Filmmaker Hannah Rothschild was given access to many of the areas of Mandelson’s life from October 2009, as he shadowed the then Business Secretary and First Secretary of State through to June 2010, following Labour’s election failure. A candid portrait it might be, although it’s not entirely warts and all. There is a real sense that the subject at the heart of the film remained very much in control of the manner in which he is portrayed.

Interviews are conducted on train journeys or at the close of an exhausting, hectic day, yet it is the scenes of the infamous anti-hero at work that prove to be revealing. Following two well documented and spectacular falls from Governmental grace, this disarmingly sincere raconteur has to be admired, even if begrudgingly, for the influence and power he continued to wield in the wake of adverse publicity and temporary losses of credibility.

This film is especially fascinating due to the tumultuous period of political history during which it was shot. For anyone with an interest in current affairs and the power play with which the political game is won or lost, it makes for compelling viewing.

Special Features

An array of extra features provide further insights into one of Labour’s most formidable Spin Doctors. They skim beneath the surface of a man who not only worked tirelessly in politics, but directly influenced the way in which modern politics evolved. These include an extended ending to the film, Peter’s thoughts on the media as an ‘occupational hazard’ and a segment of unseen footage which is simply entitled ‘Tory Bashing’.

Brown’s own narrative is enthusiastic and contagious, entertaining and informative. His cinematography is bright, colourful and no less than exceptional when considering that the film was made 30 years ago. Its soundtrack is utterly 70s at its cheesiest worst, although this minor downside adds retro authenticity.

As a passionate motorcycle racer himself, the late great McQueen himself features in several scenes, although his star power was not intended to, and does not, eclipse the subject matter. The film was a joint labour of love for both Brown and McQueen, who contributed funding and support to On Any Sunday’s making.

It gained an Oscar nomination in 1972 for Best Documentary Feature. For anyone even remotely interested in motorcycles, it is an absolute must. For those not, it still provides an interesting snapshot of its time. It continues to stand tall as a 70s classic and now has the well deserved opportunity to become a newly rediscovered classic for another generation.

Special Features

Additionally, the special On Any Sunday Collector’s Edition is accompanied by On Any Sunday Revisited. This extra feature is an all new classic created by Brown and his son, Dana, also a film maker. It is an exciting bonus that has been especially released to mark the 30 year anniversary of the original movie.

Recapturing the atmosphere of happiness, combined with hope that the wedding encapsulated, it allows viewers opportunities to relive over and over the main moments that created a frenzy of media speculation in the run up. With the abundance of gatherings and parties that were held to coincide with the momentous occasion, the DVD offers a front row snapshot of the best bits that people might have been sorry to miss amidst their revelries.

What the key members of the royal family were wearing, the Bridesmaids, the revelation of Kate’s best kept secret – her wedding dress, the glorious horse drawn carriage procession back to the Palace and the double helping of balcony embraces, plus the wedding ceremony shown in its entirety. All are narrated with the appropriate and effortless authority we would expect from Sir Trevor McDonald and enthusiastically commented upon by excited members of the public sharing in the worldwide celebration.

Special Features

The main body of wedding coverage is accompanied by Tom Bradby’s engagement exclusive from November 2010, setting the tone for one of the Palace’s best ever productions on the grandest of scales. Whilst it was doubtlessly well scripted, it is not completely cloying and sycophantic. Bradby grills the royal couple about their highly publicised break up and Kate’s apparent work shyness once St Andrew’s was left behind that earned her the Waity Katie tag.

Prince William: A Life In Pictures does not offer us anything that viewers will not have seen before, but it does reinforce generally held perceptions that a very decent and relatively normal young man lurks behind the royal masquerade. His every landmark in life has been publicly witnessed and subjected to intense media scrutiny, as tracked in this feature. The boy who perhaps would not, but has no other choice than to one day be King, is presented with the optimism he has engendered since birth.

