No comments about San Juan National Historic Site, Puerto Rico.

No comments about In the Beginning Video Series #25 of 25: The Birth of Jesus.

No comments about Kennedy Space Center: Official Tour.

No comments about Jingle All the Way (+ Digital Copy).

3 comments about Christmas Decorating: The Art of Holiday Design.

1. Unlike many how-to videos, this one is well-written and beautifully produced. It features designer Pamela Green, celebrity floral designer Ron Morgan and a host of other designers, holiday stylists and professional party planners who share their tips and tricks for stylish Christmas decorating. The charming host is Jill Scheetz; the setting is a contemporary living room which gets holiday-decorated in stages throughout the program.
   
   In the Christmas decorating portion of the program, we see how professional designers "brainstorm" one creative idea after another. As the design concepts are discussed, each idea is "sketched in" directly on the video screen. This visualization method is very effective and is repeated throughout the program. The host and designer select a "music" theme and start decorating the Christmas tree. We learn the proper technique for installing Christmas tree lights and the importance of scale and what designers call "focal points". Traditional garland is replaced by a combination of sheer fabric and a wide ribbon printed with a music score design.
   
   I particularly enjoyed learning the history of the many holiday traditions. In The Christmas Tree Story, the use of historical illustrations and archival photographs really brought the story to life. It was interesting to learn the symbolism of the Christmas wreath and why evergreens are used to 'deck the halls'. Very entertaining and educational.
   
   The music theme is picked up in other Christmas decorating segments including ideas for decorating the windows with uniquely shaped wreaths. The fireplace decorating scheme is particularly dramatic with a wrought-iron wall hanging in the shape of a music score with large Christmas tree ornaments serving as the "musical notes".
   
   Renown floral designer and author Ron Morgan ("The Center of Attention")demonstrates how easy it is to dress up a store-bought wreath with roses and lemons. In a party centerpiece, he uses standard supermarket flowers to create a dramatic holiday floral display. The instructions are easy to follow and not at all intimidating. Other Christmas decorating segments include The Art of Gift Wrap, Finishing Touches and Beaded Ornaments.
   
   The Holiday Entertaining portion of this video starts with an executive chef demonstrating how to design an artisic buffet table. He shares his secrets for casual home entertaining. The Designing with Chocolate segment is a lot of fun. In it a designer uses melted chocolate to dress up candles that smell of chocolate as they burn down. She shows many chocolate ideas including a topiary made of scrumptious chocolate truffles.
   
   The Table Top Design segments presents two spectacular...and I mean spectacular...holiday tablesettings. Winter Wonderland is all in white, silver and crystal ("...the colors of snow...") The Nutcrackers Galore tablesetting centers around a collection of adorable holiday nutcrackers. Floral designer Ron Morgan returns to create a magical party setting called "Fire and Ice" which includes a special effect - an underlit glass-top table that seems to glow from within. Very dramatic! And amazingly easy to re-create at home.
   
   In the final segment, we "attend" a Trim-a-Tree Party and learn the do's and dont's of hosting successful parties. Everything from the Role of the Host to The Role of the Guest; from creating unique party invitations to creating magical party settings.
   
   This holiday video offers a treasury of creative ideas for the holiday season. The host is pleasant, the designers are talented and the ideas are creative. More importantly, this video is very entertaining to watch. I highly recommend it!



2. What a great video! Fabulous Christmas decorating ideas. I started watching the video when my husband walks into the room. My husband is a sports & Law and Order kind of a guy. He pretty much hates all the home and garden shows I like to watch. BUT...he sat down and watched the whole video with me! This is a first in our house. I loved the Christmas history and the cool graphics. We both loved the chocolate decorating ideas. They show this one designer that's a real chocoholic. She makes chocolate topiaries and chocolate ornaments! She even drizzles melted chocolate on candlesticks!! She says you can smell the chocolate as the candles burn down. How cool is that!!



3. The Christmas tree decorating ideas in this video are worth the price of the video alone. You know when you go to the fancy stores and hotels during the holidays and wonder how they get their Christmas trees to look so fabulous? I could never get my tree to look like that. Last year, I bought some beautiful ribbon, but when I put it on the tree, it looked stupid so I pulled it right off. Now I know the "designer trick". You have to make a loop in the ribbon first, and then you tie it with a pipe cleaner and attach it to the tree branch! The designer also uses sheer fabric instead of garland - it lets the lights twinkle through. Very nice. You can see the designers decorating this tree on this video's home cite. Just enter the art of holiday design (you know the rest). This video's got tons of designer tips. Check out the party ideas, too! This video gets my "thumbs up"!

