City Slickers

Two comedies - one that's good and one that's, well, a problem - top this week's list of new videos. CITY SLICKERS (1991) (RCA/Columbia) $99.95. 114 minutes. Billy Crystal, Daniel Stern, Bruno Kirby, Jack Palance. An often hilarious midlife- crisis comedy about three urban types who go west for a week of ropin', ridin' and soul-searchin' on the saddle. Crystal, who conceived the project, stars along with Stern and Kirby, the three of them wrestling steers as they wrestle with their late-30s angst.

Think how great it is to be a pig. When you're a human, you have to spend a lot of time in January fretting over pounds you piled on over the holidays. When you're a pig, it's your job, and you haven't done it well unless you've really porked up. "That's what people say about pigs - they really put on the weight," said Bob Holley proudly. About a dozen of his students at Saul High School for Agricultural Science are taking their hogs to the annual Pennsylvania State Farm Show this week, where they'll be judged on their pork-ritude.

Rapids! The raft is suddenly a teeter-totter on water, and I'm doing a turtle imitation trying to avoid the water crashing over my head. The water is 47 degrees. I am soaked. I am cold. And I paid for this vacation. Day One, city slicker on the river. Actually it's city slickers, four childhood friends from South Philadelphia and a new buddy from Roxborough. Call us the Philly Five. Everyone else did. We were on the Colorado with 22 other passengers in two rafts in Grand Canyon National Park for six days of white-water rafting, camping, and being outdoors.

Whoa there, little doggies. If you thought "City Slickers" would end the summer comedy drought emergency, think again. It's not that "City Slickers" isn't funny - there are some laughs. It's just that it's not strictly a comedy. Instead of a western spoof, what you get is a fairly serious attempt to show how three men in the throes of midlife crises face their problems during a big cattle drive out in the prairie. There's some humor to lighten things up, but at its core, "City Slickers" is about male bonding, in the worst sense of the phrase.

The kvetching cowboys and cute calves of "City Slickers" easily roped moviegoers' hearts over in its opening weekend. The Billy Crystal comedy netted $13 million, more than twice the gross of its nearest competition, "Backdraft. " The big-canvas firefighter saga is down about 30 percent from its previous weekend gross, while "What About Bob?" lost about 20 percent to finish in fourth place. Spike Lee's entry, "Jungle Fever," made its debut in third place with $5.3 million.

How do you lure city slickers to the farm? You don't - you bring the farm to the city. From May 29 through June 7, Philadelphia will stage what it is hoped will become an annual county fair on the grounds of Memorial Hall in West Fairmount Park. The 10-day Philadelphia County Fair will offer city folk a chance to experience the smells and sights of life on the farm without tiptoeing through pastures. Fairgoers will see rabbits, sheep, beef and dairy cattle and other farm animals; watch baby chicks being hatched and pigs race; smell fresh hay (and other pungent farm odors)

Dan Kurzman's Fatal Voyage - The Sinking of the USS Indianapolis documents what its author calls "the greatest case of negligence in naval history. " In the waning days of World War II, returning from a Pacific atoll where it delivered vital parts for the A-bomb destined for Hiroshima, the Navy cruiser was torpedoed by a Japanese sub. A third of the crew's 1,200 sailors went down with the ship; the rest clung to rafts in the ocean for five days, many dying from starvation, dehydration or sharks.

QUOTE "Wearing a yarmulke with an Afro. " - Lenny Kravitz, on the hardest part of being raised a half-black Jew. DID PITT SIZZLER BOIL OVER OFF-SET? It's a pretty long day when you're just running around with a patch over your personals," says Brad Pitt, the actor steaming up movie screens with his portrayal of a seductive hitchhiker who has the hots for Geena Davis in the new female buddy picture, "Thelma & Louise," also starring Susan Sarandon. The twentysomething-year-old Pitt describes his explicit love scene with Davis in the current issue of US: "We were all fighting over what music to play to break the tension.

Remember the resplendently pregnant - and nude - Demi Moore posing on the cover of this month's Vanity Fair? Well, move over, Demi. The September cover of Spy magazine, on newsstands this week, features Moore's husband, Bruce Willis, in a parody of the Vanity Fair photo, cradling a hairy tummy that appears heavy with child. No, Willis didn't violate any laws of nature. The photo was electronically altered. "We looked at a lot of Bruce Willis head shots, found the right one, went to a modeling agency and found a guy with Willis' body.

