It had been Johnny Depp’s childhood dream to one day play Barnabas Collins, a vampire character from a popular daytime soap opera, but it took him and his old friend Tim Burton half a lifetime to make a movie version of Dark Shadows. The result is a delightful mix of horror and drama carefully sprinkled with bits of Burton’s particular brand of macabre and sarcastic humour, making it one of the most enjoyable recent movies of the director even if the script is slightly overloaded with plots and characters. Because the movie had not been a particular financial or critical success, Warner did not make much of an effort for the home video releases. The DVD is especially disappointing, containing only one short featurette as bonus material, but this does not make Dark Shadows less amazing.

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I don’t have anything new this week to post, but I’ve finally made a decision: DVDLog is going to make a switch from German to English this year. It’s going to be a very gradual process, but I am going to write all new reviews in English now and there will be translations of my favourite older articles to fill some gaps when I haven’t got new material to write about. There are two reasons for the change: I want to expand my readership with the help of Google+, which has already begun to work, and writing in English has proved to be much more fun than in German. I hope that the regular readers won’t mind, probably most of you understand enough English to follow my articles.

Apart from some slight language changes in the blog template, nothing else is going to change. I still try to do a weekly update and I’m actually working on something new right now which should be ready next Monday. I’m slowly beginning to get my groove back after the winter and in April and May a few fresh DVDs should be coming in, so maybe it’s going to be a busy spring here on the website.

When I had posted my collection of english-language reviews in February,I completely forgot about one very special article: the review of Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, one of the most amazing British television series of the late 1960s. I had already reviewed a German boxset of the series back in 2006, but in 2010 I finally bought the wonderful UK boxset from Network which had been released two years previously and not only came with brilliantly restored transfers, but also an exhausting collection of bonus materials and even a whole accompanying book. This week’s article is a repost of my review from nearly three years ago – but thoroughly updated, corrected and improved. Be seeing you!

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In the last few years, Brian Cox has become somewhat omnipresent on british television. The rockstar-come-physicist-come-television star had first presented six Horizon documentaries between 2005 and 2009 for the BBC with his own two full-length series Wonders of the Solar System and Wonders of the Universe following in 2010 and 2011. Together with comedian Dara O Briain, he was also the co-host of three Stargazing Live events and gave a televised physics lecture at the end of 2011. David Attenborough has said that if he would need to choose a successor, it would be Brian Cox. But is the popularity of the good-looking scientist just a hype? His new five-part series Wonders of Life shows that this is most definitely not the case. Mixing physics and biology for the first time, Brian Cox once again succeeds brilliantly in bringing a sense of wonder to the television screens.

Since I’ve decided to skip the Oscar coverage this year and there’s no new review ready this weekend, I’m going to introduce the new catergory Lost & Found for all the great stuff I’ve encountered somewhere on the web worthy of sharing. I’m probably not going to make this a regular feature, but once in a while there will be posts like this with interesting links, videos and other things.

Today’s find comes from the wonderful website Open Culture – which everybody should have in their Facebook or Google+ streams – and contains reportedly 500 free movies on the web. I must admit that I have not counted through the list, but it is utterly exhaustive and has an amazing collection of vintage and not-so-vintage movies from all genres, which are partly stored on Youtube and partly in other archives. Of course these are mostly not high-quality transfers, but in almost all cases still watchable, making them a wonderful starting point to browse for amazing movies and later look for better commercially released versions.

In addition there are a couple of other more specialized movie lists on Open Culture, whose contents are all contained in the big 500 collection: some of Alfred Hitchcock’s earlier movies, many Charlie Chaplin classics, a Film Noir section and even a couple of early Westerns with John Wayne. And for the current occasion there’s also a list of 33 Oscar-winning movies and short films. Unfortunately not everthing is still online – some of it has been taken down for copyright reasons, some are not playable in Germany because of the Youtube-Gema feud. But even with some entries missing, the movie collection from Open Culture is an amazing treasure trove for every movie enthusiast.

The first exclusively english-language article on DVDLog is also one of my very few negative reviews: I’ve actually been a big fan of Blue Sky Studio’s Ice Age-Franchise up to now and I still like the first three movies, but Ice Age – Continental Drift was a big disappointment. There’s not much left of the witty and satirical humour of the predecessors and the still stunning visuals can’t hide the problem that the story and particularly the dialogue seems to be written for pre-schoolers only. It’s just another mindless computer-generated action-adventure and the old-established characters are only shadows of their former selves. While technically more than acceptable, the German DVD also suffers from the lack of good bonus materials – but even the Blu-Ray does not have an audio commentary. One of the very few instances when I wish I hadn’t bought the disc unseen.

