CRITICS' PICKS : TELEVISION.

Meaty role for Fields: ``A Cooler Climate'' (8 p.m. Sunday on Showtime) offers Sally Field a dream role for any actress - she not only gets to run the emotional gamut, she gets ample opportunity to flaunt her physique.

Field plays Iris, who's pretty much the smart woman/foolish choices poster child. Alone and broke after ending 26 years of marriage, she heads to a bucolic seaside resort town and takes a demeaning job as a maid for Paula, the area's pampered yet brittle resident (a familiar role for Judy Davis). Iris discovers Paula's chilliness has already caused some casualties - she's estranged from her licentious daughter (Carly Pope, of the upcoming WB series ``Popular'') and working on losing her husband, as well.

The uplifting resolution is somewhat pat, and director Susan Seidelman is working familiar territory here, yet she's adept at creating a credible environment for Iris' emotional turmoil; moreover, Field's work is simply exemplary.

- David Kronke

SMusic

Darndest musical group: It's the quintessential San Francisco phenomenon - an eight-member group consisting of six accordion players - or maybe it's a subplot in a low-budget Japanese sci-fi flick.

Either way, if squeezebox is your thing, you must check out Those Darn Accordions! on Saturday at Fais Do-Do in Los Angeles.

You might have caught the octet performing a medley of pop hits on the 1998 American Music Awards telecast with pals Drew Carey, ``Weird Al'' Yankovic and accordion legend Dick Contino.

Those Darn Accordions! - an unholy cross between Lawrence Welk and Led Zeppelin - are on the road in support of their fourth record, ``Clownhead.''

Personnel includes former members of the Ramonas and pioneering Bay Area squeezebox rockers Polkacide. Tattooed accordion-hugging crooner Clyde Forsman, 84, has been known to stop the show with his reading of ``Do Ya Think I'm Sexy?''

Along with originals like ``First Bratwurst of Summer,'' Those Darn Accordions! play whacked-out covers of Grand Funk Railroad's ``We're an American Band'' (reworked as ``We're an Accordion Band''), the Who's ``Baba O'Riley'' and War's ``Low Rider.''

Fais Do-Do is at 5257 W. Adams Blvd., Los Angeles. Show times are 10 and 11:30 p.m. and admission is $8. Information: [phone].

- Fred Shuster

Sounds of mariachi: The more mariachi music changes, the more it stays the same. How come? Well, take the lineup for this Saturday's third annual ``Viva El Mariachi'' concert at Universal Amphitheatre, a harmonic convergence of tradition and innovation, stylistic integrity and sex appeal. Headlining the show is the 20-something Mexican soap opera star Lucero, who has incorporated mariachis into her burgeoning pop singing career. At first glance, the two other charro-suited main acts, Sol de Mexico and the all-female Reyna de Los Angeles, look like the kind of old-fashioned mariachis you see plying their trade in Boyle Heights restaurants. Listen, however, and you'll hear strains of the classical, jazz, pop and swing influences that have shaped the eclectic, very contemporary sound of these two continually evolving bands. And don't duck out for a Coke between acts unless you want to miss Ballet Folklorico Del Pacifico and the Mexican stunt ropers Los Hermanos Escamilla. Call [phone].

- Reed Johnson

Art

See private collection: Let's see: Windswept beaches, cool restaurants, spectacular mountainscapes, trendy boutiques, a historic mission. Have we forgotten any reasons why day-trippers flock to Santa Barbara during summer's dog days? Ah yes, the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, which through Labor Day weekend is showing selections from one of the world's most expansive private photography collections. Leonard and Marjorie Vernon began collecting photographs in the mid-1970s, plucking important works by Julia Margaret Cameron, Edward Weston, Ansel Adams and many other giants of the medium. Their tastes ran, simply, toward whatever they found beautiful, an approach that's reflected in the 150 prints in the exhibition ``An Eclectic Focus: Photographs From the Vernon Collection.'' For information, call [phone].

- Reed Johnson

Film

It's a funny business: Sure, it's easy to make fun of the movie business. But it's hard to do it with the kind of gentle yet biting panache that Steve Martin exhibits in ``Bowfinger.''

Martin wrote the script and stars as a loser producer who'll do anything to get a big action star in his latest awful movie - and goes so far as secretly filming the actor without his knowledge. As uproariously duplicitous as Martin's Bowfinger is, Eddie Murphy is even funnier as both the paranoid superstar and the sweet-natured, none-too-swift look-alike Bowfinger casts for close-ups.

The movie makes smart fun of all the absurdities that come with life on either extreme of the Hollywood food chain. Yet there's a sweetness here as well, a sense that these people would be even more desperate without the many fantasies that consume them. The director is Muppetmeister Frank Oz, who with this one and his last hit ``In & Out'' is fast becoming one of the deftest comedy filmmakers of our era.

- Bob Strauss

CAPTION(S):

4 Photos

PHOTO (1) The eight-member musical group Those Darn Accordians! hits the stage Saturday at Fais Do-Do in Los Angeles with a repertoire that includes some of hard rock's best-known anthems.

(2) Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin wring laughs from a movie producer's exploits in ``Bowfinger.''

(3) FIELDS.

(4) ``The Thinker'' (1928) by Hiromu Kira, part of the Marjorie and Leonard Vernon photography collection, is on view at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art.