FILM: Down the Tube.

THE twins David and Jennifer, living in a broken home with their unhappy mother, console themselves: she by becoming the high-school slut, he by immersing himself in reruns of an idyllic Fifties black-and-white family television show, Pleasantville. An elderly television repairman arrives unbidden and rewards David's knowledge about the show with a special remote control that lands him bemusedly, and Jennifer furiously, inside the show. They take the places of Bud and Mary Sue, teenage siblings in an Eisenhower-era fiction that for them becomes, er, reality.

Their "parents," George and Betty, carry family values to the heights of saccharine platitudinousness, as does the rest of Pleasantville, a self-sufficient microcosm bounded by smugness. The pages in the library books are as blank as the students' minds: the jocks playing basketball score with every shot. The fire patrol's entire job is rescuing treed cats, and lovers' lane is merely for holding hands. The girls' wired bras are as impenetrable as cuirasses, and double beds are unheard of. You wonder how anyone here got born. Do I hear you mutter "Truman Show"? Well muttered.

Jennifer/Mary Sue starts seducing the basketball captain, and David/Bud revolutionizes the mentality of Mr. Johnson, his boss at the soda shop. As they experience sex, or any other passion, the monochromatic Pleasantvillers become "coloreds": they, like things close to them (flowers, trees), start taking on color. Book pages fill with text in the hands of those wanting to read them. Under Bud's guidance, Johnson discovers art reproductions and takes up painting. Sexually neglected by her husband, Betty has an affair with Johnson, who also paints her in the nude. The town is shocked by the painting, and Betty tries to hide her coloredness under grim, grey-green makeup.

The town is bitterly divided into a black-and-white conservative majority and a growing minority of liberal coloreds. Sex is catching on, as are notions of a world beyond. Big Bob, the reactionary mayor, enlists George and other conservatives to help stem the tide-why, George even finds Betty gone and is forced to cook for himself! Hauled before Big Bob's ad hoc tribunal, Bud, the supposed instigator, defends himself staunchly as Margaret, his by-now-colored girlfriend, and his colored mother, Betty, look on proudly.

But where is the semblance of logic that even fantasy, in good storytelling, requires? What happened to the original Bud and Mary Sue who have become supplanted? Jennifer forgets about promiscuity and becomes a good student by reading a book by D. H. Lawrence; how does she discover it? And is reading about sex more fun than having it? How is Pleasantville to remain itself now that buses leave for beyond its borders? David returns to the present and seemingly parts forever from Margaret; is she allergic to buses? Jennifer, loving her new studious self, stays on in Pleasantville; where does that leave her real-life mother, who needs her back? George, Betty, and Mr. Johnson seemingly continue in a menage a trois; is that utopia or dystopia? The TV repairman is displeased with the turn things have taken; is that God disapproving of errant mankind? Then why doesn't he punish it?

Like other overambitious fantasies, Pleasantville paints itself into a corner. But what Gary Ross (author also of Big) flubs as a writer, he glosses over as a director. Performances are fine, notably by Tobey Maguire (Bud), William H. Macy (George), and the deeply moving Joan Allen (Betty). But neither politically nor existentially-let alone artistically-does this allegory come to an honest conclusion, as another cute concept, initially provocative, goes down the drain.

n The only interesting thing about The Siege is the idea: Arab terrorists blanketing New York City with bombs, and the difficulty of finding adequate protective measures. But even that idea was ripe for the plucking, and required only a little pluck, because, in targeting New York City's Arab-American population for suspicion and showing them being herded into detention camps, it risked arousing the wrath of that minority.

Yet, as minorities go, that is one of the most unpopular and powerless, and its protests have gone by largely unheeded. Personally, what I would protest here is a terrorist bomb going off in a Broadway theater. Being also a drama critic, I would have preferred for it to explode in a ballpark. Terrorists, not known for their good taste, may even seek out a movie such as The Siege and extract ideas from it. They, in fact, may be the only satisfied customers.

Aside from its subject, the movie is conventional. The early sequences are cannily enough staged by Edward Zwick, but after that it's mostly routine stuff. We get the megalomaniacal general whose troops take over the city (Bruce Willis, in his recent tight-lipped and beady-eyed mode), but he is not visibly backed up by the higher powers. The noble and brilliant FBI hero, Hub, by now almost obligatorily played by a black actor (Denzel Washington, doing his best with a role that is a neo-stereotype), is surrounded by fellow agents among whom the solitary blond WASP sticks out like conspicuous tokenism. Hub's chief aide is Frank Haddad, an agent of Lebanese descent, and as loyal as they come. He is played very well by Tony Shalhoub, of similar ancestry.

Where the otherwise cautious scenarists allowed themselves some leeway is in the character of the CIA agent Elise, a benign Mata Hari figure who has slept with the enemy in a good cause: to train a group of young Arabs to assassinate Saddam Hussein. But our government changed its policy, leaving those young trainees in the lurch, and, now persecuted by their own, they are ready to turn their new skills on the United States. The screenwriters have made Elise (the good Annette Bening) into a witty, tough-talking, screwball-comedy broad, a perfect Bacall for Washington's Bogart. But then they chickened out: interracial romance is, it seems, still B.O. (body odor) at the B.O. (box office).

Documentary footage of Clinton threatening the terrorists introduces the movie, but Bill subsequently fades out of the picture. Let's hope that here, at any rate, life will imitate art.

n Richard LaGravenese began as screenwriter of one of those abhorrently pretentious, would-be mythic films, The Fisher King, much admired by subliterate audiences and reviewers. He has worked steadily since then and just directed his first film (from his own screenplay), Living Out Loud.

On the surface, this is a fair attempt at a European-style, adult movie. Judith, a nurse whose fickle cardiologist husband dumped her after 16 years for a younger woman, mopes on in their Fifth Avenue co-op. Her one pleasure is frequenting a nightclub where the buxom, black blues singer eventually becomes her friend. But she also befriends her night-porter-cum-elevator operator, Pat, a humble Italian-American, whose wife abandoned him after 25 years and whose improbably pretty daughter has died of some dread disease. An inveterate gambler, he owes money to the mob. Judith bails him out.

Pat dreams of a food-import business; Judith wants to become a doctor. They encourage each other's dreams. So what's mature about this? Where's the hard-nosed reality? It's in Pat's wanting to sleep with Judith, though she never will. Not surprising, since she is the still quite attractive Holly Hunter, he the unsightly near-dwarf Danny DeVito. Ah, but even that vital black singer (nonacted by Queen Latifah) has problems: her boyfriend is gay!

Realism gets kicked in the behind: hospital nurses can always get doctors, or at least interns, to shack up with them, and tenants do not socialize with doormen in posh co-ops. And the lesbian nightclub to which the singer takes the nurse is far less real than those Starlight Roofs where Fred and Ginger once plied their whirligigs. But never mind: Judith is doing well in med school and has moved to a real neighborhood, into a brownstone full of ethnics. And Pat delights the clientele at their favorite nightclub with his singing during amateur hour; he also has a young and pretty girlfriend. Buy your imported sardines from him.