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1991 VIDEO OF THE YEAR
1 THE BEATLES-THE FIRST U.S. VISIT (1990, MPI, $89.98, unrated) If you were alive in 1964, this remarkable video can both give you back your innocence and correct decades of rose-colored ! nostalgia. All the wonder of the Beatles' impact is here-the Ed Sullivan performances (in remastered sound, no less), the press conferences-yet the footage makes brutally clear how overwhelmed the Fabs themselves were. And if you weren't alive in 1964, Visit captures a shock wave that still vibrates in what we wear, how we think, what we listen to. Eight years earlier, with Elvis, the culture of youth had staked a claim. This time it triumphed.
BEST WAIT-FOR-THE-TAPE MOVIES 1 PUMP UP THE VOLUME (1990, RCA/Columbia, $92.95, R) The epitome of the good little movie that gets ignored in theaters only to find its audience on video. Christian Slater is incredibly charismatic as the high school student whose anonymous pirate-radio rants turn his town, then the country, on its ear. The best teens-run-amok flick since 1979's Over the Edge, Volume is steeped in the end-of-the-world, self-pitying, larger-than-life mind-set of adolescence as you actually may remember it.
2 THE TALL GUY (1990, RCA/Columbia, $89.95, R) A sweet, goofy, uproarious British comedy that gives Jeff Goldblum his finest role yet. Playing a chronically dazed actor-sort of an American jughead in London-Goldblum falls hard for a nurse (Dead Again's Emma Thompson) whose starchy uniform hides a soul of lust. Halfway through, the movie switches gears to skewer Andrew Lloyd Webber-style musicals, but its wonky romantic charm holds firm. A gem.
3 ARACHNOPHOBIA (1990, Hollywood, $92.95, PG-13) This shrieker from the Spielberg camp (his longtime producer, Frank Marshall, directed) got lost in the box office shuffle because the marketing no-brows couldn't figure out whether to sell it as a comedy or a thriller. Its genius is that it is both-as these spiders crawl through town, your funny bone and ''eyewww!'' reflex work in equal measure-and the humans (Jeff Daniels, John Goodman) are pros. Slick, meaningless, great fun.
WORST WAIT-FOR-THE-TAPE MOVIES 1 FUNNY ABOUT LOVE (1990, Paramount, $92.95, PG-13) Flabby feel-good tripe in which middle-aged cartoonist Gene Wilder wants a child, then doesn't want a child, then wants a child again, then Christine Lahti and Mary Stuart Masterson look lost while the star tries to pass off his blithering shtick as new-male doubt. It's hard to imagine the man was once funny.
2 OSCAR (1991, Touchstone, $92.95, PG) Sly Stallone's geometrically shrinking career appears to be affecting his mind. How else to explain this witless comedy, so poorly adapted from a French stage farce that you can practically hear the coughing in the front row? The cast is huge and intriguingly diverse- everyone from Tim Curry to Vincent Spano to Ornella Muti-but in the center is a star with a big, fat, terrified grin plastered on his face.