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Es wird langsam mal wieder Zeit, ein paar DVD-Neuigkeiten zusammenzusuchen, aber bis jetzt habe ich noch nicht viel für den Anfang des neuen Jahres gefunden – es sind allerdings noch ein paar Reste aus dem letzten Jahr übrig. Einen richtigen Überblick habe ich im Moment allerdings nicht mehr und auch 2013 werde ich die zahllosen Blu-Ray-Neuauflagen weitgehend ignorieren, da ich immer noch nicht auf den HD-Zug aufgesprungen bin und dies bis auf absehbare Zeit auch nicht passieren wird. Aber ich denke, daß es hin und wieder mal ein paar interessante DVDs geben wird und schließlich ist das britische Fernsehen, insbesonders die BBC, ja auch noch da. Außerdem noch in diesem Artikel: eine Warnung vor einer Welle von Billig-DVDs und ein paar Sachen zur Webseite. [Die Poster-Grafik habe ich übrigens aus Spaß mit der wundervollen Seite Pulp-O-Mizer zusammengebastelt!]

Because I haven’t got anything new ready this week and there are so many English-speaking people in my circles over at Google+, I’m going to try an experiment and repost the few reviews which I have already translated into English. I’ve been writing about DVDs, movies and tv-series for more than ten years now, but my articles are usually in German. If there’s at least some interest in my English-language reviews, I could translate more of them or switch languages altogether in the future. My reviews are always of specific DVDs, but they are also articles which are not primarily criticism, but rather reports with lots of background information to get readers interested in great movies and television.

First, there are a couple of movie reviews: Fritz Lang’s 1927 masterpiece Metropolis in its restored 2010 incarnation, the wonderful 1974 adaption of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express with Albert Finney as Hercule Poirot, and a trio of articles about Jacques Tati’s first three movies, Jour de Fête, Les Vacances de M. Hulot and Mon Oncle.

There are also two very different television reviews: everybody at least in the USA might be familiar with the one and only spy-sitcom Get Smart, but the classic German science-fiction-show Raumpatrouille Orion is virtually unknown in English-speaking countries – but unfortunately equally hard to view.

And there is also the very popular Film Format Guide, a detailed article about most major film processes both historic and modern, complete with recreated example graphics of film strips, technical data and much more information.

If you are a “movie connoisseur” like me and interested in more articles about classic and current movies on DVD, I would appreciate a +1 on Google+ or a quick comment here on the blog or on G+. I’ll even take requests – a somewhat disorganized list of my archive is here.

Sequels haben es nicht leicht, Threequels noch viel weniger, aber Dreamworks Animation hat schon in der Vergangenheit gezeigt, daß Fortsetzungen nicht automatisch schlechter als ihre Vorgänger sein müssen. Madagascar 3 ist eins der besten Beispiele, denn der dritte Film der Reihe hat aus einem auf den ersten Blick enttäuschenden Plot eine ganz wunderbare Geschichte gemacht, die nicht nur kindertauglich ist, sondern mit vielen satirischen Elementen auch etwas für Erwachsene ist. Eine atemberaubende Animation und gut gelaunte Sprecher machen aus Madagascar 3 einen der besten Dreamworks-Filme seit langem. Die heutige DVD-Kritik dreht sich um die amerikanische Ausgabe, die aber auch eine Preview für die Mitte Februar in Deutschland erscheinenden Discs ist.

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Im Dezember hatte die BBC schon einen wundervollen Trailer veröffentlicht, jetzt ist der Ausstrahlungstermin bekannt: Brian Cox’ neue Serie Wonders of Life ist ab diesem Sonntag, dem 27. Januar bei BBC2 und BBC-HD um 22:00 CET zu sehen. Die fünfteilige Serie wird an den nächsten Sonntagen zur gleichen Zeit weiter gesendet und jeweils in der Nacht von Dienstag auf Mittwoch um 00:20 CET noch einmal wiederholt. DVDs und Blu-Rays sind noch nicht angekündigt worden, aber das Buch zur Serie wird schon am 24. Januar erscheinen. [Update 11.02.: Die BBC hat einen wundervollen Ausschnitt aus der gestern gelaufenen dritten Episode bei Youtube gepostet, der perfekt zum Bild dieses Postings paßt!]

Außerdem noch etwas interessantes in Sachen David Attenborough: die BBC hatte schon letztes Jahr zwei seiner Serien, Life on Earth von 1979 und The Trials of Life von 1990 in HD neu abgetastet und als Blu-Ray veröffentlicht – die DVDs wurden aber leider nicht neu aufgelegt. Ab nächste Woche Montag, dem 4. Februar, wird Life on Earth außerdem an jedem Wochentag um 17:15 CET bei BBC2 und BBC-HD ausgestrahlt, vermutlich von den neuen HD-Mastern. Mehr dazu, wenn die erste Episode gelaufen ist.