DVDizzy Forum

The interviews with Sarah Jessica Parker, Amy Linker, John Femia, Tracy Nelson, etc. on the Square Pegs Complete Series set.

jon

I watched a Making-Of featurette of Hard Candy.

Also, all the special features of Lars and the Real Girl

1. Audio Commentary with Richard Donner, Corey Feldman, Martha Plimpton, Josh Brolin, Kerri Green, Jeff B. Cohen, Jonathan Ke Quan, and Sean Astin. I'm going to kind of start discussing and rating DVD bonus features. Because I know we're all big DVD fans here at UD and I think it'd be fun. This was one of the best commentaries I've ever listened to. I remember being somewhat down on group commentaries after the pure insanity of the Donnie Darko cast commentary. But this one was just so much fun. An easy A+. Full of humor, laugh-out-loud moments, it's great to see the entire main cast together again and looking healthy. Heads up, though- Sean Astin ducks out after about the first 30 minutes.

2. Cyndi Lauper music video: "The Goonies R Good Enough." What a blast from the past seeing this one again!! The narrator mentions "Mtv" here, though I seem to remember (am I wrong?), that this also aired on the WWF Wrestling program back when Cyndi Lauper used to be a gimmick on their show. Either way, it's chock-full of famous wrestlers- Roddy Piper, the Fabulous Moolah, Andre the Giant, etc. Talk about cheesy! But I would still rather watch yesterday's refreshed cheese than today's painfully stale "sweeet" any day. C+

3. "The Making of the Goonies" - one of Mick Garris's old 1980's "special publicity" behind-the-scenes segments. It would have been nice to see one, had he done one (which it makes no sense that he wouldn't since he covered Poltergeist, Gremlins, and Goonies too), on The Twilight Zone: The Movie DVD. It's only 6 minutes long but worth a watch or 2 for hardcore fans of the movie. B-

4. Outtakes. Otherwise knows as Deleted Scenes, here they are sorrily mislabeled, but thankfully include the Octopus Scene that showed on The Disney Channel airings of Goonies, as well as a couple of other scenes I'd never seen before. All were wise choices to remove and thankfully presented here in top-notch quality and in widescreen. B+




1. Featurette: "Minnesota Nice." Another absolutely top-quality featurette by MGM. In every way, this one is highly informative, relaxed, touching, and wonderfully humorous. William H. Macy is especially a treat to listen to here and his Minnesota-n joke is very funny. No Steve Buscemi, Harve Presnell, or John Carroll Lynch, but it's a very inviting and satisfying 25-30 minutes. A+




1. Audio Commentary with Alexander Payne. Payne is a really great director and made a really great movie here, but on this commentary, he leaves so many gaps of silence, it's a chore to sit all the way through the commentary. I still don't know what a Moderator is on an Audio Commentary, but I'm starting to think it's because of guys like Payne and Ronny Yu that they were invented- I imagine they're there to keep them talking. Payne has no Moderator here. He could use one. However, his insights - when he has them - are very interesting and he's a very smart director with a keen technical knowledge of what he's doing. He also has a very extensive and impressive vocabulary. C




1. Making-of Documentary: "Terror Takes Shape." It's kind of disappointing that more of the cast aren't present here. Keith David, one of the missing, can be heard talking about the film on John Carpenter's Masters of Horror DVD for Cigarette Burns. But the ones who do show up are perhaps the most important. Joel Polis, who looks amazing for whatever his age is, is the most fond of the harsh shooting, Richard Masur is the most fond of his character, and Charles Hallahan is the most fond of people coming up to him off the street to talk to him about the movie. The stories are great and the technical information is rich and plentiful. Rob Bottin is enthusiastic to talk, but makes it sound like a nightmare to have worked on. The movie is pretty clearly defined here as an action / sci-fi film, which is a good thing since as a horror film, it lacks. For being over an hour and 20 minutes, though, Universal could have included some Chapter Stops for this doc... A-

