Hey, we're not making this up as we go. We're on a crusade to unearth the best box sets of the holiday season. And here they are - not in any particular order, but simply the ten coolest treasures on DVD and CD. Is your friend's home theater starting to seem like a temple of gloom? Do you and your girl keep going out on, shall we say, bad dates?
As the line between action movies and videogames continues to blur, so does the line between videogames and home theater. The games reviewed here really kick it up a notch when you play them on a movie system. Featuring cutting-edge graphics, thrilling surround sound, and movie-like play action, they show that more than just DVDs belong up on your big screen.
Ah, crime and punishment. They go together like . . . Leopold and Loeb, Donny and Marie, Rimsky and Korsakov. Except, of course, in the movies or on TV, when folks sometimes get away with murder (think Body Heat or The Player).
Driven to Extremes
Take a road-trip refresher course with The Educational Archives: Driver's Ed (Fantoma Films, $25). This retro-cool DVD unspools ten classroom film shorts - with titles like "Joy Ride," "Alco Beat," and "The Last Prom" - that alert teens to the dangers of delinquent driving.
The following reviews appeared as "Reference DVD" features in the Movies section of Sound & Vision. Out of the 22 discs chosen for their exceptional audio and video from September 2000 through July/August 2003, I consider these five the standouts.
BLUE CRUSH
Universal
Are movies more important than life? Are women magic? These two questions, repeatedly posed in François Truffaut's Day for Night (1973), often seem to be at the heart of French cinema, especially in a big batch of recent DVD releases.
I finally began to trust my 8-year-old son with my electronic equipment and software-he understands my warnings about disc care now that one of his favorite PlayStation titles got scratched so that it crashes at the same point every time. But now a DVD from my three-disc set of The Simpsons' first season has disappeared.
E3 2013 Highlights
Primus: Sailing the Seas of Surround
Steely Dan’s Planet D’Sound Quality