The documentary begins on that horrible day when acting mayor Dianne Feinstein announced that San Francisco mayor George Moscone and supervisor Harvey Milk had been shot and killed by fellow supervisor Dan White. The film then takes us back to the early 1970’s and chronicles Milk’s rise from camera store owner to prominent gay rights activist in a span of only a few years. This is done through a mix of archival footage of Milk, Moscone and White with original documentary footage of those who knew them.

Milk initially became involved in local politics with his neighborhood and then expanded his scope to the rest of the city. He ran repeatedly for office and lost three times but kept getting more and more supporters each time. In 1977, he finally got elected to the Board of District Supervisors. It’s hard not to get caught up in the euphoria of Milk getting elected and standing up for what he believed in. The Times of Harvey Milk also sheds light on Dan White’s story and the way he came across in the local media – a clean-cut all-American guy, an idealist who did not adjust well to the political climate of city hall. We see what motivated him to kill Milk and Moscone and the subsequent aftermath – the court case and the resulting backlash to the lenient sentence he received for the murders.

Harvey Milk comes across as a very approachable man – intelligent, funny, well-spoken and very passionate about his beliefs. Like any savvy politician, he also knew how to work the media to his advantage. However, Milk started to make waves among conservatives, like White, when he began advocating gay rights and even got legislation in San Francisco passed. This is when the hate mail really started pouring in and friends of Milk were worried that someone might try to kill him at the Gay Day Celebration but he bravely participated in it.

There is incredible footage of the candlelight vigil in observance of Milk and Moscone’s death – thousands of people taking to the streets peacefully for miles and miles. It’s hard not to be moved by it and by the testimonials of people who were there. The Times of Harvey Milk is a powerful film and a sobering reminder of how much still has to be done to give equality to gays and lesbians. It is also a moving tribute to an inspirational figure who stood up and championed a cause that wasn’t easy but one that was right because it spoke up for the basic rights that should be afforded to everyone.

Special Features:

The first disc features an audio commentary by director and co-editor Robert Epstein, co-editor Deborah Hoffman, and photographer Daniel Nicoletta. They didn’t intend the documentary to be a biography about Harvey Milk but rather a reflection of the times in which he lived in. Epstein admits that he came to Milk late and was not a devotee of his causes back in the day. The participants offer all kinds of filming anecdotes, like how they got Harvey Fierstein to narrate the film, on this informative track.

Also included is a “Postscript” that features deleted footage of various subjects in the documentary and was intended to be in the conclusion but ultimately removed.

There is also a trailer.

The second disc features an interview with Jon Else, director of the UC Berkeley documentary program. He takes a retrospective look at The Times of Harvey Milk and mentions that a film about Milk’s life was considered almost from the moment he was killed. Else praises the documentary for refusing to do re-enactments or drawing attention to the filmmakers. He also draws attention to the aspect of local elections and how important it was to Milk’s story. Else speaks candidly and knowledgably as one would expect from a man of his expertise and experience.

“Two Films, One Legacy” takes a look at the documentary in relation to Gus Van Sant’s Milk film. The goal of both films was to get Milk’s message out to a mainstream audience. The documentary does a brilliant job of giving us the basics of Milk’s life and political career, while Van Sant’s film dramatizes it in a dynamic way. Filmmakers from both films talk about their respective takes on the man.

“Harvey Milk Recordings” is a collection of audio and video recordings of Milk and the events that influenced his activism.

“Director’s Research Tapes” are excerpts from interviews Epstein recorded with 40 people for the film while it was in pre-production. These are the people that didn’t make it into the final cut, including Milk’s longtime boyfriend Scott Smith. They all talk about their impressions of Milk and what he was like.

“From the Castro to the Oscars” features excerpts from its San Francisco premiere in 1984 and the acceptance speech the filmmakers gave at the Academy Awards. The former is a fascinating snapshot of the political and social climate of the time it came out.

