Customer Reviews

The DVD Revolution: Movies, Culture, and Technology

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A very cool book about how technology is changing the way we see movies, make movies, and think about movies. DVDs give us the capability to see a lot of movies---all kinds of movies----again and again. They provide a way to challenge the one-size-fits-all attitude of corporate America (in this case, corporate America is Hollywood.)

You could almost say the advent of the DVD is a little bit like the advent of the Internet---it gives a lot of people the ability to access information, thus increasing their appetite for it. And if you can skip from a Bollywood DVD to Persona to The Wizard of Oz to the Creature from Planet X all in the same night---sort of like surfing the net---it's got to do something to your approach to movies. I've done that, but until I read Barlow's book, I never thought about its effect.

Barlow has a very easy, readable style, and has a real knack for writing about things that could be dry---like questions of copyright, or the Special Edition DVD---with liveliness and insight. And I loved the discussions on the history of film collecting and the impact of the video on the work of Quentin Tarantino (and in turn, his impact on the world of film).

For film students such as myself, I would say that the DVD Revolution is almost a necessity---we need to know more about the world that we are going to make films in! But I think anyone who has a passion for movies would enjoy this book.