Harvey Keitel

Jack Palance is a better than 2-to-1 favorite for this year's Academy Award for best supporting actor, in the opinion of callers to SUNDIAL. His portrayal of the crusty Curly in ''City Slickers'' earned him 102 votes.Tommy Lee Jones ("JFK") was a distant second with 42 votes, followed by Ben Kingsley ("Bugsy") with 13 votes, Michael Lerner ("Barton Fink") with 13 and Harvey Keitel ("Bugsy") with just seven votes."It's Your Call" represents a sampling of opinions from certain segments of the community, but it is not balanced demographically as would be done in a scientific public opinion poll.

Had a fab chat recently with Nancy Reagan, my own personal favorite first lady of the many I have known. The most "real," the most "human" of them all, with no political agenda, she was in town for the fundraiser Mayor Mike Bloomberg tossed for the Reagan Library at his eastside townhouse last week. The last time I'd seen Mrs. Reagan was at her husband's funeral in Washington and then my heart ached for her. She was grieving, exhausted and seemed very frail. But now she has bounced back.

Here would be the proper way to see "Blue in the Face." You're at the Rotunda. You came to buy new shoes, a book, a Radio Shack computer, flowers, yogurt, something. You call home, and your wife or partner or someone tells you that a certain appointment or plan you had has been canceled. You now have an hour and a half to kill. You look up and note that the movie is playing at the shopping center's little art house, although it started a half-hour ago. What the heck, you think.Here's how not to see "Blue in the Face."

Be Cool, an unawaited, years-too-late follow-up to the 1995 hit Get Shorty, proves that when "cool" evaporates all it leaves are embarrassing little puddles. John Travolta was cool in Get Shorty: He put his signature on the role of Elmore Leonard's Chili Palmer, an honorable, low-level gangster with invincible self-confidence and a soft spot for Hollywood fantasy. Travolta played him with a sparkle and finesse that got you rooting for him and grinning. Travolta made you believe that this shylock and debt collector was always smooth and collected.

Imagine a children's film directed by Abel "The Bad Lieutenant" Ferrara and you get a pretty good idea of the recondite pleasures contained in "Monkey Trouble."Ferrara didn't direct, of course; he was busy doing "Body Snatchers." But this strange little movie unreels as if he did, complete to using some of his iconographic stars, Harvey Keitel and Victor Argo.This is exactly the sort of story no one at Disney ever thought of, and if they did, they'd be fired. It has a weird and resonant subtext of menace, yet at the same time is resolutely sunny.

Has anyone noticed? It's raining Stephen Dorff.By one of those odd schedule twitches, wild-haired young gun Dorff is in two, count 'em, two jewel heist movies this week. What have we done to deserve this?Anyhow, in the violent and profane "City of Industry," he's the crackpot punk who turns against his own crew, killing two and wounding one, then takes the jewels and runs. The one survivor -- tough old coot Harvey Keitel -- hunts him down and is hunted back in return. The setting, all but mandatory these days, is the post-apocalyptic, ozone-depleted, rust-rich miasma of decaying urban America, in this case a parcel of oil wells near L.A. with the same name as the movie's.

If there's an unbridgeable tribal gap in this country, it's the one between those who love horror movies and those who don't.If you are of the latter, then please go away. Nothing I'm about to say will make the slightest sense.For the few of you who remain, I think you might be pleasantly surprised by "Two Evil Eyes," which has sneaked into town under mysterious circumstances, apparently unrepresented by an ad agency and undocumented by production notes, photos and cast biographies. In fact, the only information I have on it comes from the mother of one of the actors!

''Mortal Thoughts'' is an intriguing film noir salute that could use just a little more humor. As is, the film plays like an extension of a half-hour Alfred Hitchcock show.''Mortal Thoughts'' has a point, but the leading characters behave so foolishly that it is difficult to go along with them. It all adds up when the film ends, by there is too much puzzlement before that.You're not likely to be bored. The movie engages, but it might have been so much better with a few more laughs, in the right places.

Donny Osmond sings the title role in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," the musical adaptation of the biblical tale from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Continuing in this "PBS Showcase" (8 p.m.-11 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) is Lloyd Webber's "Requiem" with Placido Domingo. PBS. At a glance "The West Wing" (9 p.m.-10 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11) -- An arrest at a frat party could pose problems for the president's daughter; the staff celebrates the confirmation of their Supreme Court nominee.

When he's good, he's very very boring, but when he's bad he's quite interesting.That could sum up the moral trajectory of the nameless character of walking damnation played by Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant," which is at the Charles. Or it could describe the career trajectory of Ferrara himself, who has risen -- from the muck of vivid exploitative filmmaking to something close to art-house success, without compromising one morsel of low instinct.His "Bad Lieutenant" is the case in point: One of the rare American films that wears its NC-17 rating proudly follows Keitel on a perambulation through the extreme depths of corruption on the streets and drug cribs of Manhattan.

