DVD Logging
Aug. 1st, 2016 09:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_rckA History of Britain - Narrated by Simon Schama. I was rather disappointed at how fast this series skimmed over everything before the Norman Conquest. The library record says the set runs 882 minutes, so it’s not lack of time so much as a desire to focus on later history as more important. I gave up after the first three episodes.
Lost Civilizations. Volume 1: Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Aegean - The section on Mesopotamia spent a lot of time talking about biblical stories with a definite slant toward the Bible as history. I almost stopped there. The section on Egypt covered a lot of ground, not much of it ancient history. There was a lot about tomb robbers (including archaeologists) and cultural theft/abuse. The voiceover kind of surprised me by emphasizing that that mummies, however fascinating the information they provide, are human remains and deserving of respect. The Aegean section started with Atlantis, circled around a bit, and came back to the idea that Thera was Atlantis. There were stops at Troy and Mycenea on the way.
The Mirror Crack’d - Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple. This wasn’t close captioned. The sound quality was middling. Some characters were perfectly understandable, but others weren’t. I had some trouble because I kept seeing Jessica Fletcher instead of Miss Marple. I also didn’t have a solid sense of the setting.
Murder at the Gallop - Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. As far as I can tell, the movies starring Rutherford aren’t based on any of Christie’s novels or short stories. This one had rather a lot of Miss Marple sneaking around and listening at windows (including climbing a ladder to do it) and generally actively investigating in ways that don’t feel very Miss Marple-ish to me. She’s got a gentleman friend, too. I don’t think this one was a bad movie or a bad mystery necessarily, but it wasn’t what I expect when I see something labeled as featuring Miss Marple. The library has two or three others in this series. I’m not sure if I’ll bother.
The Poisoner’s Handbook - I think I still want to read the book this is based on because I’m curious about more details of the science. The two hours we got covered only a handful of cases that don’t quite connect to get from the beginning when nobody trusted science as a crime solving tool to the end when science was considered infallible. (I’d be curious to go into the more recent discoveries of things that don’t actually work as well as we’ve been assuming they do.) The main focus was on poisoning and going from it being a really easy method of murder to something nearly impossible to get away with.
Ruddigore - This is the version with Vincent Price. The sound quality of this DVD was abysmal, and it wasn’t captioned. Having see a production of this twenty some years ago wasn’t enough to carry me through. It really wasn’t particularly interesting to look at without understanding the dialogue and song lyrics, so I gave up after about half an hour.
Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle - Scott found this documentary fascinating, but I ended up kind of frustrated because the stuff about early comics basically denies the existence of all the oddball characters I’ve been reading about recently. It says explicitly that, apart from Wonder Woman, the only female characters were girlfriends and sidekicks, and, well, that’s not true. I was more interested in the bits about the death of the Code.
Lost Civilizations. Volume 1: Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Aegean - The section on Mesopotamia spent a lot of time talking about biblical stories with a definite slant toward the Bible as history. I almost stopped there. The section on Egypt covered a lot of ground, not much of it ancient history. There was a lot about tomb robbers (including archaeologists) and cultural theft/abuse. The voiceover kind of surprised me by emphasizing that that mummies, however fascinating the information they provide, are human remains and deserving of respect. The Aegean section started with Atlantis, circled around a bit, and came back to the idea that Thera was Atlantis. There were stops at Troy and Mycenea on the way.
The Mirror Crack’d - Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple. This wasn’t close captioned. The sound quality was middling. Some characters were perfectly understandable, but others weren’t. I had some trouble because I kept seeing Jessica Fletcher instead of Miss Marple. I also didn’t have a solid sense of the setting.
Murder at the Gallop - Margaret Rutherford as Miss Marple. As far as I can tell, the movies starring Rutherford aren’t based on any of Christie’s novels or short stories. This one had rather a lot of Miss Marple sneaking around and listening at windows (including climbing a ladder to do it) and generally actively investigating in ways that don’t feel very Miss Marple-ish to me. She’s got a gentleman friend, too. I don’t think this one was a bad movie or a bad mystery necessarily, but it wasn’t what I expect when I see something labeled as featuring Miss Marple. The library has two or three others in this series. I’m not sure if I’ll bother.
The Poisoner’s Handbook - I think I still want to read the book this is based on because I’m curious about more details of the science. The two hours we got covered only a handful of cases that don’t quite connect to get from the beginning when nobody trusted science as a crime solving tool to the end when science was considered infallible. (I’d be curious to go into the more recent discoveries of things that don’t actually work as well as we’ve been assuming they do.) The main focus was on poisoning and going from it being a really easy method of murder to something nearly impossible to get away with.
Ruddigore - This is the version with Vincent Price. The sound quality of this DVD was abysmal, and it wasn’t captioned. Having see a production of this twenty some years ago wasn’t enough to carry me through. It really wasn’t particularly interesting to look at without understanding the dialogue and song lyrics, so I gave up after about half an hour.
Superheroes: A Never-Ending Battle - Scott found this documentary fascinating, but I ended up kind of frustrated because the stuff about early comics basically denies the existence of all the oddball characters I’ve been reading about recently. It says explicitly that, apart from Wonder Woman, the only female characters were girlfriends and sidekicks, and, well, that’s not true. I was more interested in the bits about the death of the Code.
