'12:08' REMEMBERS ROMANIA'S BAD OLD GOOD OLD DAYS.

Byline: BOB STRAUSS

>FILM CRITIC

Past moments of national glory should always be viewed with skepticism. This is especially true for a country whose greatest hero was Vlad the Impaler.

"12:08 East of Bucharest" tries to assess a much more recent watershed in Romanian history: the 1989 collapse of Nicolae Ceausescu's monstrous Communist regime. The film finds that, sadly but riotously, even so near a moment is already fading into a fog of fake pride and self-serving venality.

Set in a provincial town somewhere, like the title says, east of the capital, "12:08" is built around a rinky-dink TV call-in show whose pretentious host/producer, Jderescu (Teo Corban), wants to celebrate the December day, 16 years earlier, when brave revolutionaries stormed the local government headquarters.

Trouble is, there probably wasn't much of a storm involved.

Christmas was coming, people were distracted. Besides, central authority had been crumbling for quite a while, as it was everywhere else in the Eastern Bloc, and any real fighting was in other parts of the country.

The two guests Jderescu manages to rope onto his show can't make much of a case for a courageous stand, either. Manescu (Ion Sapdaru), a historian who owes money to every barkeeper in town, was more than likely passing out in one of those establishments when he claims to have been assaulting sentry posts. The other veteran of the Great Day, Piscoci (Mircea Adreesc), is a grumpy old pensioner who hates playing Santa Claus at children's parties, but would still rather do that than be sitting here trying to recall something that didn't leave much of an impression in the first place.

The show within the movie gradually falls apart as callers catch the guests in lies and threaten the host with defamation suits. Cameras shake, assistants blunder into the frame, drinks are spilled. Cruelly talented young director Corneliu Porumboiu turns the whole, slipshod production into an angry metaphor for the post-Communist dream of a better life gone sour. And he makes an amusing yet merciless case for letting go of flawed patriotic fantasies.

Bob Strauss [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

12:08 EAST OF BUCHAREST - Three stars

>Not rated: language, mild violence.

>Starring: Mircea Andreesc, Teo Corban, Ion Sapdaru.

>Director: Corneliu Porumboiu.

>Running time: 1 hr. 29 min.

>Playing: One Colorado, Pasadena; Music Hall, Beverly Hills; Westpark 8, Irvine.

>In a nutshell: Sixteen years after the fall of Romania's Communist dictator Ceausescu, a provincial TV call-in show commemorating the glorious day hilariously degenerates into a muddle of lies, threats and name-calling. In Romanian with English subtitles.