“The Dan White Case” features a small collection of news clips documenting his political career as well as the aftermath of his trial. Also included are excerpts from a 2003 panel discussion with White’s attorneys Douglas Schmidt and Stephen Scherr and also deputy district attorney Jim Hammer. They recount the trial and how they went about defending White. They also give their impressions of the man.

There is an excerpt of a speech Harry Britt, the man who succeeded Milk as supervisor for his district, gave in 2003 in honor of the 25th anniversary of his death.

Finally, there is an excerpt from the Candlelight Memorial in 2003 where mayor Moscone’s daughter and Tom Ammiano, who knew and worked with Milk, speak passionately about the two men.

Crumb’s wife Aline says that when she first met him he was practically catatonic. She’s not afraid to speak her mind which acts as a nice counterpoint to Crumb’s more introverted nature. He is an obsessive collector of blues and jazz music from the 1920s and claims that it is the one thing that connects him to the rest of humanity. His brother Charles is an obsessive reader who still lives with their mother and admits to being detached from the human race.

We find out that as a kid, Charles loved comic books and got Crumb into them which led to both boys drawing their own. There was an intense sibling rivalry between Crumb, Charles and their youngest brother Maxon who had an antagonistic relationship with the eldest, Charles, with Crumb in the middle.

Crumb speaks with refreshing candor about his sexual memories and what aroused him as a kid – cute cartoon characters until he was 12 and then he became obsessed with Sheena from the popular television show, Sheena: Queen of the Jungle in the 1950s. The documentary does not shy away from Crumb’s hostility towards women, his misogynistic tendencies and his perverse fantasies as depicted in his comics. Zwigoff presents us with a critic that takes him to task for these things and one that defends his artwork quite eloquently.

At an early age, Crumb realized that he wasn’t popular or all that attractive to others and decided to be a non-conformist. He began collecting old music and developed his artistic skills. He was determined to become a famous artist. In the ‘60s, he moved to San Francisco and immersed himself in the Haight-Ashbury scene. He took LSD and it not only changed his perspective on life but his style of art, opening it up and freeing his mind. He started drawing all kinds of psychedelic comic books which became very popular.

Over the course of this documentary, it becomes apparent that Crumb was born in the wrong era. He is a man out of time, consciously ignorant of popular culture and ruled by his own personal obsessions. He’s disgusted with America’s aggressive, commercially-driven culture and the documentary ends with him and his family packing up and moving to France. After meeting his reclusive brothers and mother, Crumb almost seems normal in comparison. His art was a way for him to escape his deeply troubled family. He took his dysfunctions and obsessions and found a way to channel it into his art. Zwigoff’s Crumb is a fascinating, intimate portrait of the man that presents him warts and all with unflinching honesty.

Special Features:

There is an audio commentary by director Terry Zwigoff done in 2010. He talks about the origins of the documentary. After he met Crumb’s family, Zwigoff knew that he wanted to include Charles and his mother but they took a lot of convincing. Zwigoff talks about the challenge of picking examples of Crumb’s artwork from the thousands he had access to. He also talks about how the budget limitations impacted the film – mostly peripheral people from his past could not be interviewed because of the cost of going to see them. It took Zwigoff years and he was always trying to raise money for it.

Also included is a commentary by Zwigoff and film critic Roger Ebert done in 2006. Zwigoff talks about how he first met Crumb and how they bonded over a love for old music. He admits that Charles was the impetus for making the documentary and that he found him a fascinating person. Zwigoff and Ebert talk about Charles’ dichotomy of being both articulate and a recluse. Ebert asks Zwigoff questions about the film and about Crumb which keeps things going and avoids any lengthy lulls in the commentary.

There is 51 minutes of “Unused Footage” including more examples of Crumb’s artwork, more footage of Crumb and Charles talking about their family, Crumb talking about his sex life before and after he achieved fame, and him telling more stories eccentric brother Charles.

Finally, there is a “Stills Gallery” with behind-the-scenes photographs and portraits of Crumb and his family.

