If You Ask Me

New York film critic Gelman-Waxner here collects her irreverent, hilarious ``If You Ask Me'' columns that have appeared during the past five years in Premiere magazine. Of yet another Tom Cruise coming-of-age drama (Far and Away), she writes, ``It's like watching Tom in a $60 million school play, where you never forget that he's really the star quarterback and the class president.'' William Hurt (in The Accidental Tourist) speaks ``very slowly, like a Mormon on quaaludes.'' Gelman-Waxner is kinder to Daniel Day-Lewis, Dennis Quaid and Michelle Pfeiffer, whose ``cheekbones and thighs could be grounds for a class action suit by women everywhere.'' The persona of the columnist-homemaker, mother and wife, married to a ``wildly sought-after Upper East Side orthodontist''-is carefully fashioned as the author intersperses self-aware mockery of yuppie excesses with astringent comments about Hollywood. (Oct.)