Girls! Girls! Girls!

What's going on? Is it a conspiracy? The work of some powerful cabal of molesters led by Roman Polanski and Joey Buttafuoco, with the sole purpose of crowding our media lives with Lolitas? Sandra Bullock's career supports this hypothesis: after warming the cockles of filmgoers' hearts in Demolition Man and Speed, Bullock, only 27, has reportedly reaped about $2 million a pop for her next four films, and she's associate producer on the last. In an unprecedented lovesick swoon, Hollywood has made Bullock (who is, yes, cuddly as all hell) a major player on the basis of how crinkly her eyes get when she smiles. You'd think she'd invented the wheel.

Not that I'd kick Bullock--or any of the other little chippies in question-- out of bed in real life. But only slack-jawed troglodyte shut-ins with names like Mort or Roger who read Easyriders and Heavy Metal and have the unconscious habit of sniffing their fingertips can stay excited by watching them on-screen ad infinitum. No, for the rest of us, sex, real or not, involves the whole person, and what would any of these girls do in mid- or post-rut except annoy the shit out of you? Who would you want to lie around in kimonos with, eating Wheaties and philosophizing, like Kevin Costner and Susan Sarandon did in Bull Durham? Jennifer Connelly? lone Skye? You'd end up explaining to them how to program their VCR, What fun.

What we need are women of substance, although what "substance" is, precisely, and where desperate young actresses might buy some, is your best guess. Let's just assume we know it when we see it. which happens occasionally. There are young actresses at work who manage to convince us they've made every one of those 26 or 27 years on earth count for something. It's just that they're a distinct minority. Lili Taylor and Patricia Arquette come to mind, but neither is terribly beautiful or has a terribly impressive filmography. Nicole Kidman may stand alone as the only fully adult, regularly working under-30 actress today, and that despite Days of Thunder, Billy Bathgate and Far and Away. In both Malice and My Life, whatever you may think of either film, Kidman seems to be. miracle of miracles, a 25-year-old adult woman. It's nearly impossible, in fact, to picture her any younger-- either spending winter afternoons stoned with her dormmates watching "General Hospital" (which is how coeds behaved when I was in school), or accusing an English professor of sexual harassment because Chaucer used the word "cum" in The Canterbury Tales (which is how I hear coeds behave today). She's no Ingrid Bergman (who was 26 when she made Casablanca), but at least Kidman doesn't seem on the verge of joining a sorority.

Now, if only Kidman could land a real role, which is a different discussion entirely. If one did come along. it'd probably go to Laura Dern--which is like giving whiskey and the car keys to a teenage boy, only much duller.

Let's take an admittedly half-assed tally of some of the latest crimes against maturity (a thorough study is sorely needed):

• Marisa Tomei in The Paper, as an ace New York City reporter with inside connections--that would mean she'd have lo write for a living.

• Wasn't being asked to buy the 90-pound Juliette Lewis kung fu-kicking three 240-pound rednecks to death at the outset of Natural Born Killers just a bit much? She couldn't kick a gar-den slug to death.

• A teenage Drew Barrymore as an expert frontier horsewoman in Bad Girls? They must think I'm as stupid as a grouper. The movie's title was bracingly honest, though.

• Bridget Fonda as a trained assassin in cocktail skirts in Point of No Return? Next it'll be Fairuza Balk as Ma Barker.

• Sarah Jessica Parker as a cop in Striking Distance; Parker couldn't approximate a serious professional demeanor if she'd been hired to drive an ice cream truck.

• Nice little Winona Horowitz, er, Ryder, dressing up like Emma Bovary in all of those cute and expensive costume productions, enunciating her lines so carefully, batting those adorable doe eyes. I wonder if she'll try acting when she grows up, or go straight to medical school.

• Julie Warner as some kind of NASA extraterrestrial expert or something in Robert A. Heinlein's The Puppet Masters (there, now, that career didn't take long, did it?), in which her greatest achievement was discerning the alien parasites from humans by showing them her cleavage. Whoever yawns is human.

Now compare these coquettish little Marcia Bradys with what some other actresses their age were doing years ago. Olivia de Havilland was 22 in Gone With the Wind. Gene Tierney was 23 in Laura. Ginger Rogers was 25 in Stage Door, Liz Taylor was Rebecca in Ivanhoe when she was 19. Jean Harlow had already changed the movies' attitudes about tough whores and sexual camaraderie by the lime she died at 26, and she never played a "girl." At 27 in My Man Godfrey. Carole Lombard radiated more wit, brilliance and idealized sexiness than any whole generation of actresses since. Merle Oberon was 27 in Wuthering Heights, and so was Rita Hayworth in Gilda. Eva Marie Saint in On the Waterfront and de Havilland in To Each His Own were both 29. There's not a babysitter, ingénue or debutante in the bunch.

But today, having survived Glenn Close as an "attractive" single sexpot. Sean Young's nude scenes in Love Crimes and Madonna, period, and then stuck out our bruised chins for more, we're gonna get rewarded with the sight of Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan in a remake of The Women. If that's the way things are going, I'd just as soon quit going to movies and start attending Roller Derbys, where a woman can only pass for a fresh-faced coed at the risk of having her perfect front teeth slammed right down her windpipe. It's gratuitously brutal, and narratively it's repetitive at best, but at least there's nothing unsavory going on.

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Michael Atkinson wrote about sacred cows in the November '94 Movieline.

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