MEDIA COOL

MEDIA COOL

This month’s Media Cools were written by Thomas Anderson, Karen Schoemer, Michael Upton and Bill Holdship.

STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION (Syndicated TV)

The first few times I watched this show I noticed two things: 1) it’s more reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica (a patriarchial captain plus his underlings who have all sorts of “interrelationsips” going on) than the old Star Trek; and, 2) the plots didn’t make any sense whatsoever. Since then, happily, it’s been uphill. The storylines are now coherent and the characters and special effects impress me more each week. Brent Spiner’s Data is the best TV android since Get Smart's Hymie; and Denise Crosby’s Tasha Yar on the other hand, is all flesh and blood, if you catch my drift. Definitely a life-form reading on my tri-corder. The best episode so far: the Enterprise picks up weird signals from an unknown source, and they turn out to be an old T.J. Hooker rerun floating through space! OK, I made that up, but watch this show anyway. It’s great.

T.A.

RAW BOOKS (Distributed by Pantheon)

Raw started out in 1980 as an oversized graphics magazine which sought to elevate the comic strip to the level of high art, or at least shackle the latter into expressive pictorial panels. Raw was soon publishing books by individual artists and in 1986, Pantheon Books got into the game, handling production and distribution for a new series of Raw material which has so far spawned three books: Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, by Art Spiegelman; Agony, by Mark Beyer; and Read Yourself Raw, a compilation of the first three issues pf Raw Magazine. Maus, a novel in comic book form, recounts the experiences of the author’s father in Poland during the Holocaust. With mice as Jews and cats as Nazis, it’s a tale at once vivid, direct, spellbinding and frightening. Agony is a pocketsized mini-oeuvre of palatable existentialism, in which roommates Jordan and Amy lose their jobs, get swallowed by cartoon fish and held captive by cartoon natives who blow up in a nuclear explosion (that’s just the beginning). Read Yourself Raw offers dozens of comicized short stories by a wealth of European and American artists, plus neatoid inserts like Beyer’s “City Of Terror Trading Cards” (#3: Blasting The Bugs). Bubblegum’s not included, but Raw will introduce you to a whole new genre of fun and flamboyant literature that is sorely lacking in the universe.

K.S.

12 BEATLE ALBUM COVER PRINTS (Targeted Communications)

Here is our latest addition to the quick and easy home repair catalog. A nifty way to covpr a hole in your wall. A quick fix for cracked plaster. Available for the first time are “museum quality art prints” of all 12 Beatle album covers. Make no mistake, these babies are licensed by Apple Corps., created by the former head of graphic design at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and printed on 80-pound stock! The posters represent the album covers as they were released in England with the EMI/Parlophone logo. The prints also list the song titles which, like the Beatle CDs, differ from the U.S releases. Scott Puritz, president of Targeted Communications (the distributors) says, “We wanted to separate these from the $4 Bon Jovi poster.” Mission accomplished, Scott. The Beatle prints are about $20 a pop—and to make sure all Beatle fans get serviced, there’s a three set limit. And to answer your question, yes, quantities of the White Album prints are available for large areas.

M.L.

JORDACHEJEAN COMMERCIALS (Your TV Set)

We should all get together and beat up the guy responsible for these.

B.H.

SHOOT TO KILL (Touchstone) FRANTIC (Warner Bros.)

Two new suspense thrillers, both following age-old formulas, both featuring endings that are a little too pat, but both a sure bet for fans of this kind of stuff. The first is your standard psycho killer on the run routine (ironically, the loony isn’t identified for awhile, and one of the innocent suspects looks just like the creep from Dirty Harry)] it’s fast, thrilling and looks good like all Touchstone flicks. Plus, Sidney Poitier is still a remarkable presence on the screen after all these years. Frantic is director Roman Polanski’s newest vehicle, borrowing from Alfred Hitchcock mistaken identity territory. An American surgeon’s wife is kidnapped by terrorists in Paris, all because the couple picked up the wrong bag at the airport. I’d have preferred a few more plot twists at the end rather than formula, but that’s the only real flaw here. Harrison Ford gives his best, most understated performance as the doctor who loves his wife, and Polanski creates a paranoid’s dreamscape with his dark, disturbed and dangerous Paris. Plus, it’s always perversely interesting to see Polanski have his latest young girlfriend—Emmanuelle Seigner this time—do stuff like crawl around a roof in the shortest black leather skirt you’ve ever seen, all in the name of art.

B.H.