Category: dvd review

what is music?

What is music? This documentary from filmmaker Daniel Anker attempts to answer that question.

by New Video Group

My review of Music From the Inside Out has been posted to Blogcritics. It’s a documentary by filmmaker Daniel Anker featuring the Philadelphia Orchestra that explores the question, “What is music?”

As Israeli cellist Udi Bar-David comments in the film, “This is a lifetime challenge… you want a brief answer — you expect a brief answer?” There is no short answer to describe music, and even after watching the film, one is left with a sense that there is still more to be explored.


Poirot on film

The mysteries are pure intellectual candy and satisfy that particular craving.

by Acorn Media

My review of Poirot Classic Collection 2 has been published over at Blogcritics. I really enjoyed this collection, but then again, it is Poirot, so I expected to. I’m not going to post the pre-pub versions of my reviews here, like I have been, so here’s just an excerpt to entice you to go read the full review if you want to:

The films themselves are the meat of the product, and they are just as good as one expects them to be. Poirot remains the central character throughout, and is frequently joined by his regular film companions Captain Hastings, Chief Inspector Japp, and Miss Lemon. These three characters, while present in the books, are not as prominent as they are portrayed on film. However, this serves the series well by providing the tools for character development via the relationship that Poirot has with each.

wkrp in cincinnati

“As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”


by 20th Century Fox

Baby, did you ever wonder?
Wonder whatever became of me?
I’m livin’ on the air in Cincinnati.
Cincinnati WKRP

I'm not sure when I first watched WKRP in Cincinnati. I was only two years old when the show first aired, so I'm pretty sure I didn't watch the original broadcasts until the later seasons and possibly not until it was in syndication, but it was definitely prior to the airing of The New WKRP in Cincinnati in the early 90s. All this is to say, I was pretty young when I was watching the show, so the details are perhaps more fuzzy for me than my older fellow fans.

This show was one of my favorites in the 80s. I don't remember why, but it could have been because I liked rock music and was fascinated with radio stations from a young age. Also, I felt like this was my TV show, since I lived in southern Ohio at the time. This is the perspective that I brought with me when I sat down to watch the recently released first season DVD set.

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roasted shatner on a stick

This show will be funny after a few pints of Romulan ale. I hope.


by Paramount Home Video

William Shatner has had a long career as a mediocre actor who was elevated to cult status due to his connection with Star Trek. His notoriously difficult working relationships and stilted acting style has made him one of the more common impersonation targets, as well as the butt of many jokes. Given all that, it's no surprise that Comedy Central selected him for their brand of celebrity roast.

A roast is a public event that both honors the roastee and pokes fun at them. The first incarnations of this were private events, but television eventually became a medium for disseminating the roasts. What was shown to the public was often far more tame and prurient than what was not shown. Times have changed and what was once considered to be too crude or explicit to be shown on network TV is now standard fare for safe harbor hours and cable channels.

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wordplay

What is an eight-letter word for a witty or clever verbal exchange?

Medicine has shown that alcoholism is a genetic disease, and I wonder if crossword puzzle addiction is the same. Both my father and my paternal grandmother are crossword fanatics, solving the local newspaper puzzle daily.

One of my father’s most treasured gifts is a copy of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language that he received when he graduated from high school. He now has a copy of the new fourth edition that he frequently reads in bed. My grandmother, with an eighth grade education, will regularly finish the crossword puzzle in the Chillicothe Gazette in less than twenty minutes, although she does complain a bit about the computer/internet clues and words. Given that, it is no surprise that eventually I would be bit by the crossword bug.

Sudoku was my gateway drug, unless you count the logic puzzles that thrilled me in junior high. I was happily filling out the sudoku puzzle in the local newspaper one day last fall when my eyes strayed over to the crossword puzzle clues. “I know that one,” I thought, and that is when it all began.

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lions and witches and wardrobes, oh my!

Disney’s version strays a bit from the books, but for the most part does so with good intentions. The extras make this set a must-have.


by Buena Vista Home Entertainment / Disney

When I was eight years old, my parents gave me the Collier Books paperback box set of The Chronicles of Narnia. It is the first collection of non-picture books I remember reading that were my own and not hand-me-downs or borrowed from the library. I still have them on my bookshelf, in spite of their worn and battered spines. Every so often over the past twenty-odd years, I have read them again and again. Sometimes I will read them all in order — mine are numbered in publication order — and other times I will read one or two of my favorites, depending on which was my favorite at the moment.

On the surface, The Chronicles of Narnia are children's books. However, they have enjoyed a broader appeal that spans all ages. Whether C. S. Lewis intended for the books to have a deeper meaning than simply providing entertainment is a topic of considerable debate. Regardless, my personal experience has been that each reading of the books brings some new aspect or meaning to light that I had not thought of before, which is generally not the case in most children's literature.