The William and Irene Weinberg Family Jewish Film Festival opens its 16th season at 7:30 p.m. April 1 with the Baltimore premiere of Taking Sides, Iszvan Szabo's film of Ronald Harwood's play about conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (Stellan Skarsgard) and the U.S. Army prosecutor (Harvey Keitel) who interrogates him about his work in Germany under the Nazis. Murry Sidlin, the dean of music at Catholic University, will be the guest speaker on April 1; artist Jay Wolf Schlossberg-Cohen will dissect the movie when it screens again at 3 p.m. April 4. April 3 brings Kinky Friedman: Proud to Be an [Expletive]

Donny Osmond sings the title role in "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat," the musical adaptation of the biblical tale from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. Continuing in this "PBS Showcase" (8 p.m.-11 p.m., MPT, Channels 22 and 67) is Lloyd Webber's "Requiem" with Placido Domingo. PBS. At a glance "The West Wing" (9 p.m.-10 p.m., WBAL, Channel 11) -- An arrest at a frat party could pose problems for the president's daughter; the staff celebrates the confirmation of their Supreme Court nominee.

Indie-mania is busting out all over Entertainment Weekly.Arguing that a new golden age of movie making is upon us, EW devotes an entire issue to independent filmmakers. It's a nifty little history of alternative cinema that contains, among other things, a guide to the independent movies that matter, from "Metropolis" to "Return of the Secaucus Seven" to "The Piano," that could come in handy for video-store browsing.There is breathlessness and overstatement here and there in the issue but, generally, EW finds something smart or arresting to say about all the key indie players and their movies, from John Cassavetes to John Sayles to Quentin Tarantino, while looking into the pipeline for indie gems to come.

Has anyone noticed? It's raining Stephen Dorff.By one of those odd schedule twitches, wild-haired young gun Dorff is in two, count 'em, two jewel heist movies this week. What have we done to deserve this?Anyhow, in the violent and profane "City of Industry," he's the crackpot punk who turns against his own crew, killing two and wounding one, then takes the jewels and runs. The one survivor -- tough old coot Harvey Keitel -- hunts him down and is hunted back in return. The setting, all but mandatory these days, is the post-apocalyptic, ozone-depleted, rust-rich miasma of decaying urban America, in this case a parcel of oil wells near L.A. with the same name as the movie's.

Here would be the proper way to see "Blue in the Face." You're at the Rotunda. You came to buy new shoes, a book, a Radio Shack computer, flowers, yogurt, something. You call home, and your wife or partner or someone tells you that a certain appointment or plan you had has been canceled. You now have an hour and a half to kill. You look up and note that the movie is playing at the shopping center's little art house, although it started a half-hour ago. What the heck, you think.Here's how not to see "Blue in the Face."

New York--Almost like the magnificent answer to the riddle asked of Oedipus (What walks on three legs in the evening?) Harvey Keitel comes hobbling into a hotel room, his considerable weight semi-supported on a cane.Have five decades of hard living and hard acting finally taken their toll? Have some fans mobbed him? Was he performing some dangerous stunt in service to his art?Disappointingly, no."I was jogging," he says, like any suburban dad who stepped off a curb wrong. "And something went."

Indie-mania is busting out all over Entertainment Weekly.Arguing that a new golden age of movie making is upon us, EW devotes an entire issue to independent filmmakers. It's a nifty little history of alternative cinema that contains, among other things, a guide to the independent movies that matter, from "Metropolis" to "Return of the Secaucus Seven" to "The Piano," that could come in handy for video-store browsing.There is breathlessness and overstatement here and there in the issue but, generally, EW finds something smart or arresting to say about all the key indie players and their movies, from John Cassavetes to John Sayles to Quentin Tarantino, while looking into the pipeline for indie gems to come.

The William and Irene Weinberg Family Jewish Film Festival opens its 16th season at 7:30 p.m. April 1 with the Baltimore premiere of Taking Sides, Iszvan Szabo's film of Ronald Harwood's play about conductor Wilhelm Furtwangler (Stellan Skarsgard) and the U.S. Army prosecutor (Harvey Keitel) who interrogates him about his work in Germany under the Nazis. Murry Sidlin, the dean of music at Catholic University, will be the guest speaker on April 1; artist Jay Wolf Schlossberg-Cohen will dissect the movie when it screens again at 3 p.m. April 4. April 3 brings Kinky Friedman: Proud to Be an [Expletive]

Imagine a children's film directed by Abel "The Bad Lieutenant" Ferrara and you get a pretty good idea of the recondite pleasures contained in "Monkey Trouble."Ferrara didn't direct, of course; he was busy doing "Body Snatchers." But this strange little movie unreels as if he did, complete to using some of his iconographic stars, Harvey Keitel and Victor Argo.This is exactly the sort of story no one at Disney ever thought of, and if they did, they'd be fired. It has a weird and resonant subtext of menace, yet at the same time is resolutely sunny.

When he's good, he's very very boring, but when he's bad he's quite interesting.That could sum up the moral trajectory of the nameless character of walking damnation played by Harvey Keitel in Abel Ferrara's "Bad Lieutenant," which is at the Charles. Or it could describe the career trajectory of Ferrara himself, who has risen -- from the muck of vivid exploitative filmmaking to something close to art-house success, without compromising one morsel of low instinct.His "Bad Lieutenant" is the case in point: One of the rare American films that wears its NC-17 rating proudly follows Keitel on a perambulation through the extreme depths of corruption on the streets and drug cribs of Manhattan.