It’s February already and this means I really have to get DVDLog out of the Winter hiatus slowly. As an introduction to 2014 and a preparation to a coming review, I’m pulling out a DVD from 2002: Pixar’s fourth movie Monsters, Inc.! It’s one of their best early efforts and while not completely without faults, one of the movies almost completely foreign to the studio’s usual fare. I only saw it in 2002 when the DVD came out because I had missed it in the cinemas, but while I was never a big fan of Toy Story and A Bug’s Life I always liked Monsters, Inc. – probably because of the great voice cast and the wonderful animation, making up for a slightly weak script. The DVD release from 2002 also has some small faults, but is still amazing today with its enormeous amount of extras.

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Back in July I reviewed the first series of Shaun the Sheep, finally closing one of the gaps in my fondness for all things Aardman. Originally I wanted to review Series 2 earlier, but varying prices kept me from ordering it until now and because of a lack of other options I chose to make it the last review of the year. I know it’s not much and not even a particularly new disc, but the second series even ends with some Christmas-themed episodes, so it’s only fitting to have a look at the continuing adventures of Aardman’s plasticine sheep. The BBC DVD release of the second batch of fourty episode does not have a lot of extras, but image and sound are even better than before and for a price of about £10 for such a nice boxset I’m certainly not asking any questions.

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With this little end-of-year update, DVDLog will be going into a winter hiatus until the end of January, when I’ll be back with more reviews and hopefully some other improvements. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year, everyone – as usual, there are some more season’s greetings over on my other blog!

The unusually dark and violent Rise of the Guardians made me wonder if Dreamworks Animation had lost its touch, but with their next movie, The Croods, the studio really made up for it. Despite being the Aardman movie that wasn’t and a production delay for about a year, the movie turned out amazingly well and embodies everything that the studio stands for: a solid story, great characters and wonderful animation. This is more than just a run-of-the-mill cave-family-movie, it’s an entirely fresh and original take on a simple idea. The DVD release is a bit of a disappointment, tough – the distributor switch from Paramount to Fox apparently means that Dreamworks has given up on the commentary track, but at least the movie looks as good as possible and there are even some deleted scenes as extras.

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Dreamworks has had a lot of success with their animated movies and so far I loved almost all of their movies with some exceptions. I had high hopes for Rise of the Guardians, but it turned out that their collaboration with children’s books author William Joyce is one of their rare failures. While the movie has an amazing concept, great characters and voices and dazzling visuals, the story is disappointingly weak and a surprising amount of violence makes this feel not like a Dreamworks movie at all. In today’s somewhat longer-than-usual review, I tried to get to the bottom of what went wrong with Rise of the Guardians. This final joint DVD release from Dreamworks and Paramount is, however, absolutely fine and while some extras from the Blu-Ray are missing, the most interesting material has been ported over.

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Everybody is talking about the new space thriller Gravity, but I’m not – instead I’m taking the current hype around this movie as an opportunity to look back at another great space movie from the 1990s: Ron Howard’s Apollo 13. Even after almost twenty years since its making, the movie still holds up well and shows how a real space thriller should work – as a combination of great acting, amazing visuals and creative storytelling. Apollo 13 is neither a complete special-effects orgy or the Tom Hanks show some of the advertising wanted it to be, but a fairly accurate retelling of the real events focusing heavily on the story and characters. Today’s review of the Anniversary Edition DVD from 2005 is a heavily reworked and improved translation of my earlier German-language article, finally concluding the Spaceflight Series.

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There are countless documentaries about film history, but few achieve a sense of wonder like When The Lion Roars, Turner Pictures’ magnificent account of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s history. With the brilliant Patrick Stewart as host and a mountain of interviews, filmclips and a lot of other historic footage, it is a documentary like no other. First shown on Turner Pictures’ cable stations TNT and TCM both in the USA and in Europe, I was very glad when Warner finally released a DVD in 2009, just in time before I decided to rescue my own old VHS recordings. Despite the less than perfect technical quality, owing to the video post-production, this is a wonderful DVD release preserving one of the best documentaries about Hollywood ever made that should be in the collection of ever film enthusiast. This review is based on the original German version from 2009, translated, slightly updated and improved.

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This is one of these movies you might have someday seen on tv and then it never surfaced again – that’s excatly what happened to me with Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen. Everybody knows that Peter Ustinov played Hercule Poirot lots of times, but his one and only appearance as Charlie Chan in this comedic take on the oriental detective is mostly unknown. Sporting a great supporting cast and a both funny and dramatic script, the movie is not the embarassing failure it is often referred to, but a great production which doesn’t take itself too seriously. Unfortunately its bad reputation has prevented Charlie Chan and the Curse of the Dragon Queen from getting a proper DVD release, but there’s at least one Canadian disc which I was really glad to find years ago. Today’s review is new for DVDLog, because I wrote the initial German article, now expanded and improved, before this website even existed.

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Regular readers of this website should know that I have a particular fondness for the works of Tim Burton and when his stop-motion remake of Frankenweenie was announced some time ago, I instantly knew that it would be a very special movie – and I was right. It took me some time to see it, but it was really worth the wait. Far from being just an expanded version of the original, Tim Burton has transformed the movie he was once fired for from Disney into a delightful stop-motion world paying homage to the horror and monster classics of the 1930s and 1940s. While the movie is absolutely brilliant and together with Dark Shadows is one of Tim Burton’s best recent works, the DVD is somewhat of a disappointment with its lack of extras – but the technical quality is flawless and the movie is certainly watchable. Today’s review is the first new one for quite some time, even if the disc’s release was a while back.

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There are many documentaries about the race to the Moon in the 1960s, but not many make really good use of the vast film archives of NASA. But today’s next entry in the Spaceflight Series does this extensively and exclusively –  Al Reinert’s For All Mankind is the most fascinating and astounding documentary about the historic American spaceflight programs. Completely consisting of original NASA footage, which was carefully selected to represent all the flights as one single mission, the documentary shows the experience of spaceflight and moonwalking like no other. This review about the wonderful Criterion DVD re-release is just a straight translation of my earlier German article from 2010, but just because there was nothing much to improve or add.

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The Space Exploration Series continues today with From the Earth to the Moon, which even fifteen years after its premiere is one of the most amazing American television productions of all time. After the success of Apollo 13, Tom Hanks, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer had joined forces again to tell the story of the moon race in twelve hour-long movies, which felt more like cinema and less than just television. Treading confidently in the footsteps of Philip Kaufman’s The Right Stuff, the series brilliantly covers almost everything about the Moon race, bringing wonderful actors, great scripts and a first-class production with real enthusiasm together. Today’s post is a translated and heavily expanded review of my original German article from a couple of years ago about the American DVD re-release from 2005.

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