2. Audio Commentary with John Carpenter and Kurt Russell. John Carpenter does a lot of pointing out what's happening onscreen. Kurt Russell does a lot of laughing. I had heard this commentary was a lot funnier and more interesting than it ended up being. I almost turned it off quite a few times. C

3. Outtakes. These are more Deleted Scenes that have been mislabeled as "Outtakes" (aka- bloopers). This is truly the crown jewel of this edition of the film for me. I had always thought the Bennings scene was a little choppy and left too much unexplained. This doesn't explain much more, but it's incredibly tense and leaves you hanging- in a good way. The commentary and the documentary are overall worthwhile features, but I know this one will get frequent replay by me. A




1. Audio Commentary with Catriona MacColl and David Warbeck. Here's another commentary that gets a lot of hype. And it sure is a good one! Neither had seen the movie in many years, Catriona gets a bit squeamish from time to time, David is blisteringly sarcastic and funny, and they reveal lots of interesting stories about bizarre and insane director Lucio Fulci. A




1. Audio Commentary with Mary Lambert. Too many gaps. Also, she seems to be largely unaware of much of the schlock value of the movie. Instead finding it to be more of a personally-affecting drama. So, she takes it very seriously. Plus, her comments on Zelda are very confusing! Zelda is definitely played by someone very tall, whom Lambert refers to as "a little boy." Was Zelda actually played by a child?? How is that humanly possible? So, there's a bit of cluelessness there (not surprising, since she would go on to direct trash like The In-Crowd and Pet Sematary Two). But she's very sweet, knows a lot about music - her best comments come when discussing The Ramones, and the information she has about the special effects and the cats is very satisfying, to people who've always wanted to know how this movie was made. C-

I watched all the features for Buffy the Vampire Slayer which included theatrical trailers, TV Spots, and a small BTS (Behind the Scenes) featurette.

latest bonus features watched:

The Muppet Show: Complete Season 3
The Chronological Donald Volume 4
Home Improvement: Season 6

Bonus features I've seen lately...

"The Forsyte Saga: To Let" (2003, a.k.a. "The Forsyte Saga": Series Two)
-"Previously on 'The Forsyte Saga'..." - a series of text-based stills that give a recap of the first series. Helpful because I haven't seen the first series since watching it on Masterpiece Theatre a long time ago (well, not long time, but it's been long enough) and I don't yet have the DVDs for the first series. It would have been cool if they had a recap video of the major events, but the text screens do the job nicely and I'm glad they're there at all. B -

-Photo Gallery (1:14, 19 photos) - not many pictures and they're mostly Fleur-centric, but a nice montage and it's set to music from the series. C+

-Cast Filmographies - focuses on 13 of the castmembers but excludes a couple important actors (Alistair Petrie as George Forsyte and Oliver Millburn as Michael Mont) , and aside from placing faces to names and giving a brief filmography for each (a few get two pages instead of one), isn't really useful for much else. D-

-John Galsworthy Biography & Book List - the first 11 text pages focus on Galsworthy and his books, the last 2 text pages are just a list of the novels that make up "The Forsyte Saga," "A Modern Comedy," and "End of the Road." D

Overall, the extras package would get probably a C- or D+ from me. It could have been improved with commentaries (it is only four episodes after all) and some making-of featurettes and interviews.

albert

1. 3-Part Featurette: "Stephen King's Pet Sematary." For about 35 minutes, this one gives you a few interesting tidbits about King's life when he wrote the book. But... not very many interesting things are learned about the movie. Only 2 cast members take part and I found their comments to be pretty darn dry. Mary Lambert's comments here are pretty much the same as the audio commentary. I don't remember hearing a single new detail from her. The best comments that aren't by King himself, in a corny old video interview with him walking through the forest, are the on-set interviews by Fred Gwynne, who was really smart, and Denise Crosby. I truly hope The Dead Zone's supplements faired better than this. C-




1. Audio Commentary with Alan Jones and Kim Newman. The greatest audio commentary that I have ever listened to. I've heard it at least 3 times all the way through. Every single time, I'm enthralled. It's incredibly insightful, overflowing with information, funny, and these 2 cover just about every topic that could be even partially relevant to Dario Argento and the giallo genre in 1969-1970 and all the films the genre inspired. In fact, trying to point out the best moments of the commentary is absurd. Every minute is pure joy and intelligence. Another easy A+




