In fact, the use of the first person sticks out during the entire film, always reminding the audience of these would-be stars' priorities. The lyrics to the film's title song go something like this: "Fame--I'm going to live forever. Fame..."

Which really is a pity, because the young actors who compose the cast exude talent. Barry Miller plays Ralph Garcey (ne Raoul Garcia), a Freddy Prinze worshipper, with precocious elan, displaying a range of emotions unusual at such a tender age. And Gene Anthony Ray, as dazzling dancer Leroy Johnson, shows an uncharacteristic ease with his role. But none of the characters is capable of shattering the wall of self-centeredness the script erects around each of them. As the mundane screenplay often says, they "can't relate."

Perhaps Parker wants the movie's style to reinforce its content; maybe he wishes to convey that the road to fame is riven with unpredictability and adversity. Most viewers, however, realize that; and this choppy, self-indulgent work fails even as an adolescent Chorus Line. While Parker has a good eye for projecting spontaneity--several scenes evoke the chilling chase through the streets of Istanbul in his Midnight Express--he has a cloying tendency to content himself with flirt and skirt, inadvertently erasing any semblance of passion that leaks through the surface.

Blue Lagoon

Directed by Randal Kleiser

At the Cinema 57

ON THE THEORY that Americans won't sit still for two hours of National Geographic outtakes, the producers of Blue Lagoon added the following to their film--

Two lithe, tanned bodies. Brooke Shields and Chris Atkinson go from baby fat to puberty in the waters of a tropical bay. At first they swim in their underwear. Later, they shuck their clothes. They are growing up. Still later, they learn to make love. For the next 20 minutes, all they do is couple, on the beach, in the mango grove, behind the bamboo hut, and everywhere. They are almost adults now. The movie end when they intentionally overdose on red berries, the Fijian equivalent of Miltown. Totally grown up.

Three or four sharks, who appear to fill the occasional lapses when our young stars decide they have had enough of each other. The sharks, one of whom somehow manages to steal the oars to the only rowboat in paradise, scare only the parts of the audience that have seen Jaws, a classic case of guilt by association.

A dozen or so dark-skinned natives who appear only once, for about 40 seconds. Despite living on the same island for a dozen years, the two groups have managed to avoid each other. Determined to make their screen time count, the natives bob and weave around a campfire like so many loinclothed Travoltas and then sacrifice one their number to a hook-nosed Easter Island statue.

Even with the sharks, the savages and the suntanned insatiable teenagers, Blue Lagoon (which should be called Green Lagoon since that it the color of the water there) drags.

One way to spend the two hours is trying to figure out metaphors. No one from paradise is allowed to "go over to the other side" where the "bogeyman" lives. Should the bogeyman cross into civilization, Mr. Atkinson promises to "spear him" in the head, the guts, and other areas. Man name of John Foster Dulles wrote much the same script in his day, but lacked the underwater photography necessary to produce this thriller.

The other allusions in the film are to the creation story, but here the trail is twisted. Certainly it is not carnal knowledge that does in our heroes, or the film would last only 45 minutes. On the other hand, they 'lude out on the red berries, the island's only forbidden fruit. And they celebrate Christmas, so maybe you have to read the New Testament to understand.

Whatever their intent, the men who made Blue Lagoon blew their only shot at success when they decided to use sound. Our bleached blond hero discusses knowledge in these terms: "There are so many things I don't understand," he says. ". . . Why are all these funny hairs growing on me?" And later, angered at her lover's South Pacific hijinks, Ms. Shields shouts the classic words "I'll get you for this."

Urban Cowboy