Customer Reviews

The Shooter Series, Volume One: Brett Ratner

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I purchased this DVD assuming it was a collection of Mariah Carey music videos / interviews / clips etc.
However, Mariah is only a very tiny piece of this DVD. It is really a collection of Brett Ratner's work. (I assume he is a director?) I ended up returning it.
If you are purchasing this expecting it to be a Mariah DVD, you will be disappointed.

His Hollywood films have grossed over a billion dollars. He's friends with some of the most powerful men in Hollywood. He's dated some of the most beautiful women on the planet. Yet somehow I get the sense that director Brett Ratner would trade it all for a little bit of respect. This single disc compilation of Music Videos, TV ads and student work does a pretty thorough job of charting the trajectory of his phenomenal career (the half hour featurette even starts off with a clip from Brett's bar mitvah). As Diddy mentions in the doc, Ratner is by far the most successful filmmaker to come out of the world of hip hop videos. In some ways, he's like Spielberg (coincidentally his first benefactor)--early in his career, he never got his props as an artist because of his commercial success. But unlike Speilberg, he has yet to attach himself to a story of his own creation. With this DVD, Ratner gives himself his just due (the Shooter Series is financed and marketed by Rat himself). While I would argue Hype Williams, Jim Swaffield and Charles Stone III are responsible for the most groundbreaking and memorable early hip-hop videos of all time, Ratner was right there in the mix, as Russell Simmon's go-to guy for much of the early '90s and later as Mariah Carey's trusted collaborator on half a dozen mini-movies. While I would never recommend this DVD to the casual viewer (Ratner's clios were designed to sell records, not stand as lasting art) this would be of major interest to film students would be the audio commentaries. Ratner is famous for saying he didn't want to direct a feature film until he had made 100 videos. The commentaries on the music clips reveal his method of deliberate practice--how he incorporated match cuts, framing and dialogue to make his videos feel more like movies. His Wu-Tang Clan video (the first $1 million rap video) is utter crap, but it provided him with experience and skills he would later apply to the X-Men sequel. By the end, you can't help but feel respect for the body of work he has amassed in the first 2 decades of his career. 3 1/2 stars.