Short Takes

MUSIC

This Side Of Paradis

THE HARDHEARTED MIGHT CALL VANESSA PARADIS France's revenge on us for Euro Disney; she is a model who sings. Having conquered France with her willfully vapid bubble-gum pop, Paradis, 19, has now made her self-titled American debut. For help in her songwriting and backup instrumentals, she chose producer Lenny Kravitz, the irony-free purveyor of heavy-handed homages to late-1960s rock. Together, Paradis and Kravitz make a slick but shallow couple. On cuts like Your Love Has Got a Handle on My Mind, Paradis's slinky, coquettish voice lightens Kravitz's ponderous touch, but even their best songs have a predictable, surface appeal and no emotional depth. If there were even a whisper of originality, this pairing might have worked.

Cinema

Misfits Under Siege

AMOS (NICOLAS CAGE) DOESN'T BELONG on an upscale resort island; he's a habitual jailbird, scruffy and not quite bright. Andrew (Samuel L. Jackson) definitely does belong here; he's rich, famous and accomplished. The problem is that he's black, which means just one thing to his new neighbors: he must be a burglar. So as the local sheriff (Dabney Coleman) besieges Andrew's house, AMOS & ANDREW form an alliance, at first mutually suspicious, then mutually instructive, aimed at getting them both back to the mainland unscathed. Writer-director E. Max Frye doesn't quite know how to end his comedy, but his actors know how to play it. The result is energetic, affable, occasionally shrewd social satire.

VIDEO

Second Chance

WITH ABOUT 45 MINUTES OF NEW FOOTage added to the already existing theatrical versions, and with the films themselves rearranged in chronological order, THE GODFATHER TRILOGY: 1901-1980 (Paramount; $199.95) amounts to a kind of cinema archaeology in which the skeleton of some great creature is brought forth from the past to stand on exhibit. This Godfather may not look the same, but when the archaeologist in charge is Francis Coppola, the object is not literal reconstruction but further improvement. If only nature got as many second chances as movie directors. This trilogy has a novelistic density, a rueful, unhurried lyricism and a depth that, singly, the films could not achieve. Altogether glorious.

BOOKS

O Little Town Of Oxford

CATASTROPHE. THE HUMAN RACE IS approaching extinction because all male sperm is sterile. But listen. England's green and pleasant land is still surprisingly intact. In P.D. James' THE CHILDREN OF MEN (Knopf; $22) the country is ruled by a dictator who has canceled most civil liberties. But the middle class still prospers, and Oxford shelters scholars like Theo Faron. Because he is the strongman's cousin, he is approached by a pretty member of a dissident group. Her fellows turn out to be cliches, and, of course, she gets pregnant. Sci-fi is a cottage industry, but it is not the terrain of James, who presides over mysteries. Usually a novelist of daunting confidence, she cannot here even find a moral grounding for her characters.

THEATER

STEVE TESICH HAS HAD GREATER SUCcess in movies (including an Oscar for Breaking Away), but his heart belongs to the stage, for which his writing gets ever darker and more daring. The fascinating ON THE OPEN ROAD, off-Broadway, justifies his persistence. It follows two men, one all icy mind and the other all fiery emotion, across an apocalyptic landscape amid civil war as they search for "the land of the free." Tesich knows his terrain: he grew up in Yugoslavia during and after World War II. Yet when his story turns to the abandonment of classical culture and moral absolutes in favor of nihilism, noise and expediency, he is plainly thinking about the U.S., where he has lived since 1955.