Music Videos

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Davy Jones, 66, the leading heartthrob of the much-loved pre-fab 1960s rock band the Monkees, who sang many of the made-for-TV act's biggest hits, including "Daydream Believer," died Wednesday in Florida. Mr. Jones died of a massive heart attack in Indiantown, Fla., where he lived, his publicist Helen Kensick said. Detectives with the Martin County Sheriff's Criminal Investigations Division were conducting a death investigation, but said foul play was not suspected.

Sorry, we don't do sexy "singles" in this column. Just long-playing albums and music videos. Uh, some of them can get sexy, though. Especially if the talent's wearing spandex. ALL TAPPED OUT: Yeah, those blokes in Spinal Tap have sure made the British brand of "long-haired, tight-trousered hard-rocker" seem oblivious, pompously overblown and misogynist. Yet in their fake careers as Derek Smalls, David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel, comedian/musicians Harry Shearer, Michael McKean and Christopher Guest offer an affectionate and knowing wink.

Aug. 1, 1981, and MTV - the 24-hour music-video cable channel brought to you by Warner Communications and American Express - goes on-line, offering state-of-the-art graphics, state-of-the-art rock videos and state-of-the-ar t commercials that look and sound like state-of-the-art rock videos. America goes wild - young America goes wild, anyway. Music videos are heralded as the wave of the future, a spanking-new art form, savior of the then-foundering record industry. "I want my MTV!"

'Columbo's playing Wiffle ball with me!" Zoe Cassavetes remembers thinking happily, back when she was a little girl in 1970s L.A. There she was, in her parents' backyard, batting a plastic orb with Peter Falk - the squinty star of the long-running television detective show - who had taken a break from moviemaking to play with the director's daughter. That director, of course, was John Cassavetes, the actor-turned-American-indie-auteur of Faces , Husbands , A Woman Under the Influence , and Opening Night . Many of his groundbreaking, grown-up dramas starred his wife, Gena Rowlands.

First you see terrified eyes peering from inside a shipping crate. Then the camera zooms in on the half-dozen people trapped inside it. A forklift is carrying this human six-pack toward a truck, which is likely headed for a factory, a farm, or a brothel. The new MTV public-service ad dramatizes a hidden horror: slavery in the 21st century. Millions of women, men, and children - including many thousands in the United States - are slaves. Their forced labor includes picking crops, weaving carpets, cleaning buildings, and being raped.

Michael Jackson's This Is It looks beyond the reconstructed face and spindly body of the late King of Pop and basks in his meteoric light. Culled from more than 100 hours of footage documenting Jackson's preparing for what was to be his farewell concert stand, the film is a privileged peek at the creative process of pop music's Peter Pan. The show Jackson was putting together was a compendium - and cinematic reimagining - of his greatest hits,...

Michael Jackson's This Is It looks beyond the reconstructed face and spindly body of the late King of Pop and basks in his meteoric light. Culled from more than 100 hours of footage documenting Jackson's preparing for what was to be his farewell concert stand, the film is a privileged peek at the creative process of pop music's Peter Pan. The show Jackson was putting together was a compendium - and cinematic reimagining - of his greatest hits,...

Glitter, the eagerly awaited, twice-postponed A Star Is Born revamp featuring Mariah Carey in her film debut, is so bad that you can write its epitaph. A star is stillborn. It's not entirely a failure of the story. This yarn about a backup singer who soars to the top while her famous discoverer and lover watches his career plummet has always worked before, for Janet Gaynor and, spectacularly, for Judy Garland and Barbra Streisand. It's not entirely a failure of direction.

Genre-bending is an honorable practice that occasionally yields a pleasant surprise such as Naked Gun, a detective slapstick, or Pennies From Heaven, a musical melodrama. One Night at McCool's, a curious screwball noir, doesn't so much bend established genres as blend them into an unappetizing cocktail, where they curdle before pouring. More or less a Femme Fatale Attraction, the film stars Liv Tyler as Jewel, a ruby-lipped seductress falling out of her red velvet mini-dress and into the lives of bartender Randy (Matt Dillon)

As tooting-your-own-horn documentaries about innovative alt-rockers who've been around for 20 years go, Gigantic: A Tale of Two Johns goes very well indeed. John Flansburgh and John Linnell, the Lennon-McCartney of Brooklyn's Williamsburg, are nerdy musicheads made good. The duo's band, They Might Be Giants (a name taken from the 1971 George C. Scott flick about a delusional eccentric obsessed with Sherlock Holmes), has been making records and self-distributed cassette tapes since the early '80s.