5 comments about I Vampiri.

1. I expected more from this film because so much had been written about it and when I saw the packaging I assumed it would be a wild little movie. This was not the case however. Due to obvious budget constraints "I Vampiri" is somewhat of a letdown. It's not bad, it's just disappointing. A wealthy countess stays beautiful thanks to "scientific methods"---blood transfusions---from female victims. Atmosphere is plentiful but it's SO low budget that it's creaky and not creepy. It would have helped had Bava been more daring with the story and plot elements but for some reason he wasn't. What is here is timid with very little action. Much time is spent on the detective pursuing leads and a lot of talk when the running time is so short. It's worth noting as an early Bava horror film but that's about it. He would obviously fare better in the future.



2. This movie is famous for two reasons: First, it was the the first talking horror film from Italy. Second, it was the directing debut of the Italian master of horror, Mario Bava. Original director, Riccardo Freda, had captured the first half of the film in 10 days of filming. The producers had agreed to a 12 day shoot and were not about to go over that. Mario was the cinematographer on the film and was asked if he could finish the movie in 2 days. He agreed and it was pulled off in what became a very stylish (almost a fimm noir) and well made gothic horror. It does have it's flaws mind you, but I really liked virtualy everything about this movie.

   I Vampiri (The Vampire in Italian) plays almost as more of a detective movie than a straight horror. There is the dashing and hip reporter, Pierre Lantin (Dario Michaelis), who is trying to find out who is murdering people and draining their bodies dry of blood. He gives leads to the police who investigate them along with Pierre, but they find nothing useful in them. After he goes out on his own to investigate, Pierre is led to the local castle that houses an old and decrepid duchess along with her beautiful niece, Giselle du Grand (Gianna Maria Canale - director Riccardo Freda's longtime girlfriend and frequent star), whom he has some mysterious tie to from his past.

   Pierre's partner from the newspaper they work at is on love with Giselle and is always making comments about her, even though it is clear that Giselle is romanticaly interested only in Pierre. Pierre spurns her at every turn and becomes interested in the friend, Lorette, of one of the victims (played by Wandisa Guida).

   There are two story lines that I found hard to really figure out in this film: The first was the romantic interest between Pierre and Lorette. I didn't know there was an interest and then suddenly they are obviously an item. The second is that in the lower regions of the castle, there is a doctor who has faked his own death along with an assistant. They are doing experiments with lots of cool looking lab equipment and victims that have been kidnapped by a drug addicted thug (played by Paul Müller, who later appeared in many of Jess Franco's films). They are in cahoots with the duchess but exactly what they are doing with her is never clear. But neither of these nebulous plotlines takes away much from the movie.

   The dvd is presented in 2.35:1 widscreen and the sound is Dolby Digital mono. The print looks fantastic, especially for a relatively obscure, 45 year old movie. It is released by Image Entertainment who has released several Mario Bava films on dvd. There are several trailers for these other Bava films on the disk along with the usual filmographies and also a 4 page insert with liner notes by film historian and author of "Mario Bava: All of the Colors of the Dark", Tim Lucas (who also recorded the commentary for Bava's next major film after I Vampiri, Black Sunday). The film really is well done and considered a classic for a good reason. My brother had bought this dvd and I borrowed it from him, but it is definitely on my list of movies to get, even in the [price] range.




3. Very underrated film, IMO-- Beautiful gothic atmosphere, a mad doctor, a hopped-up (and later undead) thug. The plot is a pulpy rollercoaster ride that doesn't always make sense, but manages to wrap itself up neatly. The fact that our hero's by far the least interesting character on the screen barely ever occurs to you as you try to keep track of the convolutions. It was the fore-runner not only to gothic horror in Itally, but also the giallo crime dramas. Excellent B-movie!



4. I've always had it in mind to view this film but never got around to it until recently. It wasn't what I thought it would be either. It's not quite about vampires, although the title seems to connotate that, and the visual imagery on the dvd cover also tends to present something other than what it really is. This is actually a sort of "mad science" film if anything. Despite that I got something different than what I had hoped for, it's still a good film.



5. Elizabeth Báthory (aka "Lady Dracula") became infamous for murdering over six hundred young girls, and allegedly bathing in their blood to retain her youth.
   
   Well, probably the bathing-in-blood part is untrue -- just a centuries-old version of an urban legend. But who cares? It makes for a fascinating horror movie in "I Vampiri," which gives a scientific slant to the legendary use of blood to retain youth -- and it's a pretty good murder mystery too.
   