The first published book in the series is The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, and in my opinion, it really should be the book that introduces readers to Narnia. Chronologically, The Magician's Nephew comes first, and it does provide a good back-story for the characters and events that take place in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, but it was written as a prequel, and therefore often assumes that the reader already has a familiarity with the events that were to come later. Therefore, it is no surprise that Disney chose The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe for the first production and plan to follow it with Prince Caspian in 2008.

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DVD-Licious

This best-of collection would be a good gift for fans of the talk show, but others might not “get” it.


by Warner Home Video

Ellen DeGeneres has had a long career as an entertainer that began in with stand-up comedy in the 1980s and transitioned into television and movies in the 90s. After her sitcom Ellen was canceled in 1998 and was then followed by another failed sitcom and some bad movies, it seemed that she was destined to join the ranks of the Hollywood has-beens. However, all of that changed when in 2003 the wildly successful animated movie Finding Nemo was released and she began the Daytime Emmy award-winning talk show The Ellen DeGeneres Show.

As daytime talk shows go, The Ellen DeGeneres Show is pretty much the standard fare of celebrities and “normal” people. Most of what has made the show successful is DeGeneres herself. By incorporating her own wacky and often irreverent sense of humor to the show, as well as a willingness to laugh at herself, she has endeared herself to millions of viewers around the world.

The first two seasons of The Ellen DeGeneres Show reshaped the daytime talk show genre, bringing it out of the realms of crazy people and product promotions and incorporating the entertainment of late night talk shows, but without the crass humor. Unfortunately, the latter half of the third season and into the fourth seems to be moving more towards product-promotions-as-content. Thankfully, fans have the The Ellen DeGeneres Show: DVD-licious collection to remind us of happier times.

The DVD set contains two discs. The first disc is a collection of DeGeneres’ favorite clips from the first three seasons, and the second disc is her favorite monologues. All of them are quite entertaining and on the whole they convey the essence of The Ellen DeGeneres Show. It’s definitely a must-have for fans, but it does not hold up well as a stand-alone. Without the context of the show structure and history, viewers might not “get” some of the humor.

The Ellen DeGeneres Show: DVD-licious has been on sale exclusively in Target stores since September, and heavily promoted on the show. Tuesday was the official release to all other markets, but I suspect that the impact of that release will have been somewhat diminished by the long promotion period. However, I would not be surprised if copies of this DVD end up under Christmas trees and Hanukkah bushes this season.

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murder, she wrote

Murder and mayhem on the coast of Maine

image of DVD set In 1984, TV viewers were introduced to Jessica Fletcher, mystery novelist and amateur sleuth. “Murder, She Wrote” ran for twelve years before going off the air in 1996, and the mark it left on the American public cannot be denied. Although the formulaic nature of the program and the disturbing volume of murders that occurred around the central character left it open to criticism from audiences eager for more hardboiled mysteries such as Law & Order and CSI, the show filled a niche for a generation that grew up on cozy mysteries by authors like Agatha Christie and Ellery Queen. The appeal has remained strong enough that twenty years after the original broadcast, Universal has released the second season on DVD.

There were few central characters besides Jessica Fletcher, so each episode had a handful of guest actors ranging from the very-well-known to never-seen-again. What does “Murder, She Wrote” have in common with early 1980s TV favorite “WKRP in Cincinnati”? WKRP actors Frank Bonner, Gordon Jump, Richard Sanders, and Howard Hesseman all appeared as guests in the second season of “Murder, She Wrote”. However, you wouldn’t know this from the episode descriptions on the box set. A full listing of guests can be found at the Internet Movie Database, if you’re interested. Some notables not mentioned include Brock Peters, Robert Culp, and John de Lancie. John Astin is in three episodes as a re-occurring character of note.

To me, this is indicative of the lack of care and attention paid to the creation of this box set. There are no extras or frills to entice buyers, and the episodes still have that slightly grainy quality prevalent in 1980s television filming. One must also be careful in handling the discs themselves. They are double-sided so as to hold eight episodes on two discs and six on the third disc.

One thing this collection has going for it is the script writing. Season two of “Murder, She Wrote” had the advantage of fresh ideas and mostly realistic plots. Locations alternated between Cabot Cove (Fletcher’s home) and someplace else. The murders were complex and the identity of the murderer wasn’t quite yet obvious from the start. The set is well worth getting if you’re a fan wanting to wander down memory lane and re-visit the show back in the golden years. Just don’t expect anything else from it.

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