separate lawsuits against LMU for wrongful death. One was recently settled.)
The film follows Gathers (Victor Love) from a poor childhood in Philadelphia through his travails as a teenage father to his college career and health problems. Nell Carter plays his mother; George Kennedy plays the Catholic priest who was his first coach and mentor, and Duane Davis plays Bo Kimble, Gathers's teammate and friend in high school and college, now a pro with the NBA's L.A. Clippers.
The script is awkward—at times downright hokey. (One week the cashier at the college cafeteria is telling Gathers she wasn't aware the school had a basketball team; his next time through the line she's a jargon-tossing expert, telling him, "They're overplaying you in the low post. If you go to your left, you'll be unstoppable." Okay, coach, but how much is this bag of Cheez Doodles?)
Though Love bears a much greater resemblance to Darryl Strawberry than to Gathers, his energetic portrayal is quite winning. And for once an inner-city setting doesn't look as if it were shot on a Hollywood sound-stage.
>FAMILY AND FAITH
FBS HAS TWO WORTHY SPECIALS THIS week. In Families First (Wed., March 25, 9 P.M. ET) Bill Moyers looks at programs that try to work with families in crisis (from drugs, physical abuse, etc.) rather than placing the children in the overburdened foster-care system. Such family-preservation programs exist in 37 states.
Faith Under Fire (Tues., March 31, 10 P.M. ET) is filmmaker DeWitt Sage's stirring study of how clergy and their flocks dealt—in some cases meekly, in many instances heroically—with 40 years of repressive Communist rule in Eastern Europe.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
