Cinema: Make 'Em Laugh! Make 'Em Pay!

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Four new comedies blighten up the Christmas movie season

'Tis the season to mint money. Hollywood traditionally saves its big comedies for Christmas and, almost invariably, fills its stockings with hits. In 1980, for example, a trio of holiday comediesying home with their new video games. This season moviemakers are playing by the old rules, with bantamweight farces and mellow romantic comedies that are luring sizable audiences to the local Cineplex. The class comedy act is Tootsie, in which Dustin Hoffman winningly proves that an actor's life is a drag. But there are other new comedies aiming to answer the moguls' prayer: that this Christmas will be business as usual.

Best Friends Or: They're Playing Our Script. Richard (Burt Reynolds) and Paula (Goldie Hawn) are successful screenwriters who play out the new Hollywood romance. Boy lives with Girl, Boy marries Girl, Boy loses Girl, Boy meets Girl and realizes that amity is as important to their relationship as ecstasy. As it happens, the film's real-life writers, Valerie Curtin and Barry (Diner) Levinson, are married. The picture is a skewed documentary about two professionals working hard to be both witty and romantic. This time they worked too hard. In an attempt, perhaps, to place a discreet distance between confession and comedy, they allowed the tone of their script to become jarringly uneven. Barnard Hughes and Jessica Tandy, as Paula's parents, are repositories of senile pathos; Audra Lindley, as Richard's mom, is a shtik figureggressively annoying the next, with sutures provided by background music that never lets the viewer discover a mood on his own. One can still savor the moments when Reynolds and Hawn display their easy strengths: Burt's shrugged-off sexiness and decent vulnerability, Goldie's ditsy-pixie charm and daredevil comic timing. The two should remain among the audience's best friends, even if this picture may not make many new ones.

Airplane II: The Sequel.

What is the memory span of moviegoers these days? Like Rockys II and III, Airplane II is less a sequel than an instant remake. Same actors: Robert Hays and Julie Hagerty as the star-crossed-eyed lovers, and a supporting cast of TV stars with the chance to guy their small-screen images. Same situation: an airliner (well, this time a space shuttle) careers wildly off course. Even same gags: Hays' terminally boring monologues, black men's jive talk, Peter Graves' penchant for talking dirty to little boys, Lloyd Bridges' strikebreaking air traffic controller.

The original Airplane! was an original, written and directed by three funny fellows who went on to greater folly and glory with the spoof TV show Police Squad! The sequel is written and directed by Ken Finkleman, whose previous credit (make that debit) was Grease 2.