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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Doug Engelbart -- his mouse roared - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K In the market for a notebook computer? Exchange information and advice on brands and features in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y Spin sisters By Janelle Brown Why is PR the only high-tech field that women run? (12/03/98) The father of Mario and Zelda By Moira Muldoon Nintendo's Shigeru Miyamoto creates the world's most popular video games (12/02/98) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Block those pundits: AOL-Netscape isn't like an NBC of the Web -- and can't be (12/01/98) "We Were Burning" Reviewed by Andrew Leonard A new book tells us to forget about Japan Inc. -- Japanese entrepreneurs led the high-tech consumer electronic revolution (11/30/98) The 21st Challenge No. 16: Misdirected love notes By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Answer the mystery e-mail -- win a prize (11/25/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST REVIEWS ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M SALE! Salon's versatile, ultra-tough bag. Now on sale at just $39 for members and $49 for non-members.

IMAX MATES WITH T. REX | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - At the beginning of "T-REX," a whiny teenager named Ally (Liz Stauber) wishes her famous paleontologist dad Donald Hayden (Peter Horton) would pay more attention to her. One day, while Donald is out digging for bones, Ally writes a transference-addled, cry-for-help science project about "The Parental Instincts of Dinosaurs." This phrase, coincidentally, was also used by Julianne Moore in "The Lost World" to describe her interest in tyrannosaurus Rex. When Ally shows her dad the project during a visit to his office in the Natural History Museum, he completely misses its autobiographical relevance and lectures Ally about her laxity in following the scientific method, before disappearing into a meeting with his tight-sweatered, Laura Dern look-alike assistant, Elizabeth (Kari Coleman). Left alone in her dad's office, Ally freaks out during a power failure and accidentally knocks a dinosaur egg off his desk. When the egg cracks, it emits orange smoke that nauseates Ally and sends her on a trip through time -- first to the early 20th century, where she meets paleontologist Barnum Brown and dinosaur illustrator Charles Knight; then to a primeval forest, where she wanders around hollering, "Dad!" and eventually makes friends with a T. Rex, who lets her pet it on the nose just moments before an extinctive asteroid blazes overhead. In the course of her travels, Ally learns that her conjectures about dinosaurs' parental instincts are all true. So we're not surprised that when Ally returns to the museum, Dad comes to his senses, praises her science project and even invites her along for his next dig. Oddly enough, a newfound appreciation of children was also the most important transformation wrought by "Jurassic Park" on the paleontologist character played by Sam Neill. For director Leonard, "T-REX" is the latest in a string of films that suffer from an egregious overload of high-quality special effects and distractingly dull plots and characters. Like "Lawnmower Man" and "Virtuosity," which put characters in cool-looking virtual environments and then mechanized their emotions in order to push facile messages about freedom and justice, "T-REX" will be an endurance test for all but the most forgiving technophiles. Although the movie occasionally exploits the strengths of IMAX 3-D in new ways -- as in Leonard's brief shots from the tyrannosaurus's point of view, or his delightfully disorienting full-screen close-up of a tiny aquarium -- its innovations are sufficiently spare and isolable that they don't add up to any kind of vision. The failure of "T-REX" is a problem not only for unsuspecting audiences, but also for the IMAX firm and its format. IMAX is pursuing an ambitious plan to become a player in the commercial theater industry: Last year, the company agreed to build dozens of screens for theater chains in the United States and Canada, and it's still working to fill a backlog of orders (for clients such as Cineplex Odeon) to build almost 80 theaters -- three-fourths of them commercial -- within the next two years. Theater chains are signing agreements with IMAX because they've been promised a new generation of Hollywood-style features that will add some flash to the IMAX image and expand the traditional IMAX audience of tourists and school groups to encompass mall rats and garden-variety adults as well. Paramount is developing a 40-minute 3-D "Star Trek" movie, Children's Television Workshop is working on a feature starring Elmo (of "tickle me" fame) and IMAX is currently negotiating other deals with companies including SKG Dreamworks and Disney. IMAX hoped "T-REX" would be the first of many crossover hits. But the first IMAX movie to garner serious ticket sales will have to be better grounded in the peculiar strengths of the IMAX medium than "T-REX." With its vast screen size and all-encompassing sound, IMAX is the most immersive film experience available today: It's about taking viewers to a place (as in "Antarctica" or "The Serengeti") and showing how stories emerge from that setting. What makes "T-REX" a bad 3-D IMAX movie is what makes it a bad dinosaur movie: Instead of giving its eponymous protagonist center stage to strut and fret and sit in the audience's laps, it spends its best energy throwing a watered-down, imitation-Spielberg story in your face. SALON | Dec. 4, 1998 Michael Joseph Gross is a freelance writer in Boston.