Rushes

COMFORT AND JOY

According to the radio, eight Christmas truces are threatening to unravel, and in the Moscow zoo the panda is either pregnant or dying. At home in Glasgow, having finished her Christmas shoplifting, Disc Jockey Alan Bird's girlfriend of four years walks out on him in the middle of decorating the tree. His dentist hurts, a psychiatrist is uncomprehending, and both sides in the territorial war between Mr. Bunny and McCool's, mobile purveyors of ice cream, keep damaging his car to register displeasure at his peacemaking efforts. In short, it is a fairly typical, that is to say awful, Yuletide season, and Comfort and Joy is a fairly typical, that is to say wonderful, Bill Forsyth comedy. As Gregory's Girl and Local Hero showed, he is a director whose best shots are sidelong glances, a writer whose best lines are murmured asides. In Bill Paterson, who plays Bird, Forsyth has the perfect spokesman for his dismayed, determined reasonableness. What he has again created is a unique product, the miniature souffle.

TEACHERS

Like its subject, the public high school, Teachers is undone by its aspiration to be all things to all members of its constituency. Sometimes it is a sardonic assault on institutional idiocy, something Director Arthur Hiller once managed pretty well in The Hospital. Sometimes it is a sentimental plea for humanistic faculty-student relationships, sometimes a romantic comedy and sometimes The Blackboard Jungle revisited. Mostly, however, it is a mess. Screenwriter W.R. McKinney wrenches his plot endlessly, attempting to make plausible the weird shifts in tone. The leads (Nick Nolte and JoBeth Williams) and a raft of good supporting players are simply set adrift, looking for a logical line to which their bedraggled characters might cling. There are no survivors.

STRANGER THAN PARADISE

This saggy-dog story, made for $120,000 by American Independent Film Maker Jim Jarmusch, asks the musical question: How hip are you? A coupla white guys sit around talking, or moping. One of the guys plays desultory host to his cousin from Budapest.

The three of them meet up in Cleveland, then drive to Florida for two improbable plot twists. There are only 67 shots, each separated from the next by a few seconds of blackness, and three funny bits. Artfully done, with offhand references to directors ranging from Byron Haskin to Yasujiro Ozu, Stranger Than Paradise has the odd odor of something left too long behind Aunt Bela's chintz couch. Yet it has been extravagantly praised and is a box-office success in its Manhattan debut. Rarely has a movie so fetid been so feted.