DISNEY'S 'ULTIMATE' IN NO-GOOD SHOWS.

Byline: David Kronke TV Critic

``The Ultimate Christmas Present'' may represent the ultimate holiday rip-off. This wan comedy concerns a bratty Valley girl named Allie (Hallee Hirsh) who steals a football-shaped gizmo from Santa's summer cabin; discovering it to be a machine that controls the weather, she promptly turns it to the ``snow'' command because she figures a blizzard will get her out of a school assignment and give her more time to (this being a Disney Channel movie) go shopping at the mall.

Naturally, things don't go as planned - the unprecedented Los Angeles blizzard strands her father in San Francisco, the boy she has a crush on cancels his party, and a goober of a weatherman (Peter Scolari) embarks upon an obsessive search for the storm's cause.

Clearly, those responsible for this film suffer from acute West Coast myopia - many parts of the country receive plenty of snow around Christmastime without such lame comic complications; it's hard to imagine viewers in those parts finding much to relate to. Heck, it's hard to imagine viewers in Los Angeles finding much to relate to in this limp comedy.

Shamelessly, the film cribs from every source imaginable - its opening montage of incongruous images of sun, surf and snowlessness, over a holiday jingle, is a direct steal from Woody Allen's ``Annie Hall,'' while Scolari's weatherman recalls Steve Martin's ``L.A. Story'' crossed with ``WKRP in Cincinnati's'' hapless Les Nessman. A slow-motion shot of elves in trench coats was recently used on another Disney teleflick, ``Santa Who?'' Most desperate of all, however, is the weather doodad, which served as the plot device for the theatrical bomb ``The Avengers.''

Even my 10-year-old stepdaughter started poking holes through the tissue-thin plot once things got particularly tiresome. Performances are tuned to that condescending, kids-only level. ``The Ultimate Christmas Present'' is a shockingly banal misfire from a corporation that usually exploits the holiday with assembly-line precision.

``THE ULTIMATE CHRISTMAS PRESENT''

What: Comedy about Santa's errantly placed weather machine wreaking havoc in Los Angeles.

The stars: Hallee Hirsh, Brenda Song, Peter Scolari, Hallie Todd, John B. Lowe.

Where: Disney Channel.

When: 7 tonight; also Saturday, Sunday, Tuesday, Dec. 13, 21, 22, 23, 24 and 25.

Our rating: One and one half stars

Sloppy comedy lacks freshness

When a film boasts a cast that includes Oscar winners Shirley MacLaine and Kathy Bates and Oscar nominees Gary Sinise and Jennifer Tilly and heralds MacLaine's directorial debut, you have to figure something went fairly disastrously awry for it not to get anything resembling a theatrical release. And sure enough, ``Bruno,'' premiering on the pay-cable network Starz! tonight, is a thorough-going mess, a fatally gloppy concoction of too-cute quirkiness and too-maudlin sensitivity.

Alex D. Linz (``Home Alone 3'') stars as the title character, a precocious 8-year-old who's the chronic target of abuse from the battalion of bullies at his Catholic school - which is more or less the rest of the student body. Bruno dreams obsessively of angels, he tells us in voice-over narration, though his obese mother Angela (Stacey Halprin) scarcely fills the bill - she decorates her car and her yard with peacock kitsch, binges in the White Castle drive-thru, then throws her considerable weight around when the nuns, as they routinely do, blame Bruno for his victimization.

Bruno has three other defining characteristics - he's a disastrous hockey player but a spelling whiz, which'll come in handy for the upcoming national Catholic spelling bee (winner, naturally, gets a private audience with the pope, who as we all know, has plenty of time on his hands). Oh, and he's already an accomplished cross-dresser, which likely won't help his cause with the pious-minded etymological enthusiasts. And there's a lot of casual vehicular mayhem thrown in, rather arbitrarily, it seems, for this kind of movie.

MacLaine proves that being a great actress doesn't necessarily translate into directing others to great performances - with the exception of MacLaine herself (playing Bruno's codger-tough grandmother) and perhaps Linz, everyone here gives broad, unconvincing turns. Bates plays a hard-boiled nun with a bad Boston accent; Sinise is either wooden or overly histrionic as Bruno's estranged father. Tilly as a cosmetics trumpet and Joey Lauren Adams as Sinise's tarty new girlfriend are costumed and directed to play silly, cartoonish characters. Brett Butler plays, clumsily, a drunk nun (you'd think she'd be able to nail that role).

``Bruno'' is a curious amalgam of the Wayne Johnston novel ``The Divine Ryans,'' which combined a brutal Catholic education and hockey ineptitude (a Miramax film version has mysteriously disappeared from the studio's release slate), the French film ``My Life in Pink,'' also about a young cross-dresser, and Myla Goldberg's ``Bee Season,'' about a nominal outcast who achieves a measure of empowerment through spelling. The film pawns off a wan and watery message about acceptance and, figuring that a sequence in which Bruno studies for his spelling competitions would be less than compelling, substitutes instead montages in which he picks out his flamboyant dresses instead (diva, cowgirl). Hmm, maybe those reading-the-dictionary scenes wouldn't have been so bad after all.

- D.K.``BRUNO''

What: Comedy from first-time director Shirley MacLaine about a young boy with a gift for spelling and a predilection for wearing dresses; this doesn't work in his favor at spelling bees.

The stars: Shirley MacLaine, Alex D. Linz, Gary Sinise, Kathy Bates, Brett Butler, Joey Lauren Adams, Jennifer Tilly.

Where: Starz!

When: 8 tonight

Our rating: One and one half stars

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Photo:

In ``The Ultimate Christmas Present,'' friends conspire to ruin the weather, but team up with Santa and his two 7-foot elves to save Christmas.