Inter...

Rip It Up, Issue 232, 1 December 1996, Page 10

Inter...

CINEMANIA97 (Microsoft) If this is the way of the future, count me in! You can chuck out your Leonard Maltin Movie and Video Guide, your Roger Ebert’s Video Companion, your Ephraim Katz Film Encyclopedia, and your copy of Pauline Kael’s 5001 Nights at the Movies, and kiss your shelving problems goodbye with this one slim CD-ROM (yeah, I know CD-ROM’s are all the same size once you get them out of their insanely overblown packaging, but when you see it sitting in the space cleared by ditching all those lofty volumes of film criticism, I think you’ll be verbose with excitement tool). If reviews of 20,000-plus films don’t ring your anally retentive film geek bell, check the 10,000-plus filmographies (and a portrait gallery you can use to put faces to names of everyone from Clara Bow to Bo Derek — OK, you probably already know what Bo Derek looks like), 4,500 profiles of directors, writers etc., a library of over 1,000 movie stills, more than 150 classic film dialogue excerpts, and even 30 video clips, ranging from Un Chien Andalou to Star Wars. Crossreferencing between the various sections is enough to have you going in for a quick Nicholas Cage fix, and not emerging from a Wes Craven update until many square-eyed hours later (a simple connection, that one, but you’ll be surprised at the ever complex webs of association you’ll find yourself weaving).. If you’d like someone else’s mind bent to take you for a walk, there’s a ‘Celebrity Tours’ option in which, to name a few, Melvin and Mario van Peebles can take you on a tour of the blaxploitation genre, Sandra Bernhard can introduce you to ‘Great Ladies of the Movies’, or John Waters can take you on the ‘That’s Showmanship’ tour of Gimickville. . . '. . And did I mention useful? Apart from a selection of

articles/ definitions you can search for by category, word or phrase, there’s a daily quiz question to test your newly expanded knowledge on. Stuck for ideas for the VCR tonight? Let the nifty ‘Suggestion Wheel’ do your choosing for you. It’s a hoot even when you’re not actually using it to look for a film — pick ‘Stirring and Uplifting', and you’ll be rewarded with a sub-cate-gory and associated list like ‘Tales of Devotion’, ‘Hope and Inspiration’, or ‘Disabilities’; ‘Passion and Romance’ could get you anything from a ‘Date Movie’ to one of the multitude of twists on the ‘Love for Sale’ theme. It even makes a cool whirring sound when you pull the handle! And a ‘List Maker’ function you can also cross-reference from allows you to store personalised lists of all you’ve discovered. This is the film buff’s best buddy — and with Internet update capabilities — from which you can also source new ‘Celebrity Tours’ — it will remain top of the line in even the most modern movie stakes until August of 1997. BRONWYN TRUDGEON

U2 Studio On Line The slow moving U2 recording sessions have had a video link to their web site. Fans have seen very little of U2. Cardboard cut-outs of Claudia Schiffer and Clint Eastwood are all that’s visible at times. The site suggests their new album has a working title of Expect Nothing or Expect Nothing But the Best. http://www.island.co.uk/cat/cat.uvw/u2studio.html

Radiohead Site There’s now an official Radiohead site, but Thom Yorke admits unofficial sites “seem to know better what’s going on than we do”. The address is... http://www.radiohead.co.uk