November 23, 1999

NEWS Holiday Spirit The director George Lucas has decided to rerelease last summer's ''Star Wars'' installment, ''Episode I -- The Phantom Menace,'' for one week beginning on Dec. 3 in theaters in 350 North American cities. But it's not an effort to swell the box-office take. Mr. Lucas will donate all the money to local charities, not just the profits but every penny. Officials at Lucasfilm and 20th Century Fox said this was the first time that total revenues from the nationwide exhibition of a film had gone to charities, in this case 177 of them picked by the local theater owners. Double Divas This weekend the hassled and harried can head to Newark, where there's a diva to soothe many a savage breast. On Saturday the Grammy Award winner Natalie Cole will woo listeners with standards made famous by her honey-voiced father, Nat (King) Cole, and new songs from her recent release, ''Snowfall on the Sahara.'' The next day the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves will sing works by Puccini, Bizet, Saint-Saens, Brahms and Falla and a selection of home-grown spirituals. Both concerts take place at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. 'Lion' Roars Again There's nothing like it, American critics proclaimed in 1997, and this year their British counterparts just had to agree. So much so, in fact, that the Evening Standard Theater Awards created a new category to honor ''The Lion King,'' yesterday crowning the stage spectacular Theatrical Event of 1999. But for all the hoopla, it still might be called faint praise. After naming Stephen Dillane best actor for ''The Real Thing'' and Janie Dee best actress for ''Comic Potential,'' the judges decided there was no play worthy of being called ''best.'' ''We felt it would diminish the award to give it to a new work that did not live up to the extraordinary achievements of the past,'' said Max Hastings, the newspaper's editor and chief judge. Fun Couple In a century that saw it all, comedy didn't get much better than Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Audiences in need of a good laugh can saunter over to an eight-day film festival devoted to them, starting on Friday at Symphony Space in Manhattan. ''Classic Comedy Films: Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton'' will show 35 films, including shorts and features, silents and talkies. On Saturday the actress Claire Bloom will discuss the pratfalls of working with genius in the 1952 film ''Limelight,'' the only film in which Chaplin and Keaton appeared together. KATHRYN SHATTUCK

REMBRANDT'S EYES By Simon Schama 750 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $50. Simon Schama's sumptuous new book on Rembrandt bears about as much resemblance to traditional biographies of the painter as ''Tristram Shandy'' and ''Moby-Dick'' do to conventional novels. Impassioned and learned, expansive and discursive, ''Rembrandt's Eyes'' not only leaves us with a fierce appreciation of the artist's work but also immerses us inexorably in his world.

Iraq today unexpectedly began to cut off the oil it is allowed to export in exchange for food and other basic supplies, after the Security Council extended the program for only two weeks. Fred Eckhard, the United Nations spokesman, said independent experts reported this morning that Iraq had cut the flow of oil to the Turkish port of Ceyhan and was preparing to stop shipments from the Iraqi port of Mina al Bakr on Tuesday. Those ports are Iraq's main export points.

It's the New World's Vatican of viticulture, the oracle of grape-growing, the arbiter of winery practice. The University of California's department of viticulture and enology here trains most of California's winemakers and provides root stock for much of the New World. The department's geneticist, Dr. Carole P. Meredith, has recently been shaking up a lot of the Old World as well as the New. With a new method of unraveling the grapevine's tangled family tree, she has shown that several of the world's best known wine grapes are not pure strains but hybrids between other varieties.

The familiar hulking figure on the far end of the court was wearing his black knee pads, three layers of T-shirts soaked to his skin and the same old grumpy disposition. ''I ain't talking,'' he growled. ''Practice ain't over, yet.''