Off The Record...

Megadeath

Risk

Megadeath continues to do it better than ever, taking another step on its continuing journey into the hard rock mainstream with tightly crafted songs and some of the most outright, catchiest choruses the band has ever set to record.  This is also Dave Mustaine's best album as a singer, with a more confident, forceful delivery and a wider range of vocals.  Megadeth isn't necessarily gentler on Risk, but it's certainly more compelling than ever.

At The Movies...

Stigmata

A young hairdresser receives a mysterious gift, a rosary with a sinister history.  Shortly thereafter she begins exhibiting disturbing behavior.  Her moods shift violently, she speaks in tongues and her body is ravaged with wounds resembling those of the crucified Christ.  When her case draws the attention of the Vatican, Cardinal Vignielli dispatches a troubled priest to investigate, who becomes far more concerned with saving her life than debunking her claims of supernatural possession.  Chilling.

On Video...

Cruel Intentions

Deciding to venture where few films have had the nerve to go recently, Cruel Intentions is a luscious, truly nasty look at rich kids from hell.  Two step siblings, Kathryn and Sebastian, have the hots for each other but haven't acted upon that impulse yet.  Instead, the two hatch little plots where Sebastian deflowers various debutantes.  His school's new headmaster's daughter Annette Hargrove provides him with the ultimate challenge.  This film creates a new teen genre for the coming millennium, a daring step in the right direction.

The Buzz...

The new millennium may be Beanie-free.  Ty, the maker of the beanbag creatures announced on the company's Internet site that its line of plush-covered, pellet-stuffed animals will be retired on New Year's Day.  One large collector speculated that the message was a marketing gimmick to spark prices of older Beanies and prepare for the introduction of a whole new line of the toys next year.

ABC ended its two-week Who Wants To Be a Millionaire series with the strongest ratings of the summer and a promise to return in November. Sunday's hour-long finale drew an estimated 22.4 million viewers, more than double the 9.9 million viewers who watched the first episode.

The Walt Disney Co. will close its three ESPN stores and focus their efforts on restaurants and the Internet to peddle merchandise for the cable TV sports network.

The Sixth Sense has outdone Phantom Menace on at least one front, lasting one week longer at the top of the box-office rankings than the Star Wars prequel.

Dick Clark is pitching a new breakfast cereal celebrating the new millennium.  Clark will soon introduce Millenios, a sweetened whole grain oat and corn cereal made into 2s and 0s to mark the upcoming calendar switch.  The limited-time offering will hit store shelves in September.  General Mills likely will sell the cereal through January.

Judy Sheindlin, star of television's Judge Judy, will serve as a judge at the 79th annual Miss America Pageant.  She will be joined by Briana Scurry, goalie for the U.S. women's soccer team, actor Michael Badalucco of TV's The Practice, and Tia Carrere, from the movie Wayne's World.

The success of the summer sleeper The Blair Witch Project has spread to the Florida university attended by the five men who made the hit movie, with enrollment in one film course up by 500 percent.

Nirvana, Oasis, the Beastie Boys and Janet Jackson are among the rock, pop, rap and soul artists on a new album compiling musical performances from the long-running Saturday Night Live television program.  The two CD-set will include tracks from stars who've played on the weekly variety show over the past 25 years, including rockers Tom Petty, Beck, Neil Young and Green Day, and rap and R&B acts Dr. Dre, TLC and Mary J. Blige.  Saturday Night Live: The Musical Performances, Volumes 1 and 2, is due Sept. 21.

Altair Water, a spacey-sounding, but Earthbound, bottled water named after Dr. Bones McCoy's drink of choice, is due to bow on a store shelf in your quadrant late this fall.  The novelty H20 is being beamed there by Starbase-1 Coffee Co. (starbase-1.com), a Nevada-based gourmet food outfit that also holds the official Trek licenses on gourmet coffees, teas, chocolates, bottled drinks and even lollipops.

An Italian doctor claims to have discovered the secret to the Mona Lisa's smile, a compulsive gnashing of teeth.  Doctor Filippo Surano says he believes the woman in Leonardo da Vinci's famous portrait suffered from bruxism, an unconscious habit of grinding the teeth during sleep or periods of mental stress.  Kind of takes the romance out of it.

A Canadian musicologist has discovered what appears to be a long lost work by Mozart.  Dorothea Link came across the passage, scored for strings and soprano, in the Austrian National Library in Vienna.

ABC News has lured Jack Ford from NBC to serve as host and correspondent on 20/20.  The former chief legal correspondent at NBC and co-anchor of the Today show weekend editions will be a leading candidate to replace Charles Gibson as host of Good Morning America.

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