MEDIA COOL

MEDIA COOL

This Month’s Media Cool was written by David Keeps, Dave DiMartino and Dave Segal

THE BEATLES (Second Revised Edition) by Hunter Davies

(McGraw-Hill Paperbacks) With over 250 books about the quintessential quartet in existence, and not enough time to read them all, curious Beatle fans are forced to be discriminating. This is the authorized bio, first released in 1968. Davies, a former London Sunday Times editor, traveled with the Beatles for two years (’67 & ’68) and had access to parents, relatives, close friends and associates. The man was nothing if not exhaustive. Myriad surprising facts and anecdotes pop up everywhere. Throughout, Davies is the fly on the wall, although he possesses the style of a wire reporter (i.e., none). The hooks to buy this edition are the intro and postscript. The former describes the difficulties the author encountered during his mammoth project; the latter ties up loose ends from ’69 to ’85...each Beatle’s solo career is summarized and their personal lives are explicated. What’s shocking is Davies’s downright inelegant prose. He’s guilty of several incomplete sentences and sentence fragments. But this bio is still absorbing and essential reading for anyone interested in the Fab Four. And the British Revolver was released in 1966, not in ’65, as the otherwise fine discography states. D.S.

REVOLUTION (Warner Bros.)

It’s 1776 and the Founding Fathers aren’t the only ones who are revolting. There’s this Al Pacino fella, spouting pure 20th century Brooklynese as a simpleton widowed father who gets politicized by his dumb son—who got both of them in the army in exchange for a measly five shillings. Then there’s a bad-complexioned Nastassia Kinski (funny name for an American patriot) as a rich girl who loves nothing more than stabbing British officers in the crotch with hatpins and hanging out with low-life rebels like that Pacino guy, who she just has to fall in love with. And then there’s Donald Sutherland as a sadistic British officer and Annie Lennox as Miss Liberty, who aren’t revolting at all, but somehow got stuck in the middle of all this beautifully staged, taking-liberties-with-history glop. Unrelentingly boring, Revolution was directed by Hugh (Chariots Of Fire) Hudson, one of the great British film discoveries of the ’80s. Or so they say. D.K.

HEAD OFFICE (Tri-Star)

Ever laughed out of sheer desperation? Believe me, it’s an experience that can be perversely funny. But this desperately pretentious satire of big business/politics is most certainly not. Poor Judge (Beverly Hills Cop) Reinhold gets smothered in too much makeup and too few opportunities to do anything more than survive the messy, unfunny writing by dint of his natural, effortless charm. Danny Devito, Jane Seymour and Eddie Albert weigh in (’specially Eddie) with grotesque cameo caricatures, while Judge, who plays the son of a Congressman, bungles his way to the top and gets the girl, who just happens to be the activist anticorporation daughter of the Captain Queeg-like head of the corporation and so on and so forth... D.K.

HEADS

by David Osborn (Bantam)

I don’t know about you, but I’ve always wanted to read the Best Book Ever Written. This is it. OK, heads get surgically removed and live by their lonesome, just like in The Brain That Wouldn’t Die. Big deal. That classic plot is nothing compared to Osborn’s writing, which—to put it mildly—is better than anybody ever’sl Including dialog so stunningly lifelike, you’d swear you were there (‘“Susan, this is one of those moments when a head would give its life to have a body. ’”); the best adjectives yet (“The beach would be a great place for sex. Tanned naked bodies locked together on the yellow sands, their labored cries of ultimate ecstasy mingling with the screams of gulls and the call of wild birds and the sound of wavelets rustling shore pebbles. But not with Al. ”); vital explanations (“[She’d] done everything she could think of to boost her confidence, including spending more time than usual on her appearance, her makeup, hair, and selecting what to wear.’’ philosophy to die for (“She had to cope somehow. It was a nightmare, but so were a lot of other things. You couldn’t just give up.”); imagery galore (“With a jar, Susan saw by a digital wall clock that it was now five-fortyfive. ”); deep truths (“Except for the hair, one slender young female head looked like another, especially when the face was half-covered with an anesthesia cone. ”); tasteful racial slurs (“It seemed only just yesterday, the memory was still that vivid... the blood-covered operating table, and under the white glare of operation lights, the dying patient, a wetback who had been half torn to pieces in a rail accident.”); common dilemmas (“He’d find her in a minute. Where could she go with a shaved head and drugged half out of her mind?”); and, finally, sentences so artfully written that you, like me, will be moved to tears (“She had the almost childlike face of someone quite young.”). David Osborn is the best! D.D.