Bad Movie

You want to go to the movies. So you turn to the newspaper, where movie ads trumpet the current films. The "Wyatt Earp" ad proclaims, "Not bad, but you'll probably wish you'd waited for video." "I Love Trouble" brags, "Terrible! Don't waste your money!" And the ads for "Baby's Day Out" suggest, "What, are you kidding? Wash your hair instead!"OK, so the idea of newspaper ads that actually help you decide what to see is a fantasy. But there are ways to sniff out stinkers before you find yourself seven bucks and two hours poorer.

Los Angeles.--To date myself: I was a sophomore in college in 1958 when the movie ''Gigi'' came out. There was a song in it, sung by Maurice Chevalier, that we all laughed about, called ''I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore.''That still seemed funny to me until Monday when my wife and I went to see ''Reality Bites,'' the film some critics seem to think defines the new generation of post-baby boomers, Generation X. If they are right and this is what it is like to be young and educated in 1994, I am now glad I'm not young anymore.

Tonight's schedule includes two new television movies, each of which fails for a different reason.* "I'll Fly Away" (8-9 p.m., WETA, Channel 26) -- Forrest (Sam Waterston) retreats to a forest for a weekend fishing trip. PBS.* "Ghost Mom" (8-10 p.m., WBFF, Channel 45) -- Dave Thomas of "SCTV," and now of "Grace Under Fire," directed and co-wrote this comedy-drama fantasy, in which Jean Stapleton plays a meddling mom who remains meddling after she dies. Geraint Wyn Davies, who played a member of the undead on TV's "Forever Knight," plays a normal mortal here, the guy whose mother constantly hovers about.

BAD MOVIES WE LOVEEdward Marguliesand Stephen RebelloPlume330 pages. $12 (paperback)Bad movies, like Tolstoy's unhappy families, are not all the same. That is the premise of Edward Margulies and Stephen Rebello in "Bad Movies We Love."This high-camp tour of film's lowest echelons promises "Big Stars! Big Budgets! Big Hair! Big Mistakes!" and it delivers, essay-style, with a short synopsis of more than 200 bad classics. Some of the material first appeared in Movieline in the "Bad Movies We Love" monthly column.

Simon Says:I don't get it: If violent TV shows are supposed to make kids more violent, how come comedies don't make them any funnier?*When did turquoise become teal?*You read it here first: With so many partners now owning the team, the Orioles are going to have to add thousands of prime location "owners seats" at Camden Yards, forcing out longtime fans and creating riots next opening day.*Two reasons to own a television set: Ed Feldman and Joe L'Erario of "Furniture on the Mend."*If you ever get a watch that tells you the day of the week, you can never go back to a watch that doesn't.

Los Angeles.--The city of the future is having a nervous breakdown.The symptom of the end of California dreamin' is, appropriately, a bad movie.''Falling Down'' stars Michael Douglas as a recently fired defense worker who cracks up on the freeway in South Pasadena and decides to walk 20 miles across Los Angeles to the home of his ex-wife in Venice. Then, in an unfortunate phrase in a Los Angeles Times commentary, ''He does everything you've always wanted to do.''What he does is break up a Korean grocery store because the owner can't pronounce ''five,'' win a street war with a couple of guys from a Hispanic gang, terrorize a hamburger stand with automatic weapons because they don't serve breakfast after 11:30 a.m., kill the nasty owner of an Army-surplus store and a rich old golfer who gives him a hard time, go after a construction crew with a heat-seeking missile.

"Stay Tuned" is an elaborate and ambitious attempt to look at the zany world of cable TV.Do the words "it stinks" mean anything to you?There are more laughs to be experienced aimlessly hitting the remote in the hours after midnight and flashing through Lost Combination Cable Network and SuperStation 99 from downtown Omaha and Total War Cable Network and Old, Bad Western Theater than in any single instant of "Stay Tuned."Did the money men behind this piece of cheese look at the record of director-photographer Peter Hyams, which is one long bland litany of mediocrity -- "2010: The Sequel," "The Star Chamber," "Running Scared" -- as well as being utterly devoid of humor?

It's the age-old question: Genetics or environment?Are certain actors by some defect of birth destined to appear in ungodly strings of awful films, or do they plummet to the depths of career degradation once they find themselves firmly entrenched in Hollywood?It's a pertinent question, as this summer is shaping up as one of the worst, aesthetically speaking, in recent memory. Films have opened big, but audiences all but disappear after a couple of weekends.Way too many actors seem to be making careers out of churning out assembly-line-processed, sorry movies.

No movie I've seen in the past six months has lit me up as much as "Boomerang."It's such a rare feeling, too: the buzz, the increasing excitement, the sense of stepping through the membrane of the screen until you are completely inside the movie, wandering among the characters, desperate to know what happens next. And you know that when it's over, you'll want to hector people about it, try to get them to feel some of the excitement that you felt as it unspooled before your fascinated eyes.

Everyone connected with "Man Trouble" is 100 percent culturally validated: Jack Nicholson, of course, is the leading film actor of his generation; Ellen Barkin, after a series of vivid, passionate performances, is the first genuine actress since Meryl Streep to poise on the edge of movie stardom; Bob Rafelson, the director, is a legendary enfant terrible of Hollywood, having helmed the classic "Five Easy Pieces," as well as "Mountains of the Moon" and...