UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL (22)

Directed by: Jon Avnet

Starring: Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert Redford, Joe Mantegna

The Pitch: A novice TV reporter finds a mentor - and a lover - in an older, wiser journalist.

Theo Sez: The theory that Michelle Pfeiffer would probably be irresistible just reading the phone book, which survived DANGEROUS MINDS only by the skin of its teeth, takes another mighty hammering in this shockingly bland movie. You can only assume that director Avnet watches very few movies - even more than in the godawful THE WAR he seems genuinely not to realise how many cliches he's piling up, not least in the character of Redford's mentor figure, a beacon of Integrity in a world of infotainment ("You've got to realise this is a business." "That's right, a business! To hell with news, to hell with the Truth!"). In retrospect, the outcry that greeted it on release - for apparently whitewashing its source material, the life of newswoman Jessica Savitch - seems absurd : source material or not, anyone looking for real life in this movie needs their head examined. Utterly synthetic from the first frame, it's notable only for its lack of even a perfunctory interest in its characters : the script may hint that our heroine is a careerist bimbo but the film sees her only as a cardboard mate for cardboard idealist Redford - everything just stops at regular intervals so the two of them can pretend to be deeply in love to the saccharine strains of Celine Dion. Avnet's apparent delusion that he's making some kind of Great Romance would be laughable in a lower-profile movie, but you can't laugh off a disaster of this magnitude ; especially with a fine supporting cast constantly reminding you that this shallow, uninspired fluff is also an expensive vehicle for some major Hollywood royalty.