DVD Collectors Online

Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan, a review by GSyren

Title	Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan
Year	2011
Director	Gilles Penso
Stars	Ray Harryhausen, Randy Cook, Peter Jackson, Nick Park, Phil Tippett and many others
Overview
My thoughts	If you don't know who Ray Harryhausen is, you need to buy this title. If you do know who Ray Harryhausen is you need to buy this title. Ok, maybe that's a bit extreme, but the fact is that Ray Harryhausen is an extraordinary person who has had a HUGE impact on visual effects. If you are the least bit interested in visual effects you should learn about Ray Harryhausen. Today most effects are created with computer imagery, and there are often hundreds of people involved. Ray did it all himself. He was a one man visual effects studio. He was mainly a stop motion animator, and truly a great stop motion animator. His films inspired generations of stop motion animators. Without Ray we may never have seen Wallace and Gromit, Nightmare Before Christmas, Coraline and ParaNorman. But he also inspired lots of other visual effects people. You can hear them tell how Ray's work was the thing that inspired them to go into the business. Ray Harryhausen is one of the very few technicians who has been elevated to a position above the directors of the films they worked on. If you ask people who made The 7th Voyage of Sinbad or Jason and the Argonauts, they'll most likely say Ray Harryhausen, not Nathan Juran or Don Chaffey. Me, I'm a long standing Harryhausen fan. I've got all his films on DVD (and some now on BD), almost all books published about him, and still I learned new stuff from this film. Unfortunately, this title seems to be region locked to region B. Sorry Achim! ;-) It's available from Amazon UK on DVD as well, but the DVD is actually more expensive than the BD.
Rating

(From Reviews and ramblings by Gunnar on March 28th, 2013)

Kung Fu Panda, a review by Dragonfire

Prepare for awesomeness with DreamWorks Animation's Kung Fu Panda, "a delightful movie that can stand among the very best animated features" (Leonard Maltin, Entertainment Tonight). Jack Black is perfect as the voice of Po, a noodle-slurping dreamer who must embrace his true self - fuzzy flaws and all - in order to become the Dragon Warrior. With groundbreaking animation, an all-star cast and high-kicking humor, Kung Fu Panda is "Ultra-satisfying entertainment" There's heart in this movie and that's the secret ingredient." (Richard Corliss, Time)
   
My Thoughts

I still like animated movies and tend to see most of the new ones at least once.  I haven't liked the ones from Dreamworks as much as the ones from Pixar overall, but I will still go see them.  I have liked some of their newer movies, like this one, more than their earlier movies.  I thought the movie was cute and entertaining.  Po was a cute, likable character.  Some things were a bit silly, but that didn't bother me at all.  I thought the movie was very entertaining overall.  The way the different styles of kung fu were represented by the animals worked well.  I did think that the animation was well done.  I think this was one of the better animated movies from Dreamworks. 

 

(From My November Alphabet Marathon on November 18th, 2008)

Angel Marathon, a review by addicted2dvd

12. You're Welcome
Original Air Date: 2/4/2004
Cordelia returns to help her friends one last time after an old nemesis shows up determined to defeat Angel by overriding a secret failsafe created by the Powers That Be.

Guest Stars:
Charisma Carpenter
Christian Kane
Sarah Thompson
Ryan Alvarez
T. J. Thyne

My Thoughts:
An excellent episode. This is the 100th episode of the series. So you know they do a big one for that. Which also means I only have 10 more episodes of this series to watch now. In this episode we get closure of the Cordelia storyline as well as the Lindsey storyline. And I think they did an excellent job on both... especially with Cordelia. That character really grew since the self-centered character of the early days of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

My Rating:

(From Angel Marathon on March 24th, 2010)