What's better than a remote control a enhancing your TV- and movie-viewin pleasure? Your Mac.
Jon Zilber
Watching TV is so early '90s. Renting videos is so pre-Web. Let's face it -- if you're going to veg out in the post-GUI era, why not use your Mac to transform your passive couch-potato lifestyle into a more interactive mouse-potato paradigm? Your Mac is just itching to help you turn those hours wasted vegging out in front of the tube into quality time vegging out in front of the tube.
Video Visionaries
Plunking down a couple of bucks to rent a new video release or punching up a cable pay-per-view selection is like playing the slots in Las Vegas -- except that Vegas gives better odds. Here's a safer bet: Invest in a good movie guide, and it will quickly pay for itself by steering you to just the right selection. You can check what your favorite reviewer thought of a particular flick, search for movies that fit your mood, or even get recommendations based on your own personal history of picks and pans.
Overall, Cinemania 96 (Rating: Outstanding (5 of 5 mice); $35 estimated street), from Microsoft (800-426-9400 or 206-882-8080), is your best bet. This updated version of last year's Eddy-nominated product has over 20,000 reviews from Roger Ebert, Pauline Kael, and Leonard Maltin; free monthly online updates; exhaustive cast and credit lists; movie stills; and audio and video clips. Hypertext links abound, letting you explore connections among actors, directors, genres, and themes. Sure, you can get lost in all its links, but the journey is bound to unearth a few discoveries for your next video-store run.
In contrast, get lost in Corel All-Movie Guide (Rating: Poor/Acceptable (2.5 of 5 mice); $24.95 list), from Corel (800-772-6735 or 613-728-8200), and you'll be just plain lost. Sure, it boasts the biggest database of any movie guide -- and Waterworld had the biggest budget of any movie in 1995. Using All-Movie Guide is like having a C++ programmer as your movie maven. The information in its unintuitive database not only varies dramatically in quantity and quality from movie to movie but it's often inconsistent within a selection as well. The 1971 film The Canterbury Tales, for example, is flagged as both an "okay family film" and "not for children." Still, All-Movie Guide does have data on over 90,000 films and offers a few neat features, such as a time line showing the chronology of the movies that match your search criteria and a plot finder that lets you search for movies matching a wide variety of thematic descriptions (such as "Aliens, bad," "Aliens, good," or "Aliens, sexy"). It also lets you order videos online. But if all you want is a big database of movie reviews, you're better off checking out the Internet Movie Database (http://www.msstate.edu/Movies/).
Blockbuster Video Guide to Movies & Videos (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice); $20 estimated street), from Creative Multimedia (800-262-7668 or 503-241-4351), has a simple, streamlined approach that can help you find what you want quickly without drowning you in movie trivia. Its search capabilities aren't quite as forgiving as Cinemania's, though; you have to enter an exact and complete word to find a match, whereas the Cinemania search engine narrows down your search with every letter you type. And although it can search for themes and plot elements in its 21,000 reviews, you have to know how to look. The 1967 film Bedazzled (a satirical retelling of Faust) turns up if you search for devil but not if you look for Satan, Faust, or satire. Online updates are available for $3 per month or $30 per year.
Criterion Goes to the Movies (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice); $24.95 list), from Voyager (800-446-2001 or 212-431-5199), covers a comparatively scant 140 movies, but it includes a thoughtful essay and a video clip from each -- far more video clips than any of the others include, and they're all classics. Although it's just a catalog for the acclaimed Criterion Collection of laserdiscs, it's still an invaluable addition to any film buff's CD-ROM collection.
I Like to Watch
Someday, when digital videodisc replaces videotape, you may be able to watch any movie on your own Mac screen. For now, you can choose from a handful of full-length QuickTime movies on CD-ROM, generally supplemented with behind-the-scenes goodies. The best of these -- including This Is Spinal Tap, Comic Book Confidential, and A Hard Day's Night -- are from Voyager. Voyager's Ephemeral Films (Rating: Very Good/Outstanding (4.5 of 5 mice); $29.95 list) is perhaps the best suited to CD-ROM; it's a campy collection of social-propaganda and industrial promotional films that were the forerunners of today's infomercials. No thigh busters, psychic hotlines, or Apple Performas hawked here, but you will find A Wonderful New World of Fords; Dating: Do's and Don'ts; and a young Mike Wallace narrating as an even younger Dick York struggles with the difficulties of fitting in, in the 1947 classic Shy Guy.
As Seen on TV
Television, it's been said, is a vast wasteland. A visit to tvland (http://www.tvland.com/) may not make it any less of a wasteland, but it certainly makes the wasteland vaster. While you're online, be sure to stop and stock up at Bubba's BBQ Chip Collection (http://users.ao .com/gbeason/bbqchips.html).
But don't just watch another Star Trek rerun when you can boldly go where no Mac has gone before, thanks to Star Trek: The Next Generation Interactive Technical Manual (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice); $60 estimated street), from Simon and Schuster Interactive (800-910-0099). Thanks to the 3-D magic of QuickTime VR, you can explore practically every nook and cranny of the USS Enterprise from every possible perspective. And Star Trek Omnipedia (Rating: Acceptable/Very Good (3.5 of 5 mice); $60 estimated street), also from Simon and Schuster Interactive, can help you find just about every bit of Star Trek trivia from the original series, The Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine.
Only one TV-related CD-ROM, however, deserves to be called Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time (Rating: Outstanding (5 of 5 mice); $50 estimated street), and perhaps no other CD-ROM has ever so delightfully lived up to its promise as does this celebration of all things Pythonesque, from 7th Level (800-884-8863 or 214-498-8100). Among the skits included are the naughty bits from "Nudge, Nudge," the haughty bits from "The Argument Clinic," and some cheesy video from "The Cheese Shop." You can sing along to Spam!, customize your Mac with the Desktop Pythonizer, or play pointless games involving flatulent fowl. If "penguin on the telly" holds a special meaning for you, don't miss this disc.
Ultimate Potato Accessories
No mouse potato is truly complete without two final items. First, what the remote control is to the couch potato, the EZ-CD CD opener ($3 list) is to the mouse potato. This low-tech lifesaver from MacTec Products (818-702-6979) effortlessly slices open all CD-ROM packaging materials. Thanks to the magic of analog technology, it even works on audio CDs too!
And if you're out of breath from the exertion of slitting open all those CD-ROMs, maybe you've embraced the potato lifestyle a bit too vigorously. Check out
Active Trainer (Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice); $44.95 list), from Laser Media (800-639-0628 or 416-977-4320). This surprisingly slick fitness package is so inspiring you'll practically burn calories just by watching its instructional videos. Featuring expert advice and QuickTime videos on weight, aerobics, diet, and lifestyle training, the Active Trainer CD-ROM even comes with a tape measure and a handy fat caliper for measuring your progress from spudly to studly.
