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| Saturday, 15-May-2004 00:00 |
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MY DVD COLLECTION, PART ONE
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Please note that my anime DVDs have a bookshelf of their own. Also, I have a handful of Special Editions/Boxsets I keep elsewhere in the room because they eat up too much shelf space on my main movie shelf-and-a-half. And there are some movies I simply don't have my own copy of because my father has his own copy upstairs. Finally, there are a few films I have on Laserdisc and never bothered replacing, like the first two Jurassic Park films.
The X-Files: Season One: It's out of order alphabetically, but it's a convenient bookend.
About a Boy: This one's my brother Nick's. It's actually the second copy he owned. Sam, our labrador-mix dog, chewed up the first one in the case. It's a previously-viewed DVD from Blockbuster, so, unfortunately, it's fullscreen, but my brother doesn't seem to care.
About Schmidt: One of my two favourite live-action movies from the year 2002, though my father didn't care much for it, even if you'd think that he'd be able to relate to the Warren Schmidt character more than I can. Also, it was mostly unfairly shunned by Oscar, except that Jack Nicholson got a Best Actor nomination and Kathy Bates got one for Best Supporting Actress.
The Abyss (Special Edition): Another one of my brother's DVDs, this is James Cameron's 1989 big budget box office disappointment that most people, myself included, didn't really appreciate until it became available on DVD in 2000. It's notable mainly for being about the first Hollywood film to use the so-called "morphing" computer animation effect later made famous by the T-1000 in Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day. There's what I think is meant as kind of a homage to the thing in The Abyss in Mohiro Kitoh's Narutaru/Shadow Star manga wherein a hapless Cessna pilot ins interrogated in mid-air by Tomonori Komori, using a tendril of his "Push Dagger" creature to form a replica of Shiina Tamai's face (this sequence is not in the anime version).
Airplane!: Still one of my favourite films of all time, and the Zucker-Abrams-Zucker commentary track was very much appreciated. I just wish this disk had some of the deleted scenes like the "Hi, Jack!" scene that I know exist because I still have a videotape of the television version where they had to remove so much of the sexual and drug humour that they had to re-insert some of the deleted scenes just to keep it from getting too short. I actually had two copies of this on DVD because I bought it and then my mother got it for me for Christmas, so I gave one to my brother, John.
Airplane II: The Sequel: Not as good as the original, and Zucker-Abrams-Zucker team wasn't involved so there's no commentary, but it's still better than most spoof comedies. I especially like the elevator gag, with loud muzak versions of "MacArthur's Park" and "Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head". I have a Paramount videotape version from around 1990 where pretty much all the copyrighted music was changed to generic, royalty-free music (or just muted, like the guy singing the Love Boat theme except no words are coming to my mouth), and that bothered me to no end (I had a version taped off a television with the music as it was originally), but, fortunately, the DVD restored the music from the original theatrical cut, so the opening had the Battlestar Galactica theme I so sorely missed.
American Beauty: Another one of Nick's DVDs. I've never actually watched it, though I have skimmed the scriptbook he has.
Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Collector's Edition): Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise's 2001 attempt to make a Disney film for a slightly older target audience, which was met with mediocre returns at the box office. Maybe it is a failure, though I think it's only real fault was that it's a story which should be at least two-and-a-half hours long crammed into the standard 90 minute Disney format, but it's a very interesting, glorious failure. And pretty much everything some anime fanboys said about it ripping-off the 1989 Hideaki Anno/Gainax series Nadia and the Sea of Mystery/The Secret of Blue Water was blown ridiculously out of proportion; the controversy pretty much died as soon as the film hit the big screen, though you still find a few people that repeat that claim. The second disk has something like three hours of behind-the-scenes footage, and is still one of the most thourough insights into the production of an animated film that I have ever seen.
The Back to the Future trilogy: Back to the Future is another film in my top seven, and I appreciated both sequels even if they were slightly gimmicky. Filming two sequels at once was a trick well over a decade ahead of its time, with the Matrix sequels and the Lord of the Rings films following in the footsteps blazed by Robert Zemeckis and two Pirates of the Caribbean sequels set to shoot the same way next year. I have the bad version of the set, with the framing slightly off for a few scenes in the sequels.
Banned and Censored: A collection of copyright-lapsed cartoons from the 1930s and 1940s which were surpressed or outright banned, primarily for stereotypes of both blacks and Irish, but also for a handful of propaganda shorts which the military felt gave away a bit too much information, even if it was just coincidental (there wasn't any way the animators could have known about the atomic bomb). Nothing too notorious, like Bob Clampett's Coal Black and De Sebbin Dwarves (which was considered recially progressive for its time), is included though, and, obviously, there's nothing from Disney (though all the WWII propaganda shorts many thought Disney would never put on DVD over here are about to be released in the Disney Treasures: On the Front Lines collection.
Beavis and Butt-Head do America: I still think this one is slightly better than the South Park movie, though it's not that comparable since it's not really a musical, save for Van Dreissen's "Lesbian Seagull" song. Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and the late Robert Stack all provide voices, as does an uncredited Greg Kinnear, and David Letterman was the voice of one of the roadies. I wish Paramount would do a special edition DVD with a Mike Judge commentary track, but Mike Judge doesn't seem to be interested in doing commentaries (either as himself or as "Hank Hill" on the King of the Hill DVDs nor does he do one on the Office Space DVD).
Behind Enemy Lines: One my mother got Nick for his birthday a couple of years back, but I think it's a bit too jingoistic for Nick's tastes. The action sequences are pretty cool, even if the enemies are ludicrous, but Owen Wilson's charms are mostly restrained here, though a couple of lines Wes Anderson thought Owen ad-libbed in The Royal Tenenbaums also show up in here, which kind of amused Wes a little.
(Note: I group the James Bond movies together under "B" for "Bond".)
You Only Live Twice: The one when Connery Bond fakes his own death somehow (actually, I never could quite figure how he survived being shot up in the folded-up bed.), and he goes to Japan and gets transformed into a Japanese person, though I never found the make-up that convincing. And we learn that Bond likes "Sacky" (sake). And this is one of the Bonds with Blofeld, except this Blofeld is Donald Pleasance, while Charles Gray, who would appear as Blofeld in Diamonds are Forever, appears in this film as one of Bond's allies! Also, this film is notable in that the screenplay was written by Roald Dahl, best known as the author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and James and the Giant Peach (as well as a couple of lesser known adult books).
Diamonds are Forever: The one when Bond goes to Amsterdam, Las Vegas, and an oil rig to bust up a diamond smuggling ring with links to spy satellites or something like that. Like anyone cares about the story in these things. A lot of people think this is the worst Bond film but it's my favourite for the overall campiness, especially with the two gay villains, Mr. Wint and Mr. Kidd, and sausage king Jimmy Dean as Willard Whyte, a character that spoofed the reclusive Howard Hughes, though Hughes himself was so tickled by the idea of a film with "him" assisting James Bond that he gave them unprecedented access to shoot at places he owned around Las Vegas. And the Vegas bits are the best part of the film, not the climax at the oil rig, which the filmmakers fully admit is one of the film's shortcomings.
The Spy Who Loves Me: This one I actually pilfered from my father. Pretty good Roger Moore Bond movie on its own merits, especially the amphibious Lotus, but I like it mainly for the opening song by Carly Simon, "Nobody Does It Better (The Spy Who Loves Me)", by far the best Bond theme song, and one that, as we saw in Lost in Translation, makes great karaoke.
STEVE BRANDON WILL RETURN IN "MY DVD COLLECTION, PART TWO"
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