Thelma Louise

How do you ask a Knight of the Realm — and a Knight of the Realm with a best picture Academy Award, at that — to move on to the next question? With great difficulty. Allotted 15 minutes to chat with Sir Ridley Scott, who is on the phone from London promoting his dazzling and dark — if somewhat nonsensical — sci-fi thriller Prometheus, this interviewer managed to get all of four questions in before the publicist with the charming accent interrupted with a brusque, "I'm going to have to break this off, sorry.

Johnny Suede is a deadpan, deliriously bent fable about a singer with an oversized pompadour and undersized talent who thinks that the secret of life lies in simply being cool. This is not the secret of life, however - a realization at which the hero of this arch and occasionally magical urban fairy tale finally arrives. Well, maybe he arrives at it. A decidedly offbeat little movie written and directed by Tom DiCillo (Jim Jarmusch's cinematographer on Permanent Vacation and Stranger Than Paradise)

The best movie catchphrase of the year - better than Harrison Ford growling "Get off my plane" in Air Force One, better than Mike Myers cooing "Shagadelic, baby" in Austin Powers - is delivered by Demi Moore in G.I. Jane. Unfortunately, it's a three-word declaration of defiant triumph that cannot be printed in this newspaper. Trust me, though - it's a breakthrough moment, wherein Moore's Lt. Jordan O'Neil, the first woman given the chance to train for the elite, eat-dirt Navy SEALs, becomes, in a sense (or a couple of senses, actually)

He is best known for dramatic peformances that have won him Oscar and Emmy awards, but as with many stars, the early years were lean for Louis Gossett Jr. But unlike other struggling actors, Gossett didn't sell shoes or wait on tables. He supported himself as a folk singer. "We were rehearsing for an Off-Broadway play above this coffee house in Greenwich Village, and I used to go down and watch them pass the basket around after a song," the actor recalled. "That basket was filled with money in 15 minutes.

Gregg Araki's The Living End isn't going to play well with the "family- values" crowd. If, somehow, the film had found its way onto the giant video screens at last month's Republican convention in Houston, it would have prompted a stampede of epic proportions. ("Gay Pic Sends Pols Packing. ") Which would have suited Araki just fine. After all, The Living End - a frenzied, lovers-on-the-lam movie that opened in Philadelphia at the Ritz at the Bourse on Friday and has been breaking attendance records in art houses on both coasts - is dedicated to the "hundreds and thousands who've died and the hundreds and thousands more who will die because of a big white house full of Republican . . . " - well, full of Republican not-nice-guys.

In Black Hawk Down, the $90 million Sony Pictures reenactment of the battle on the streets of Mogadishu, director Ridley Scott has delivered a challenging new form of war movie that avoids making political statements. With praise from critics and a marketing campaign that plays up the heroism of the young American troops, the harrowingly straightforward depiction of an Army mission gone bad has strong box-office prospects. And it's clear that producer Jerry Bruckheimer and Columbia Pictures smell Academy Award nominations (Scott's work debuted in New York and Los Angeles last month in order to qualify)

I never thought I'd find myself feeling sorry for Warren Beatty. This aging, crinkly-eyed Lothario, with his implacable yen for ever-younger and more visible specimens of femaleness, is hardly the sort of man to strike a chord of sympathy in a woman's heart. Still, as I watched Beatty play - or try to wiggle his way out of playing - the assigned role of Boy Toy in Madonna's "Truth or Dare," I felt myself wince. In one scene, Beatty is urged by Madonna to venture closer toward the camera.

Let's agree on one thing real quick. Many men are total jerks. Some of them are are brutish, self-centered, hyper-aggressive total jerks. Naturally, the way things work in our great nation, large numbers of women wish to emulate them. Next time you see somebody driving like a total maniac, it's an even bet there's big hair behind the wheel. Yes, one of the byproducts of gender equity is that young women now drive as idiotically as young men. Progress can be painful. Take last year's dubious heroine, Lorena Bobbit.

I see by the papers that men are feeling picked on again - this time because of a lightweight but amusing female buddy-movie "Thelma and Louise. " One reviewer, of the male persuasion, felt the film was feminism carried to the point of fascism. Another was particularly offended when the audience cheered after Louise shot a rapist. I saw "Robin Hood" the other night and the audience cheered every time Robin and the guys offed another minion of the sheriff of Nottingham. I fail to see the difference.

IT'S BEEN an 18-month thrill ride across the American Heartland, complete with Texas-size gaffes, a daring flight from substantive issues and finally a Grand Canyonesque cliffhanger. But now that the story line of "Willard and Barack" has produced a result, is America ready for a "Thelma and Louise"-style bummer of an ending? It's an approaching high-speed plunge off the so-called "fiscal cliff," with a Polaroid snapshot of happier election times presumably floating skyward. The nation's political conversation now takes a sharp turn toward a man-made crisis that the candidates have been loath to discuss - possible tax increases on all American households, as well as mandatory steep spending cuts, especially in defense, that critics say will crush the plodding economic recovery.