1. Documentary Featurettes: "The Making of Dressed to Kill" and "Slashing Dressed to Kill." A fairly typical pair of featurettes. Not nearly as thorough as the ones for Carrie (1976), which seem to have been recorded at the same time. And so, they're not quite as interesting. But the participants are very direct, especially Angie Dickinson. Nancy Allen and Keith Gordon are wonderful here. Unfortunately, the featurettes become heavy when the issue of feminist / activist backlash is raised. And unlike the similar subject when it's raised in the featurettes for Basic Instinct and The Silence of the Lambs (the killer in Dressed to Kill is also a crossdresser), MGM didn't get any feminists to come in and speak for themselves. So the interviewees are left guessing what all the fuss was about. And they go on and on about it. If you want a good featurette about that - look no further than Basic Instinct's "Blonde Poison," which is actually 70% about activist protests and backlash. The activists they bring in are very honest and their comments add a lot to it. Also, De Palma gets a little dull when discussing how he was branded as a "Hitchcock rip-off."

Pretty decent feature. Really needs Michael Cane in it! B+

2. Featurette: "An Appreciation by Keith Gordon." This featurette is the best of the interviews because Gordon doesn't feel the need to apologize for anything De Palma's done. Instead, he ends up pointing out a lot of really smart directing on De Palma's part. If you like this kind of thing, you may learn something you didn't already know. Great interview. One complaint: what the heck is going on with his hair?? Did he get in a fight with a demonic hair trimmer? A-

3. "A Film Comparison: The 3 Versions of Dressed to Kill." I bought this DVD for 2 reasons. One of them was seeing on YouTube just how brutal that murder scene in the elevator was. My eyes did bulge quite a bit. Amazing special effects. Hell, even Argento didn't typically get that vicious in the majority of his slashing scenes! (The other reason was- it's MGM in their glory days of DVD and I had this feeling that the disc was going out of print and would soon be replaced by one of 20th Century Fox's hatchet jobs)

There isn't much to say about this feature. It tells you about all you need to know. The 1980 MPAA board should have been run out of the movie business for the dialogue tweeking they requested to get the film an R-Rating!! I believe they reduced one "cock" to a "bulge," then took out another "bulge" entirely! Give me a freaking break. Even freakier is the "Network Version" of the movie. They literally took out every single drop of blood in every killing scene. I'm serious- they wouldn't even let you see most of the shots of the blood-stained clothes in the elevator kill scene! And as for dialogue, I think they let Nancy Allen say "stripped," but all "pants" references were taken out altogether. For God's sake! It's a movie about a prostitute, a crossdresser, and a woman who has an affair. Maybe they just shouldn't show it on "Network" TV in the first place. Reminds you just how relaxed TV has become. I'm pretty sure that's a good thing... Now, if only the writers would write better shows and movies! A




1. Audio Commentary with Mick Garris. I barely made it through the film/episode itself. Don't ask me how I got through this commentary. Usually I like Garris quite a bit. But this session of gab proves that the guy is just plain clueless. The oddest thing is when he brings up the scene he says he dislikes the most of Valerie...does it matter which? He also seems to be under the impression that he knew what he was doing. Pointing out camera angles and color schemes... If only he knew how the film/episode was going to be received- the commentary would have been a lot more interesting if he approached it apologetically! D

2. Featurettes - "Spine Tingler: The Making of Valerie on the Stairs" and "Jump Scare: Editing Valerie." Again, cluelessness is a running theme on this DVD. But, these are definitely worth sitting through, because Clive Barker pops his head in and is always engaging. Garris is in his typical good-spirits here. Especially in the "Editing" featurette, where he's all goofy chuckles. The thing that's really worth noting about the 2nd season featurettes for the Masters of Horror DVDs is that they're all Starz and no Anchor Bay. They're very typical "making of" pieces, the ones you're likely to see for all new movies. Boring... But these MoH ones are a little more fun than the ones Fox or Universal or Disney makes, so... Because they're geared slightly toward horror fans. So, if it's Stuart Gordon or Clive Barker, etc., being interviewed- you know they're going to say something smarter than the directors of some new and lame big-blockbuster sci-fi epic - blah blah blah. They're sold more on personality than on promises that you're going to love the feature. B

I watched one of the features on my Cars Blu-Ray where they discussed the Hudson Hornet.

