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179 of 191 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Substandard picture quality and censorship ruin this DVD, September 29, 2009
Before anyone gets on my case, I HAVE THE DVD and am watching it right now.
Let me start off on a positive note, the DVD set contains 47 videos on 2 DVDs. Some good ones are inexplicably omitted (Dress You Up, Oh Father, Bad Girl, Fever, This Used to Be My Playground, Substitute For Love, Nothing Really Matters, American Life, etc) but there is a lot of good material released here for the first time. The audio is generally excellent. The 5.1 track is not really a 5.1 mix, it is simulated and sounds terrible. Stick with the PCM stereo track, it sounds fantastic.
I won't comment much on the content of the videos. They are some of the most famous and influential music videos ever made. This is classic stuff. With the exception of Justify My Love (see below) all of the videos are uncut.
Now on to the picture quality...what the hell happened here? It's not as horrible as some people have claimed, but it is WAY below standard. There are serious compression artifacts throughout all of the videos. Pixellation, smearing, graininess, blotchy color, blurring, interlacing artifacts. It's all there and it looks bad. I am watching the DVD on an upscaling Blu Ray player on a 52" LCD 1080P television. It won't look as bad on a smaller TV, but it still won't look great. I have honestly seen VHS look better than some of the videos. The Immaculate Collection DVD, which was made from a 19 year old master, looks better.
The problem is that someone made the really, really stupid decision to use single layer DVDs instead of the industry standard dual layer DVDs. I suspect this decision was made late in the process to save a few cents and the program was re-compressed to fit in half the space. There is too much compression and too much picture quality lost. I'll bet the original master was for 2 dual layer DVDs and it probably looked very good. It is hard to believe that anyone at Warner quality control approved the picture quality on these DVDs. Didn't Madonna sign off on a release copy??
I thought it might have something to do with the age of some of the videos, but the most recent ones look just as bad. The brand new Celebration video only looks slightly better than VHS quality. And it is ridiculous that the widescreen videos are not in 16:9 format, even the recent ones filmed in 16:9 HD are in letterboxed 4:3.
There really is no excuse for this to happen, especially from a company as large as Warner and an artist as big as Madonna. Using single layer DVDs could have only saved them a few cents. On a $30 set, that is inexcusable.
I would strongly suggest not buying this DVD until Warner addresses the situation. I think outcry among the fans will (hopefully) cause Warner to do the right thing and release a corrected version on dual layer discs.
UPDATE - One more thing, the video for Justify My Love is CENSORED! This video was widely released uncensored as a video single in 1991 and sold millions of copies. And NOW, 18 years later, it is censored?? Just unbelievable.
Also, the Amazon description claiming the DVD has "unedited and never before seen footage of 'Justify My Love'" is completely false. There is no new footage at all. In fact, you actually see less because of the censorship.
If I could split my rating, it would be 4 stars for content and 1 star for quality.
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57 of 62 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Warner should be ashamed!, September 29, 2009
They should recall this piece of garbage. Fake 5.1 mix (minimal difference in sound, if any) and highly compressed videos on single layered discs. The only saving grace to this set is that it contains over a dozen videos that have never had an official release. But then again, what difference does it make if the release is official when the quality rivals that of a bootleg? Those videos by the way, look MUCH better on the DVD-R my friend made for me years ago from DJ promo videocassettes. That's just pathetic. I'm sorry I wasted my time looking forward to this all month, and now wasting $25 of my hard earned cash.
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44 of 52 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Madonna has lost her edge. Censored videos!, September 29, 2009
In the days where MTV is playing pimps being lapdanced by topless strippers, Madonna releases her video collection with a censored version of Justify My Love and Erotica.
Once upon a time Madonna swore over and over she would rather cancel shows rather than change them or censor her videos.
Well apparently she's become even greedier with age because the "never seen footage of Justify My Love" that was taunted pre-release is nothing more but a black stripe covering the dominatrix's nipples in the video! And Erotica has no nudity.
So, I don't understand WHY she is realeasing two versions of this dvd collection, one in amaray case and one in digipack. Who wants that? Why not do something really smart and at least do one of those with a friggin' parental advisory sticker and give the grown-up fans what she knows they wanted?
Hopefully now that Madonna is no longer with Warner Bros they will milk her catalogue like a cow and release everything she's done and not care about this unspoken rule of "always keep some things unreleased so we can milk the fans in the future!".
My balls hit the floor when I saw that black stripe on Justify My Love.
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