Initially, Zwigoff was just going to write an article on Armstrong but after interviewing him at his home over the course of three days, Zwigoff thought that there might be a film idea there. Over the course of five years, he made the film and also learned how to make one along the way. Armstrong starts things off by recounting an amusing anecdote about how he got his nickname. We see him jamming and reminiscing with fellow musicians, bantering back and forth like long-time friends. We also see his love of painting and how he got into creating them. Armstrong also shows off a book he wrote and illustrated entitled, The ABC’s of Pornography.

Zwigoff clearly has affection for his subject and the music but this documentary is not some starry-eyed puff-piece. Armstrong is not shy about sharing his views and opinions on a wide variety of things – religion, women’s posteriors and so on. However, there’s a twinge of sadness one feels watching Louie Bluie when you realize that once all these guys are gone there will be no one around to make the kind of music they did. At least Zwigoff’s documentary will be a testimony to Armstrong’s legacy and place in the history of music.

Special Features:

There is an audio commentary by director Terry Zwigoff. He’s thankful to the folks at the Criterion Collection for preserving Louie Bluie as the film stock he shot it on was disintegrating and would not have lasted too much longer. He goes into the origins of the project and how he discovered Armstrong’s music. Zwigoff points out that Armstrong’s artwork is reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s style of art and the musician eve did some drawings specifically for the film. Zwigoff tells some interesting stories about Armstrong and making the film in this informative commentary.

Also included is 32 minutes of “Unused Footage.” Included are more musical performances as well as Armstrong reading more passages from The ABC’s of Pornography. There is some really nice footage here and for such a short film one wonders why some of this was cut.

Finally, there is a “Stills Gallery” featuring behind-the-scenes photographs, movie posters and album covers as well as illustrations by Armstrong.

Born premature and blind, Wonder had an abusive father. After his mother fled with her children to Detroit, Wonder was signed to Motown records as a child by the legendary Berry Gordy. He had his first hit at age 13 and went on to have an incredible career, including five years during the early seventies – a creative period arguably only matched by The Beatles – which saw the albums Music of my Mind, Talking Book, Innervisions, Fulfillingness’ First Finale and Songs in the Key of Life. He’s been married twice, had a passel o’ kids and narrowly survived a serious car crash in 1973. Before you ask, he wasn’t driving.

Rich pickings for a biographical documentary, no? As it turns out, this effort by the History Channel is a bit of a missed opportunity. Clocking in at barely 45 minutes long, it’s obvious that the producers have not had much of a budget to work with. For a start, none of Wonder’s music features; in a game effort to avoid paying royalties, we get bland elevator bobbins that vaguely sounds like his music but at the same time is a million miles away. There’s only a handful of footage and still pictures used, and it’s not too long before you’re tired of seeing the same photograph over and over, no matter how many times they zoom into and pan across it in a vain effort to liven things up.

On the positive side, the talking heads wheeled in to regale us with anecdotes about Stevie’s life are engaging and well informed, and there’s the odd famous face including Smokey Robinson and Rev Al Sharpton.

All in all, you feel that an artist of Wonder’s calibre deserves something with better production values – even if he did throw his cred away with I Just Called To Say I Love You and Ebony and Ivory – but this scores a few extra points for making you want to find out some more about the guy and listen to his music.

Finding that they are getting a lot requests from abroad but are unable to investigate them because of family commitments, Grant and Jason from Ghost Hunters decide to form an international investigation team led by Robb Demarest from the Florida branch. Their first case is in England and the 800-year-old Chillingham Castle, reputed to be the most haunted castle in the country. To be fair, at night with no lights on, the place does have a foreboding vibe.

Not surprisingly, most of the cases take place in the United Kingdom so that there is no issue with a foreign language but they do go to Italy and check out a haunted monastery with a reported demonic presence, Transylvania, Slovakia (gothic compound), Germany (a headless ghost), and Germany where they team up with Destination Truth’s Josh Gates to investigate Frankenstein’s castle.

