Latest Video: The generation game

By Ewan McDonald

GENERATIONS of Hollywood movie stars show up in the video rentals this week.

There's Clint Eastwood, who's knocking 70 and surely shouldn't still be going into the office, giving his pre-school daughter, Francesca, her first break.

There's Mickey Rourke, who used to be the wild young thing, playing the headmaster in one of those tough school dramas, and Diane Keaton as the control-freak mum of an adult daughter. And here comes the next products of the starmaking machine - Ben Affleck, Christina Ricci, Courtney Love, and Goldie Hawn's daughter.

* In True Crime, Steve Everett (Clint Eastwood) has a lot of problems. An alcoholic, he's only been sober for a couple of months. A womaniser, he's on the verge of being thrown out by his wife, Barbara (Diane Venora). Thanks to his messy personal life, he's been fired from his job as a reporter on the New York Times and moved to the West Coast where his friend, Alan Mann (James Woods), has given him a chance on the Oakland Tribune.

Much to the infuriation of his stiff-necked superior, Bob Findley (Denis Leary). Probably because when Findley wants to send Everett on an assignment. the editor calls home and asks his wife to please put Everett on the phone. They're in bed at the time.

Findley wants Everett to interview convicted murderer Frank Beechum (Isaiah Washington) then cover his execution. Of course, his check on Beechum, the details of the robbery and killing in an Oakland store, shows that the conviction doesn't stack up. After he meets Beechum in prison Everett begins a manic search for proof to stay the execution. He has only 12 hours.

There's a good story here, taut and tense enough, good supporting cast, but pretty soon you realise True Crime would have been a much better movie with someone 20 or 30 years younger in the lead role. Like Mickey Rourke.

* The Other Sister is an odd-couple drama with a difference: the young lovers are intellectually impaired. Karla (Juliette Lewis) and Daniel (Giovanni Ribisi) meet at a polytechnic where she goes to study after 10 years in an institution. Friendship blossoms, it becomes love, and Karla wants to move from home into her own place, horrifying her control-freak mum (Keaton). She's already had to cope with a husband who's a recovering alcoholic and another daughter who's a lesbian. Doncha just know that lurve's gonna conquer all?

Director Garry Marshall, who also came up with Pretty Woman, goes right over the top here (even harking back to The Graduate in several scenes, using the Lemonheads version of Mrs Robinson, which must be a decade old by now). Rent it, but don't get jaffas, get tissues.

* The idea for 200 Cigarettes probably came from the marketing department rather than the creatives. You can just see the conference: "Let's get everyone under 30 and put them in a movie." "What's the movie about?" "Who cares, the kids'll come to see whatever..."

Affleck, Love, Ricci, Martha Plimpton, Paul Rudd and Hawn's daughter, Kate Hudson, are among the ensemble in this uneven, loosely tied-together comedy about late teen, early 20s New Yorkers on their way to the same New Year's Eve party in 1981. As our reviewer, Russell Baillie, said, it's a period-dressed, soundtrack-flogging sitcom.

* Still, it's not just the youngsters who make stinkers. Thicker Than Blood has an idealistic young teacher, Griffin Byrne (Dan Futterman), assigned to an inner-city Catholic school . As you've seen in a bunch of other schoolroom dramas (think Blackboard Jungle, think Dead Poets or ... oh, insert your own title here) he inevitably becomes entangled in the violent home life of a talented boy. Yes, to rescue the situation he launches into a controversial teaching method that outrages the headmaster (Rourke). And puts himself in danger.

* Katie is 25, a hopeless romantic searching for her ideal man in the vast no-man's-land of Los Angeles. When she rejects her best friend Ben, who confesses he is madly in love with her, and falls for Richard, a suave, sophisticated and sexy composer, she thinks she's found the romance of her life. But she's about to find that Mr Perfect isn't necessarily Mr Right.

Newcomer Marla Schaffel is Katie, Mitchell Whitfield and Michael Harris her boyfriends in I Love You, Don't Touch Me, which the LA Times called "an amusing and mischievous look at romance," and the New York Post found "smart, sweet, funny and original." Both of which are stretching things a bit.

* Hard men from all around the globe flash their pecs in American Dragons. Michael Biehn (The Terminator, Aliens) joins Asian action star Joong-Hoon Park in a knock 'em down, drag 'em out adventure set in New York.

Biehn plays Tony Luca, a tough NYPD detective whose world is turned upside-down when he's forced to partner Korean Inspector Kim to investigate a brutal killing. Yep, they must overcome personal and cultural differences, then Kim's calculator brain and Luca's sledgehammer brawn must be harnessed to defeat vicious gangsters.