From: L-Bueno@cup.portal.com (Louis Alberto Bueno)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.movies
Subject: MASTERFUL ACTING MAKES A TASTY 'SOUP'
Date: Sun,  8 Nov 92 20:46:09 PST
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Distribution: world

MASTERFUL ACTING MAKES A TASTY `SOUP'
-------------------------------------
By Kenneth Turan
(c) 1992, Los Angeles Times 11/05

	   HOLLYWOOD - ``In The Soup'' is a charming pipsqueak of a movie,
a playful film of ragged and shaggy appeal. All its virtues are small-scale
except for one, because inside this little picture is the year's largest,
most robust pieces of acting, a performance that no one can resist,
Aldolpho Rollo least of all.
	    Aldolpho (Steve Buscemi) is ``Soup's'' would-be hero. A timid,
idealistic, embryo film director, he lives in a low-rent, walk-up tenement
in Manhattan, a poster from revered Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky on his
wall and dreams of glory in his heart. Some day he'll make his movies, some
day tour buses will visit his apartment and a plaque on the wall will
commemorate his scuffling days. Someday maybe even Angelica (Jennifer
Beals), the beautiful girl next door, will do more than snarl at him. But
for now, with his erratic landlords the Bafardis on his case, what he
really needs is money.
	    Aldolpho's favorite books are sold. His meeting with deeply
underground producers Barbara and Monty (Carol Kane and director Jim
Jarmusch) did not turn out at all the way he expected. Even his mother has
done all she could. All Aldolpho has left is his most precious possession,
a massive, tattered, 500 page script for his film-to-be, the aptly named
``Unconditional Surrender.'' So he places an ad, offering the script for
sale. Which is how Joe comes into his life.
	   Joe (Seymour Cassel) is everything Aldolpho is not. A man who
doesn't recognize any boundaries - legal, social or moral - who cheerfully
lives by rules he makes up as he goes along, yet who manages an ease with
people, a twinkly-eyed charm that Aldolpho can't even imagine. ``Joe had
this way of making people feel important,'' Aldolpho tells us in the film's
amusingly ironic voice-over, ``even though you knew he was taking you for a
ride.''
	    It's not so much that Joe isn't what he seems, its that he
seems to be several different people, invariably all at the same time. When
he firsts meets Aldolpho, he introduces the nervous director to his
giggling topless girlfriend Dang (Pat Moya), hands him $1,000 and menaces
him with a gun, all within the space of a couple of minutes. Before
Aldolpho can even think about adjusting to all this, Joe announces he wants
the two of them to be ``in the soup,'' to work together. ``I've decided,''
he says with perfect mock-earnestness, ``I want art to be an important part
of my life.''
	    Aldolpho, understandably confused about whether ``this guy Joe
was what I was looking for,'' can't help but give in to the man's energy
and his enthusiasm. Never mind that this means hanging out with Skippy
(Will Patton), Joe's psychotic hemophiliac brother, and getting involved in
all sorts of nefarious, not to say illegal, schemes. After all, wasn't it
true what Joe said: ``Before you make films, you have to make money''? The
questions could come later.
	    Basing ``In The Soup'' (Times-rated mature) on his own
experiences as a young filmmaker, director Alexandre Rockwell (who co-wrote
the clever script with Tim Kissel) has constructed a light cinematic
^bildungsroman@, a neoclassic story of the emotional education of a young
artist. For Aldolpho Rollo is not only a tyro director, he is also a
neophyte human being, and hanging out with Joe forces him to engage with
life and, ultimately, to get a life of his own as well.
	    Rockwell, whose previous features were little seen, has not let
the fact that he had to make this film on a shoestring, at one point even
borrowing money from his mother-in-law's pension fund, hamper his sense of
style or of fun. He had the film shot (by Phil Parmet) in expressive black
and white, and allowed his actors (including his wife, ``Flashdance''
survivor Beals, as the girl of Aldolpho's dreams, and Sully Boyer,
unforgettable as an old man who misses his own wife) the liberty to
improvise when necessary.
	    Both the improvisation and the black and white are something of
a tr
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