Each episode is broken up into two separate cases. The investigators are given the backstory to the place, eyewitness accounts of paranormal activity, a tour of the site, and then the investigation begins. The team’s goal is to prove or disprove the presence of paranormal activity. The team waits until night and breaks up into couples and explores the site. The investigators are equipped with an array of scientific equipment including thermal imaging and an electronic voice phenomenon device that picks up noises not detectable by the human ear. Each episode mixes footage of the investigation with soundbite interviews with the team members conducted after the fact. After the investigation, they review the evidence and then present their findings to the client.

What is refreshing about Ghost Hunters International is that it takes the Ghost Hunters template on the road all over the world. The investigators are skeptical and are looking to debunk things that were thought to be unexplainable. They attempt to capture potential evidence of the paranormal but unfortunately most of what they find consists of the odd disembodied voice or footage of a strange shadow. The investigators do often experience something first hand but it are rarely recorded and therein lies the rub. Still, if you are even remotely interested in the unexplained, the show is entertaining to watch but unfortunately the personalities of the team aren’t as distinctive as the ones on the original Ghost Hunters. On Ghost Hunters International, the exotic locations are the real star of the show.

Special Features:

There is over an hour’s worth of deleted/extended scenes for every episode. We get more backstories to the various haunted locations and naturally we see more of the investigations themselves.

I saw him live in Cardiff on the Dangerous Tour in 1992. I saw the opening night of the History Tour in Prague in 1997, and two of the Wembley dates the following summer. I also had tickets for the opening night of the This Is It concert last year. Not just tickets either, Thriller VIP hospitality tickets – costing over a grand for the pair.

I opted for the printed holographic ticket instead of a refund, I have the Michael Jackson Opus book and yes, I used to subscribe to ‘King’ magazine.

It’s safe to say I’m something of a fan.

Therefore the chance to review Michael Jackson’s This Is It on DVD is something not to be missed.

When I heard the news last summer that Michael was rushed to hospital I sat, like many people across the world, transfixed by the news channels while checking websites for updates. Twitter fell down with the clamour for news and Facebook was alive with rumours and hearsay – sadly most of it turned out to be true. The tragedy every fan had feared had finally happened, at the worst time possible.

Many believed that Michael wasn’t in good physical or mental shape and that the concerts wouldn’t have gone ahead regardless. The video footage that was compiled to form last year’s theatrical release of This Is It proved otherwise.

Michael was in fine shape and the concerts were ready to go. This would have been the pinnacle of his career in terms of liver performances, and thankfully it was recorded so that we do get the chance to enjoy it in some form, even if it is incomplete.

This Is It has an eerie quality all of its own. The empty stadium, the casual nature of the presentation, the fact that the production was never performed; it all makes for awkward viewing. Putting that aside however and you have a truly spectacular concert showing that Michael was still at the top of his game, both vocally and artistically.

Highlights of the show include the specially shot video footage for the introduction of Thriller and the tear inducing final performance of Billie Jean, which earns Michael one last ovation from the watching dance troop, many of whom would have grown up watching him dance.

The film starts off in a tearful manner, but doesn’t dwell on what happened. The film is about Michael as a performer and about the concert that he worked so hard to put on. It’s a celebration of life and talent, rather than a lament at the loss of it.

Watching this in the cinema I was caught between two contrasting emotions. I was delighted that I got the chance to watch it, to enjoy it and was singing along at certain points as though I was at the concert in person. I was also devastated that the concert itself would never be seen live, as it was intended.

Special Features

In the weeks following Michael’s death I tried to avoid the television as much as possible as I knew every TV channel would try to capitalise on the event by hashing together old footage from various videos and putting out ‘tribute’ programmes. I’d seen all of this footage before and didn’t want to see the same sequences over and over, in what was basically just an attempt to gain ratings from fair-weather fans.

