mbalson

5 stars for the Film, 2 stars for this badly cropped DVD, Oct 1 2004

'1.78:1 Widescreen Aspect Ratio" as stated on the cover is completely wrong. What we have here is a zoomed and cropped Full Screen transfer that renders the film unwatchable. Every video component on this DVD (including the shorts, trailers etc., except maybe the menus) suffer from bad PAL to NTSC ghosting. This only adds to the terrible picture quality. (And when I say terrible I am keeping in mind Maddin's intentional low res filming style). What I find amazing is that they didn't even go back to the original negative to achieve a Full Frame transfer. They just re-cropped the already matted Widescreen transfer. This leaves the image with all the above problems plus it looks blurry… Read more

Very Good but too short and too expensive, Mar 22 2004

Despite the ugly cover art(which at the time of writing this is not available here), this DVD is actually very good at covering The Animals' story during their peak years. True, this DVD is a little expensive at $27 but it contains many vintage clips from the 60s and outlines the progression of the band far better than I thought it would.

Great video but missing major sections of score., Feb 27 2003

Well its finally on DVD! Let me start with the good.
The new anamorphic widescreen transfer is very very nice looking. A direct comparison to the full screen VHS shows much more width and slightly less height in this new transfer. Detail, sharpness and color are all miles better than any other home video edition. Now the bad, when comparing the VHS and DVD I noticed something very disturbing. There are certain scenes where portions of the score are completely missing. Early in the film during the scene where John Hurt is removing a book from behind a brick in the wall there is absolutely no score that was present in the original VHS. This occurs again during the flash back to the dirty… Read more