A Jack Kerouac ROMnibus
CD-ROM for Windows and Mac*
Penguin Electronic Even if I weren’t Jack’s biggest fan, I’d have to say this CD-ROM is one of
the most comprehensive and technologically superior I’ve seen so far,
succeeding where others fail because it offers more than a book or a
video. I’d buy it just to own the famous clip that greets you at the start, of
Kerouac reading on the Steve Allen Show. So the disk’s other features —
a thoroughly annotated manuscript of The Dharma Bums, a gallery of rare
photographs, an annotated flow chart of the layered relationships of beat
icons, an archive of legible journal pages in Kerouac’s own hand, and video
clips of Kerouac’s contemporaries — are icing on the cake. Ann Charters,
editor of the Portable Beat Reader, served as literary consultant
on the project, and this CD-ROM makes a perfect companion to my dog-eared copy
of that book.
— Jen Scoville Born to Be Wild
D: John Gray; with Wil Horneff, some guy in a monkey suit, Helen Shaver,
John C. McGinley, Peter Boyle.
VHS Home Video
Sight and Sound When Katie (some guy in a monkey suit), befriends an adolescent rebel
(Horneff) at the university primate lab, wackiness ensues. The unlikely
cross-species buddy team races for the Canadian border, narrowly avoiding the
evil clutches of Katie’s rightful master. Born to Be Wild is nothing
short of hysterical as the “gorilla” displays amazing cognitive skills —
reading the newspaper, playing with a Vue-Master, getting rocked by John Kay
& Steppenwolf, and ultimately giving a courtroom speech on morality.
Intensely predictable and rife with inanity, this film maintains a constant
stupor as the boy playfully wrestles the gorilla to the ground over a veggie
burger and subsequently saves the animal from drowning in three feet of water. — Taylor Holland
Divertimento
D: Jacques Rivette: with Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, Emmanuelle
B�art, Marianne Denicourt, David Burgztein, Gilles Arbona.
VHS Home Video
New Yorker Films French director Rivette adds previously unseen footage and new twists to this
shortened version of his four-hour-long La Belle Noiseuse. A young
couple, Marianne and Nicolas, visit famed artist Frenhofer and wind up in a
bizarre predicament when Marianne is chosen as the model for his unfinished
masterpiece. Strained relations and emotions reach unknown levels creating a
drama devoted to subsurface complexities and to the task at hand… producing a
painting that needs “blood on the canvas” to be complete. Divertimento
captivates with its sublime collection of talents that augment the
entertaining plot.
— Stephany Baskin
Prince Interactive
CD-ROM for Mac
Warner Bros./Graphix Zone So, why do you like Prince? His music? Buy an album. His videos? Get a
videotape or laserdisc. His insufferable pomposity? Bingo! You’ve found your
product. In this intensely Myst-derived “game,” the “Modern-day Mozart”
of the title invites you to wander around his “playground of fantasy and
music.” Unfortunately, this is about as much of a treat as wandering around a
rich friend’s house after a cross-country drive: Sure, it’s pretty and lavish,
but after you wander around a bit, you just want to find the guest room and
take a nap. And as far as I got, anyway, the host didn’t even bother to show
up. — Ken Lieck
Apache
CD-ROM for PC
Interactive Magic
Apache is a fine game, but it’s missing something. The sound is
good, but not great; the graphics are nice, but not compelling; the battles are
fast-paced and frenetic — it’s very easy to mistakenly wipe out the friendlies
during combat. Apache has a lot going for it — you can play with or
against your friends in multiplayer mode, or fly the helicopter in arcade mode
if you don’t want to learn how to fly a real chopper. The game can run in both
VGA and SVGA modes; in the lower resolution a great deal of detail is lost and
it’s hard to see what’s going on, while in high-res mode the frame-rate is
slow. If you love games like Falcon 3.0 and Gunship 2000, you’ll
have a blast with Apache, but if you’ve never tried a flight sim before,
I suggest looking for something else. — Kurt Dillard
This article appears in January 19 • 1996 and January 19 • 1996 (Cover).