The special features on The Is It however contain more than 2 hours of unseen footage, and as someone who has edited together behind the scenes footage from Michael’s Stranger in Moscow video for a screening at the 40th Birthday Bash in London in 1998, I know my ‘unseen’ footage from my ‘often seen’ footage.

The highlight of the special features has to be the unfinished rehearsals, where you see footage from rehearsals that wasn’t included in the film. The stand-out section here is the rehearsal footage for Dirty Diana, where a huge bed had been created for Michael to perform on with a pole dancer. The bed included poles at each corner, and a roof structure, where we see the talented pole dancer swinging around and performing while the bed itself is encapsulated in fire.

This would have been one of Michael’s raunchiest stage routines.

Another interesting aspect of the special features concerns the search for his dancers, where a talent show similar to ‘So You Think You Can Dance’ is held, featuring dancers from all over the world flying in to win one of the 11 places on the crew. This would have made a great series in its own right, and features some very talented dancers.

There hasn’t been a DVD (or video) release of Michael’s that has given this much insight into his creative process as he was such a private man. This release gives you that tinge of sadness that the concerts never happened, but the feelings of joy experienced when watching it far outweigh any negatives.

This, as Michael said himself, is it.

Al Reinert’s documentary For All Mankind (1989) chronicles these missions in a unique way: it is essentially a mash-up of all of them, from liftoff to splashdown. No astronaut is identified by name yet we hear them talking about their experiences on the soundtrack. No one mission is identified from another and this strangely gives the film an epic quality, enhanced considerably by Brian Eno’s low key and oddly ominous electronic score.

With the exception of Kennedy’s famous speech, all of the footage in For All Mankind is taken from NASA’s archives and this gives the film the feel of being made from an insider’s perspective. This isn’t some omniscient dramatization like Apollo 13 (1995) but more like a fly-on-the-wall feel, like we are tagging along for the ride with these astronauts. In this day and age of DVDs, the various astronauts talking about their experiences over footage of the missions has the sensation of an audio commentary only not done by some scholar or filmmaker but by the men who were actually there.

Watching the footage of one of those huge rockets taking off is still an impressive spectacle to behold. The footage of the Earth as seen from outer space is breathtaking and really puts things into perspective. Even more impressive is footage of a spacewalk over the Earth as an astronaut describes the experience. No matter how many times one sees Neil Armstrong take the first step on the surface of the Moon it is still a stirring moment.

After For All Mankind, Reinert went to write Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 and contribute two screenplays for HBO’s ambitious 12-part miniseries From the Earth to the Moon (1998) but they don’t quite capture the immediacy of his documentary.

Special Features:

This is a re-issue of a previous release by the Criterion Collection but features a brand new transfer of the film, which looks fantastic. All of the previous extra material has been carried over.

There is an audio commentary by filmmaker Al Reinert and astronaut Eugene Cernan, the last man to set foot on the Moon. Reinert provides some insight into how the film came together. He went through thousands of hours of footage and managed to put together an 80-minute film. Cernan shares some of his experiences about what it was like to be an astronaut at that time.

New to this edition is “An Accidental Gift: The Making of For All Mankind,” a 30-minute retrospective documentary. Reinert always wanted to see this outer space/Moon footage on the big screen and this was the impetus for the film. He got his start as a journalist covering NASA in the early 1980s. Through his contacts he got access to their film archives and found footage that had never been shown. This is an excellent look at how For All Mankind came together.

Also new is “On Camera,” a compilation of on-camera interviews Reinert conducted with 15 of the Apollo astronauts. In the film itself only the audio is used and it is nice to put a face to the voice.

“Painting from the Moon” is an updating of an extra on the original edition. After retiring from NASA, astronaut Alan Bean became a painter and this is a gallery of his work with commentary.

“NASA Audio Highlights” is a collection of 21 soundbites from the first ten years of the American space program. Some of the most famous words have spoken during this time, including Neil Armstrong’s immortal words.

Finally, there is “3, 2, 1 . . . Blast Off!” a collection of launch footage of various rockets taking off for outer space.