Short Takes

VIDEO

Edward Scissorhound

SPARKY, A PIT BULLTERRIER WITH A sweet disposition, gets run over by a car, and Victor Frankenstein (Barret Oliver), his 10-year-old master, determines to revive him using a microwave and a toaster. FRANKENWEENIE sounds like pure Tim Burton, and it is. The 27-min. Disney comedy, made in 1984 and now released as a home video, marked the debut of the director of the Batman blockbusters. This ripe tale has intimations of Burton's Beetlejuice and Edward Scissorhands: the undead and a wild child sundered in suburbia. But Burton's Batmanic surrealism is plenty evident here. The pet cemetery is adorned with fire-hydrant and dog-biscuit tombstones, and the community unites to hot-wire the dead-again pooch. It's a prize oddity from a child prodigy.

CINEMA

Supertroopers

UNIVERSAL SOLDIER asks us to believe that the government learned to chemically reanimate dead Vietnam vets and turn them into immortal, radically improved fighting machines. It further posits a squad of these supertroopers running around the U.S. as a rogue police force. It's a whopper, all right. But Jean- Claude Van Damme is appealing as a "UniSol" whose memories of a previous life recur and lead him into rebellion. Roland Emmerich's film may be nothing more than lowbrow, high-cal entertainment, but with the action genre now encrusted with dubious aspirations (Alien 3, Batman Returns), it's good to get back to the bloody basics with a little style and self-satirizing wit.

BOOKS

Four Sisters

TERRY MCMILLAN'S BREEZY POP NOVEL WAITING TO EXHALE (Viking; $22) is one more battle communique in the war between the sexes, notable chiefly because all the condo-owning, Z-car-driving protagonists are black. True, these four good- looking, thirtyish women friends and the men who do them wrong, wronger and wrongest are the whitest black people ever seen off the set of The Cosby Show. This is high-class soap opera, and the big, unstated joke is that the soap is Ivory. That may be why Pocket Books just bid $2.64 million for paperback rights. The subliminal pitch, a home truth for gender warriors of all colors, is that buppies are just as baffled by their disconnected lives as are their tight white cousins.

MUSIC

Two Who Deserve A Hearing

MOST PEOPLE THINK OF CLASSICAL MUSIC as a white enterprise, but two new chamber-music CDs from Koch International Classics celebrate a pair of worthy black composers. The felicitously named SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR (1875-1912), an Anglo-African, was equally at home in the Dvorak-tinged idiom of his Clarinet Quintet and the simple strains of Negro spirituals, which he set compellingly for piano. The album boasts fine performances, especially by pianist Virginia Eskin. WILLIAM GRANT STILL (1895-1978) was similarly eclectic. A staff arranger for the Paul Whiteman band, he could pen a delicate gem like the Seven Traceries suite or a robust concert piece like Africa, originally for orchestra. Pianist Denver Oldham gets them just right.

THEATER

Dudes and Dudettes

The plot is the thinnest in all of Shakespeare, and by its end, as one scholar famously observed, there are no gentlemen in Verona. Although the Bard presumably intended an allegory about male bonding and Christian forgiveness, nowadays most productions of THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA favor a lighthearted romp in the woods, making it a cousin to A Midsummer Night's Dream. The gorgeous staging by Laird Williamson at San Diego's Old Globe Theater is no exception: a dazzling mix of oversize umbrellas, masks, giant fans and gauzy shimmers of cloth, all displayed amid intensely hued red, green, white and yellow costumes. The acting has a monochromatic intensity, but it abounds in charm, if usually of a dude and dudette style of tomfoolery.