The feature on Alice Faye on the "Hello, Frisco, Hello" disc.
The feature on Busby Berkeley on the "The Gang's All Here" disc.

I forgot to post this but I watched The Pixar Story on my WALL-E Blu-Ray a week ago. It was a pretty interesting documentary and it looked pretty good in HD.

Strangely enough, the bonus disc was available to rent from Netflix. And now... I guess now you can count me in-love with Disney Platinum Edition as well. Without question, several of these featurettes now rank among the best DVD bonus features I've ever seen. Especially, the Art Design: Impressions of the Forest (A+) segment in the 53-minute documentary!! It was so awe-inspiring and right-on-the-dot for me that I was overwhelmed and almost cried. I kid you not. I actually gained a partial new respect for the film (which on the whole, leaves me underwhelmed everytime I see it). Everything together was just that kind of reminder that even the lesser Disney films of the past had the magic that the films of the mid-90's and beyond have failed to capture.

Bambi as a story may be sappy and irritatingly bland in many ways. But there's no mistaking that the art design and background / forest animation on the film is amazing beyond amazing. I never gave the film visual credit for being so legendary.

Similarly, Restoring Bambi was equally powerful. And a little bit scary. When you think of movies that haven't come out on DVD yet or haven't gotten the right kind of restoration and Disney lets us know that some movies might be damaged beyond repair if they're restored immediately. But again, even a technical featurette brought new insight into the film and for just 5 minutes was pure joy. Another A+.

I tried playing a few of the games and became enraged with the Nature Knowledge's. I kept "playing" because I wanted to hear Owl ask me a question for all the available things in the forest that I could click on. But he wouldn't! And he kept repeating the same questions. I wanted all different questions. I kept playing it over again until I could get him to ask me all the questions at least once. And the pointer had at least 3 different things that he never asked questions about (the tree trunk, the water, and the grass). This was the Spring/Summer version. The Autumn version was worse. He asked about the possums that I remember from the movie and there was no stinking possums on the screen. I literally had to select every single thing the arrow was pointing at to get the right answer. And both the lake and the leaves had 2 different answers. I had to play that game through almost 17 minutes before he asked me about the mushrooms! Terrible game, it made me very angry. D

Virtual Forest - was great, I loved it. A

Disney Time Capsule- 1942: The Year of Bambi - pretentious and condescending. A little. A couple interesting things. D+

Inside the Disney Archives - B+, it is such an amazing thing to see a little bit of the Disney archives... A little bit. As for the photos he showed us, it would have been cool to discuss those in deleted scenes. I was really bothered by the guy's decision to try and come up with a reason why it was cut. It was much more interesting in the 53 minute segment hearing people who actually worked on the movie talk about it. But the closeups of some of the portraits he showed us were amazing. So, it got better toward the second half. When discussing watercolors. They're more in-tune with the film's mood. And that's the most important thing, I think, with any Disney movie.

Slide Show Gallery (with Docent Audio) - Character Designs (all 4), A-. I really liked the narrator's observations. And I was surprised how cute the pictures of Thumper were.

Color Keys and Backgrounds (with Docent Audio) - A+. Loved it. The backgrounds in this movie are what I have been taken with the most.

Story Sketches (with Docent Audio) - B. It was okay. But most of it felt just like the character sketches. Most of them were Bambi and the other deer. So, I guess here is where you'd see pictures of Faline. Not many.

Tricks of the Trade (Excerpt) - A+. Hearing about Walt Disney's constant curiosity and incurable imagination makes me really love him as an artist. Then, watching him in all of these excerpts / things (sort of like interviews, but he leads them), he is fascinating - not just for what the Disney team did together, but for how much he knew. He could have done any job in that company.