For most of us, the Catskills comedian has gone the way of vaudeville, silent movies and eight-track tapes. But that irascible entertainer of old, chomping on his cigar and dispensing his quick, abrasive quips, maintains a fond place in Billy Crystal's heart. "These are the guys I grew up watching on 'The Ed Sullivan Show,' growing up in Long Island," Crystal said. "There was only one show where there were stand-ups, basically, and that was 'The Ed Sullivan Show'. . . "These were the guys, Alan (King)

For an economics major, Shira Kamm is handy with a shovel or a hoe. And she's cozy behind the wheel of a truck or a tractor. But she does tire of questions about how she manages that 12-foot truck, assumptions that she must be gay, and unwanted advice from guys. Such is the lot of the female farmer. Kamm, 30, just signed on to lease land from a retired couple in Glen Mills to start her own farm: Wild Goose Garden, on four acres near Cheyney University. And that puts her among a new breed of city slickers - urbanite devotees of the Do-It-Yourself culture, committed to sustainability and ready to put their jeans to good use. They are a small but growing force.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation might have meant well when it stuck Philadelphia drivers with about 1.5 million silly yellow stickers for three years. For that same amount of time, drivers have been complaining to PennDot that the program was wrongly labeled, since sticker does not accurately describe the little, yellow car registration paper that promptly and unfailingly unsticks itself from the back windows of vehicles, frequently fluttering away. Finally, on Tuesday, PennDot declared the program done.

BEYOND BORDERS. This film about a romance between aid workers has stink-o tendencies. Starring Angelina Jolie, Clive Owen, Noah Emmerich and Teri Polo. (R) C- GOOD BOY! Nice little movie about a boy (Liam Aiken) and the outer-space terrier who clues him in to secret life of dogs. (PG) B INTOLERABLE CRUELTY. Gold digger (Catherine Zeta-Jones) meets match in divorce lawyer (George Clooney). Some bright moments, but doesn't match level of talent. (R) B- KILL BILL: VOL. I. Killer (Uma Thurman)

Like lovers in a country song, in 1996, Lars Anderson and Lori Steinmetz were hurtin' from love when their eyes met across the dance floor and they two-stepped to the lyrics of "Waltz Across Texas. " The couple started a new life together and a new business, City Slickers/Country Kickers, a weekly country-line-dance gathering. No smoking, no drinking, no come-ons, Lori Anderson said, just a place to relax with good friends and dance. "Country dancing is basically a love, a love of the music and the dance," she said.

Adam Sandler as a bard of greeting cards who imparts his folksy, small-town values to those impersonal cynics in the big city? Mr. Deeds is a half-good update of Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, the 1936 Frank Capra charmer starring Gary Cooper as the New England hick who inherits millions and gets dubbed "Cinderella Man" by the tabloids. (Inflation being what it is, the $20 million pot Mr. Deeds got in 1936 has by 2002 ballooned to $40 billion.) Where in Capra's original, Mr. Deeds was diagnosed a nut because he wanted to share the wealth, here he is deemed dim-witted because he's not a flashy New Yorker like Babe Bennett (Winona Ryder in the role originated by Jean Arthur)

To a rational person, the photograph shows Robert Redford attending a funeral and a boorish fan who has barged into the picture for a brief brush with fame. But Jerry Schiff isn't a rational person. He's an actor. Worse, he's an out-of-work actor. In his delusional world, the photo marked the beginning of a firm and long friendship with Redford. And in his more reckless flights of fancy, he can elevate the picture into the movie he and Redford shot together. Redford and Barbra Streisand costarred in The Way We Were 30 years ago, and they are brought together once again - sort of - in Daniel Stern's comedy, Barbra's Wedding.

Four years ago, Daniel Stern, a seasoned actor but fledgling playwright, was sitting at his desk in his Malibu home and getting nowhere with a two-character piece. It wasn't a case of writer's block, but what was going on down the street. Unable to take the deafening noise anymore, an exasperated Stern went outside to investigate. Swarms of helicopters buzzed over the neighborhood in Apocalypse Now formations. On the ground, the roads were jammed with news trucks and television reporters babbling excited inanities into their microphones.

The verdict is in: "Come East, Mr. Cowboy, come East. " Gone are the days when city folks packed up their belongings and headed west in search of gold, land or adventure. The action is here, on the East Coast. Forget about the wide-open range and the smell of cattle, the pig roasts and barn dances, the horsey rides and cowboy boots, and come join us city slickers who live and die under the clouds of pollution, filth and sex. Many Americans are sick of the hanky-panky, hee-hawing and half-truths that dominated the White House.

The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation is trying to out-smart uninsured drivers who escape detection by using the red-on-white "T" temporary insurance stickers indefinitely. Instead of stickers, motorists will get a 5-by-8 card with expiration date to put inside their back windshield. This will deter theft and forgery of proof-of-insurance. But pardon us city slickers if the PennDOT move seems more like touting a drug that will alleviate dandruff while withholding one that could cure cancer.

Rapids! The raft is suddenly a teeter-totter on water, and I'm doing a turtle imitation trying to avoid the water crashing over my head. The water is 47 degrees. I am soaked. I am cold. And I paid for this vacation. Day One, city slicker on the river. Actually it's city slickers, four childhood friends from South Philadelphia and a new buddy from Roxborough. Call us the Philly Five. Everyone else did. We were on the Colorado with 22 other passengers in two rafts in Grand Canyon National Park for six days of white-water rafting, camping, and being outdoors.