   Girls in Paris keep vanishing, only to turn up drained of blood. Of course, reporter Pierre Lantin (Dario Michaelis) is determined to find out who is doing this, when he's not fending off the advances of the Duchess du Grand's sultry niece Giselle (Gianna Maria Canale). Apparently the old duchess was in love with Pierre's dad, and now Giselle wants to continue. Pierre is more interested in finding the "vampire."
   
   But then an unwanted suitor tries to seduce Giselle -- and sees her instantly transform into a withered old woman, right before she shoots him. Turns out she's the old duchess, keeping herself eternally alive and young by transfusing blood from young girls into herself. But this murderous therapy is taking its toll on the duchess -- and Pierre is getting too close to the truth...
   
   If "I Vampiri" doesn't have Mario Bava's distinctive flavour, that's for one simple reason -- it was originally directed by Riccardo Freda, and when he left the production Bava had to wrap things up. So don't expect the same kind of experience that Bava's solo pictures had, although it's a pretty solid Euro-horror movie on its own.
   
   Half of the movie is steady, not very captivating detective work, with Pierre ticking off the local police chief, flirting with schoolgirls, and reluctantly attending a ball -- where, of course, he hears someone screaming from the tower but doesn't clue in. And of course, lots of creepy men in the streets and autopsies of the dead girls.
   
   No, the creepiness is there when the Good Guys are not present -- dungeons, coffins, sinister labs, zombies, junkies, mad scientists, and old gothic castles with long white drapes blowing in the wind. Not to mention the decrepit old lady shooting mirrors, and ranting endlessly about how she just HAS to be young and beautiful again, no matter what the risk. And despite being from the mid-fifties, the "aging" special effects are still very, very well-done.
   
   The final scenes are where Bava's influence comes out, as Pierre and the police finally get a clue. Director No. 2 toys around with light and shadow, music, and the ghastly architecture -- turning a formerly mundane transformation into a thing of horror.
   
   Michaelis and Carlo D'Angelo do pretty tepid jobs as Pierre and the police chief, though admittedly they're not given much to work with. Canale is the real star of this piece -- she can flip from a sultry seductress to screeching harridan on a moment's notice, and you can see the absolute insanity bubbling under the surface. And Wandisa Guida has a good, brief performance as the love interest/latest blood victim.
   
   "I Vampiri" is less about vampirism than about a Hollywoodesque determination to preserve youth and beauty, whatever the cost. And that devastating vanity is what makes this REALLY horrific.

2 comments about Little Women's Christmas Story.

1. My daughters love this movie. They remember seeing it as a Christmas Special when they were little girls in the 1980's.
   I have been trying to find it to purchase for years.



2. Although it has a copyright date of 1992, "Little Women's Christmas Story" appears to consist of two episodes from the 1987 Japanese animated "Little Women" TV series edited together to make one 47-minute special. Even though they cover incidents that come right at the beginning of Louisa May Alcott's novel, these don't appear to be the first two episodes of the series since they refer to events that were evidently seen in at least one previous episode. (Episodes from an earlier Japanese animated TV version of "Little Women," produced in 1981, have also been dubbed in English and released on home video in the U.S.)
   
   The events dramatized here include the visit by Aunt March in which she gives the four sisters each a dollar for Christmas which the four agree to use for gifts for their mother ("Marmee"). Jo meets Laurie, the boy from next door, and also his grandfather, Mr. Laurence. We also see Jo write the play that the girls will perform on Christmas and watch as Amy and Beth fight over the script. Curiously, the tape ends with the girls going to bed on Christmas Eve, so we never see the performance of the play or the celebrated incident where the girls decide to give their Christmas breakfast to a poor family in town, the Hummels. (These incidents are dramatized in episodes from the 1981 series that have been released in English.)
   
   There's a pretty, cheery look to the animation, with round-eyed happy faces, bright primary colors, fluid movement, and beautifully rendered background art depicting the town and the local environs. (This is a far cry from the 1981 version, which had a starker, more dramatic look to it and more of a 19th century feel.) The character design is by Yoshifumi Kondo, who went on to work for Hayao Miyazaki (PRINCESS MONONOKE) and directed the 1995 Studio Ghibli production, WHISPER OF THE HEART (1995). Haim Saban (of "Power Rangers" fame) produced this English dub, adding new music, for one thing. The quality of the voice acting will be an issue for some, since the most childlike voice, that of youngest sister Amy, is the one that gets to narrate!

1 comments about The Snowden Raggedy Ann & Andy Holiday Show: A Spectacular on Ice.

