Editorial Product Review: essential video:This restored, animated valentine to the Beatles offers viewers the rare chance to see a work that's been substantially improved by its technical facelift, not just supersized with extra footage. Recognizing that its song-studded soundtrack alone makes Yellow Submarine a video annuity, United Artists has lavished a frame-by-frame refurbishment of the original feature, while replacing its original monaural audio tracks with a meticulously reconstructed stereo mix that actually refines legendary original album versions. What emerges is ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:This restored, animated valentine to the Beatles offers viewers the rare chance to see a work that's been substantially improved by its technical facelift, not just supersized with extra footage. Recognizing that its song-studded soundtrack alone makes Yellow Submarine a video annuity, United Artists has lavished a frame-by-frame refurbishment of the original feature, while replacing its original monaural audio tracks with a meticulously reconstructed stereo mix that actually refines legendary original album versions. What emerges is ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:The winner of 10 Academy Awards, this 1961 musical by choreographer Jerome Robbins and director Robert Wise (The Sound of Music) remains irresistible. Based on a smash Broadway play updating Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet to the 1950s era of juvenile delinquency, the film stars Natalie Wood and Richard Beymer as the star-crossed lovers from different neighborhoods--and ethnicities. The film's real selling points, however, are the highly charged and inventive song-and-dance numbers, the passionate ballads, the moody ...
Editorial Product Review: :This remastered, pan-and-scan 30th-anniversary edition of that kiddie-car caper is flawed but solid family fare. It retains a quaint charm while some of the songs--including the title tune--are quite hummable. A huge plus is Dick Van Dyke, who is extremely appealing as an eccentric inventor around the turn of the century. With nimble fingers and a unique way of looking at the world, he invents for his children a magic car that floats and flies. Or does he? ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:When it was released during Hollywood's golden year of 1939, The Wizard of Oz didn't start out as the perennial classic it has since become. The film did respectable business, but it wasn't until its debut on television that this family favorite saw its popularity soar. And while Oz's TV broadcasts are now controlled by media mogul Ted Turner (who owns the rights), the advent of home video has made this lively musical a mainstay in ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:No one even bothers to argue about it any more--by any standard and international consensus, this is the best movie musical of them all. Its arcane, unlikely milieu is Hollywood during the transition in the late 1920s from silent to sound motion pictures. Its reason for being was producer Arthur Freed's desire to use the catalog of songs he had written with Nacio Herb Brown in the '20s and '30s for various shows and movies. But, ...
Editorial Product Review: essential video:Hollywood's legendary 'woman's director,' George Cukor (The Women, The Philadelphia Story), transformed Audrey Hepburn into street-urchin-turned-proper-lady Eliza Doolittle in this film version of the Lerner and Loewe musical. Based on George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion, My Fair Lady stars Rex Harrison as linguist Henry Higgins (Harrison also played the role, opposite Julie Andrews, on stage), who draws Eliza into a social experiment that works almost too well. The letterbox edition of this film on video certainly ...
Editorial Product Review: :A Damsel in Distress is a lighthearted romp to showcase the classic comedy team of George Burns and Gracie Allen, the classic songwriting team of George and Ira Gershwin, and the classic dance team of Fred Astaire and... Joan Fontaine? Damsel was filmed in 1937 when Astaire was taking a break after his seventh film with Ginger Rogers, so the 19-year-old Fontaine plays Lady Alyce Marshmorton, a young British woman whose scandalous love life leads to a mistaken-identity ...
Editorial Product Review: :Film buffs and critics can argue until their faces turn blue about whether this lavish Dickensian musical deserved the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1968, but the movie speaks for itself on grandly entertaining terms. Adapted from Dickens's classic novel, it's one of the most dramatically involving and artistically impressive musicals of the 1960s, directed by Carol Reed with a delightful enthusiasm that would surely have impressed Dickens himself. Mark Lester plays the waifish orphan Oliver Twist, ...
Editorial Product Review: :Film buffs and critics can argue until their faces turn blue about whether this lavish Dickensian musical deserved the Academy Award for Best Picture of 1968, but the movie speaks for itself on grandly entertaining terms. Adapted from Dickens's classic novel, it's one of the most dramatically involving and artistically impressive musicals of the 1960s, directed by Carol Reed with a delightful enthusiasm that would surely have impressed Dickens himself. Mark Lester plays the waifish orphan Oliver Twist, ...
Canon's XH A1 and XH G1 are excellent camcorders for entry-level professionals and independent filmmakers, with hard-to-beat prices for what they offer.
Thanks to a rich set of features and some great new additions, Evite maintains its stature as the top service for issuing e-invitations —but competitors are catching up.
