:: theLogBook.com DVD Reviews ::

At the moment that I’m writing this review, the writing is on the wall for America’s dwindling fleet of space shuttles, which were mooted in the early ’70s as the great white-and-partially-black hope of the U.S. space program. A new workhorse spacecraft is on the drawing board (but not even in the testing stages) which will supposedly pick up where the shuttle left off, and apparently before that first launch date the new vehicle will have the good graces to hurry up and be finished and perfected. And if the new vehicle isn’t ready? Oops.

Before embarking on the Apollo program, NASA knew it’d have to develop certain key abilities in the relative safety of Earth orbit. Dusting off plans for a two-man “Mercury Mark II” capsule, the space agency went from Mercury to Gemini, an intermediate series of flights designed to test those abilities. Since Gemini came after the first-men-into-space Mercury flights, and before the first-men-on-the-moon Apollo flights, it’s often consigned to the “also-ran” category of history, or the memory of space geeks like myself. This 3-DVD set from Spacecraft Films preserves the existing footage and adds a documentary that puts it all in context for those who have forgotten. (more…)

Over a dozen of Tori Amos’ videos, from the abstract, low-budget visualizations of the songs from her breakout first album to the much more conventional, Hollywood-ified videos of her mid-1990s stint in the mainstream limelight, to more subdued recent efforts, are collected here, along with a couple of videos rarely seen in the U.S. and a running audio commentary with Tori herself talking about the genesis of both the songs and their videos.

Ever since her solo debut with 1991’s Little Earthquakes album, Tori Amos has embraced the medum of the music video, often taking a visually sparse approach. In fact, Little Earthquakes had its own “video album” released about a year after the album itself, featuring the videos from that album (many of them in a somewhat similar thematic vein) directed by Cindy Palmano, interspersed with interview segments and concert footage. Tori is no stranger to music video, either short-form or long-form. (more…)

When The Light Is Mine compiles the videos from R.E.M.’s years on IRS Records, and adds several live television performances from the same period. Many of these videos have never been released on DVD, having appeared only on the VHS compilation Succumbs. The band’s low-budget, experimental mentality – driven equally by former art student Michael Stipe’s interest in the medium and Bill Berry, Peter Buck, and Mike Mills’ near-complete lack thereof – is apparent throughout. (more…)

250 miles above us in outer space floats the International Space Station. IMAX: Space Station takes its viewers on a fantastic voyage, letting landlubbers such as myself experience the wonders of space.

Typical IMAX screens are 72 feet wide and 52 feet tall — in addition, IMAX: Space Station was originally filmed with IMAX 3D cameras. While initially I had reservations about how such a big film would look on the small screen, any such fears were alleviated once the film started. Regardless of screen size, this film is fantastic.

IMAX: Space Station documents the assembly and operation of the International Space Station. The film’s footage was recorded during the first and second expeditions to the space station in 2000 and 2001. The movie follows a logical order, taking viewers through astronaut training and through a launch before finally reaching the blackness of space. (more…)

From the demented minds of the Chapman Brothers at HomestarRunner.com, this DVD complements the previously-released 3-DVD Strongbad E-mail box set with an additional 31 responses from Strong Bad and crew to actual fan-written e-mails (one of these never before seen on the web), along with commentaries and other extras. Why so soon after that box set? It’s simple: because this single volume contains some of the very best of the bunch. (more…)

Okay, here’s a confession that will probably shock absolutely no one: your webmaster is a big fan of the surreal, mondo bizarro online cartoon Homestar Runner. Sure, it seldom obeys anything other than its own twisted internal logic, and to the average non-twisted mind, it probably doesn’t make a lot of sense. But I love it. And the “gateway drug” that got me hooked on the Homestar universe once and for all was a Strong Bad e-mail about the local news. (more…)

I don’t go for too many music video collections on DVD. That said, it’s an ideal medium if a single artist or group releases their entire library that way, but in general I’m not a big fan of how the medium of the music video has evolved. I tend to like the more avant-garde, anything-goes approach of the early ’80s stuff, where literally hundreds of dollars were spent (but not thousands) on a single video - the more impressionistic stuff always caught my eye more than the “let’s make a small movie out of it” approach. But for a select few acts, I’m happy to see them put their entire video careers on DVD, and Peter Gabriel is certainly one of those. (more…)

Pop Screen, a collection of videos from Document and Green, is the earliest R.E.M. video collection available on DVD. (Succumbs, which collects the videos from the band’s first four albums, is still available as a VHS-only release.) It’s a relatively short disc, and the videos hail from the period where R.E.M. was still turning out videos that often lacked a close connection to the songs - there’s very little performance footage, no lip-syncing at all, and several clips where the band never appears at all. (more…)

Showing no fear of stylistic clashes whatsoever, R.E.M. compiled their videos for Automatic for the People and Monster onto one collection. Parallel features six videos from the former album and five from the latter, with interstitial footage drawn from the films that were projected as a backdrop during the Monster tour. (A sixth Monster video, “Tongue”, was not completed at the time of Parallel’s release and was included on the In View best-of collection as a bonus clip.) It’s a very interesting disc for no other reason than the vivid contrast it establishes between two periods of the band’s career. (more…)

The 1995 Monster tour was probably R.E.M.’s most anticipated; it was their first in five years, and the first after their multiplatinum smashes Out of Time and Automatic for the People. It was also by far their most tumultuous. Not only did Bill Berry have to undergo brain surgery due to two aneurysms, Mike Mills went under the knife to fix complications from his previous appendectomy and Michael Stipe had a hernia repaired. The official record of that tour is Road Movie, a film that made a few appearances in arthouse theaters before hitting video and eventually DVD. While there are several strong individual performances, the whole never quite clicks. (more…)