1. This was originally a Target exclusive movie. I purchased my VHS copy at a discount after Christmas the year it was released. Truthfully, I would not have purchased it originally if it had not been 50% or 75% off. Now I wish I had purchased several more and the DVD version. It has become a favorite.
   
   This video is like an Ice Capades show only MUCH better as you are treated to close up interaction between the performers and some video magic that isn't possible during live performances.
   
   The story line is sweet and appropriate for all ages. The story is tender with fantasy and generously sprinkled with high spirited fun. Some of the skating has the beauty of a ballet. Other sequences are high energy. Scott Hamilton is incredible on a pair of skates and makes a cute Elvis. Ekaterina Gordeeva is so beautiful. Love to watch her on skates. (This performance was after her husbands untimely death.) Kurt Browning and Josee Chouinard are also a joy to watch.
   
   I have been trying for several years to find DVD copies of this video--one for our home library and several more for our grandchildren. The DVD version hasn't been available on ebay. People seem to be holding on to this one.
   
   Since the Amazon product info is bare for this video, I have copied some info from several ebay auctions for the VHS version below:
   
   "Daring leaps, amazing acrobatics, marvelous music, sensational skating and a magic mirror make this special holiday show a skating spectacular on ice. In this exciting tale of dreams fulfilled, a beautiful magic mirror reveals the wishes of small children to Snowden, Raggedy Ann & Andy, Doc and an all-star cast of skaters."
   
   Stars:
   Scott Hamilton
   Ekaterina Gordeeva
   Kurt Browning
   Josee Chouinard
   
   1998. 60 MINUTES. COLOR. NOT RATED. NTSC VHS HI FI. STARRING SCOTT HAMILTON, EKATERINA GORDEEVA, KURT BROWNING & JOSEE CHOUINARD. THE SNOWDEN RAGGADY ANN & ANDY HOLIDAY SHOW - A SPECTACULAR ON ICE. DARING LEAPS, AMAZING ACROBATICS, MARVELOUS MUSIC, SENSATIONAL SKATING AND A MAGIC MIRROE MAKE THIS SPECIAL HOLIDAY SHOW A SKATING SPECTACULAR ON ICE. IN THIS EXCITING TALE OF DREAMS FULFILLED, A BEAUTIFUL MAGIC MIRROR REVEALS THE WISHES OF SMALL CHILDREN TO SNOWDEN, RAGGEDY ANN & ANDY, DOC AND AN ALL-STAR CAST OF SKATERS. THIS EXCLUSIVE VIDEO, WHICH INCLUDES SPECIAL FOOTAGE OF THE MAKING OF RHE SHOW, WILL WARM YOUR HEART TIME AND AGAIN.

No comments about Playboy - Wet and Wild 7, Hot Holidays.

5 comments about New Year's Concert in Vienna.

1. Stunning playing by one of the greatest orchestras in the world. This notoriously `difficult' band gives it all and more to the only conductor they truly have any respect for after Furtwangler.



2. Listening to the CD of this concert was my intro to the New Year's Concerts of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, so this particular one has special meaning. Not surprisingly, it is also my favorite. Now that the DVD has been released, one can see and experience it! Both the sound and picture are crisp and beautiful - the only way you could improve them would be to have the DVD in DTS format, but the DVD looks and sounds excellent!
   The selections presented in this concert include some of the Strauss family's best-known pieces along with some that you may not know. Still, no better orchestra to perform them than the Vienna Philharmonic. Their playing is spectacular, and as conductor, Carlos Kleiber enjoys one of his finest hours here (a feat he would later repeat in the 1992 concert.)
   These New Year's Concerts performed by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra are works of art in themselves! Of course, there's no substitute for seeing one live in person, but sitting back and experiencing this DVD in your home theater comes very close!
   I highly recommend this DVD to anyone who is either fond of the music of the Strauss family or of good classical music, period. Now, in closing, I have just one question: when will the rest of the New Year's Concerts be released and made available on DVD?



3. Truly inspirational playing. A match made in heaven. The VPO and Kleiber.
   This concert oozes élan and consummate artistry on a level hard to imagine. Must be seen to be believed.



4. Klieber does not leave anything to chance and refines all subtleties of the music not found in other performances of Strauss' works. His pianissimos are done with aplomb and will move the discerning afficionado. He even memorized the entire concert and conducts completely from memory and his heart! This is the best DVD I have of anything.



5. I own two DVDs of Kleiber's New Year's Concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic, 1989 and 1992, and I am guaranteed to have wonderful music for a new year's day no matter who's actually conducting the concert that year.