Yesterday and the day before, I was sick in bed, watching Disney bonus features!!! I watched ones from Lilo & Stitch, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, The Jungle Book, The Lion King, The Emperor's New Groove, and Dinosaur. Wonderful times! I've complained in the past about the setup of TLK's bonus features, and I still agree that it could be layed out better, but the info is solid...I didn't click on the countries, just the categories, so I didn't get the same info twice, but I did on TENG, since I watched the 2 documentaries first. But, I had a good time watching all the documentaries!

Yesterday and today I watched the Laugh-O-Gram on the Cinderella DVD, "Oswald Comes Home" on the Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Treasures set, "Still the Fairiest of Them All: The Making of 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs'", "No Strings Attached: The Making of 'Pinocchio'" (for the second time since I bought the DVD), "The Making of 'Fantasia'", "Behind the Boards on 'Baby Weems'" (on the Behind the Scenes Treasures set), "Celebrating 'Dumbo'", "The Making of 'Bambi': A Prince is Born" (but only 3 sections of it), and "Restoring 'Bambi'".

My friend homeschools her kids, and they're coming over on Thursday for a "field trip"...they want to have either a HSM or Cheetah Girls movie marathon (I think I came up with the idea a while ago), and at first I was just going to do 3 hours of Disney History with them and then have a movie marathon, but a while back, all of us were talking and we thought that I'd give them a Disney History lesson for a "field trip", and I figured that I might as well when they come over on their "field trip" day...I got really into it, though, as I was going through my DVDs and books, creating a lesson plan and tests, and I created 2 units (1901-1939, and 1940-1942...the second unit was going to go through 1949, but it has been taking so much of my time yesterday and today, I figured I'll do 1943-1949 if I ever make a third unit). I have no idea if they'll get much out of it, especially the youngest one, but hopefully they'll have fun. I had more fun then I've had in a while yesterday and today, what with all the Disney history I've been researching!

Pinocchio: The Audio commentary was just right for me, especialy when they talked bout the production of the film and the development of Jimminy's character. I highly recommend the commentary for anybody who wishes to know more bout the film.

No Strings Attached was a sheer delight too especialy when they discussed the voice cast and the model department, very immmerisve material.

The Incredibles: I really enjoyed the commertary by Brad Brid, he knew what he wanted to see in a film and took memorable cliches and twisted 'em to his own style.

I watched the Releasing the Duck feature on the Howard the Duck dvd a while back.

God it's been forever since I posted in this thread. Since then, I rented the bonus discs for Peter Pan: Platinum Edition, Snow White: Platinum Edition, and The Jungle Book: Platinum Edition. I was quite impressed with the documentary on Jungle Book. And some of the Snow White stuff was incredible.

But I have to really say it - those Art Galleries are absolute mind-blowers. There are so many beautiful shots... they totally take my breath away.


I'm currently on the audio commentary for Hell Night (1981). I started it literally just because I heard director Tom DeSimone was also a big gay porn director (I have no idea if it's true or not) and I kind of got fascinated. But then, I stayed to listen to the first few chapters on the DVD because I got the impression that Linda Blair, who was in the commentary, would get phased out of the discussions because the director and producers were talking so dryly about technical stuff and lighting and filters and etc. But they come back down to Earth as the commentary goes on. I haven't finished it yet.

Have watched and rewatched the special features on the Blu-Ray of Taken and I am sold on the "Black Ops" feature with all the extra footage and meter that counts the miles, and number of bodies left behind.

This is one heck of a movie and I can watch over and over. Liam Neeson is amazing in this film and I really love Maggie Grace.

The commentary on Kung Fu Panda, as well ad Madagascar 2, the Last Mimzy, the Shaggy Dog(06) and all the features on Snow White.

And Beauty and the Beast.

John Waters' audio commentaries for Mommie Dearest and Pink Flamingos.

I watched the alternate scene in Gremlins 2: The New Batch where the gremlins invade the theater.