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Documentary DVDs

Deadliest Catch - Season 1 (5 Disc Set)

Sales Rank:8668
List Price: $29.99
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Box set
Color
Dolby
DVD-Video
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NTSC

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Mike Rowe
Phil Harris
Sig Hansen
Jonathan Hillstrand
Edgar Hansen

From the Discovery Channel's hit series!Forty-foot waves, freezing temperatures, swinging 700-pound crab pots, a nearly 100% injury rate... but also the chance to earn enough money for a family to live on for a year with just a few days' work. Welcome to one of the world's deadliest jobs: the Alaskan crab fisherman. Deep in the frigid waters of the Bering Sea lurk the highly lucrative, yet often elusive, king and snow crabs. Each year, approximately 250 boats converge on Dutch Harbor, Alaska, where crewmembers regularly pull 20-hour shifts in freezing weather, exposed to the harshest elements on a slick deck. Now the hair-raising reality adventure comes to DVD in this thrilling 5-DVD set containing all 10 episodes: "Greenhorns," "Long Sleepless Nights," "Lady Luck," "Beat the Clock," "Dead of Winter," "Man Overboard," "High Hopes," "Good Fishing," "The Clock's Ticking," and "The Final Run."

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Battle of the Bulge [Blu-ray]

Sales Rank:2218
List Price: $28.99
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

AC-3
Closed-captioned
Color
Dolby
Dubbed
Subtitled
Widescreen

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Henry Fonda
Robert Shaw
Robert Ryan
Dana Andrews
George Montgomery

The German offensive in December 1944 became the basis for this all-star Hollywood take on the Battle of the Bulge. Henry Fonda is an officer who predicts the assault, Robert Ryan and Dana Andrews are Army brass skeptical of his intuitions, and Robert Shaw (his hair dyed yellow and his eyes glinting with malice) is a German officer leading the tank attack. Shaw is certainly the most compelling thing about the film, especially in his philosophical debates with ambivalent underling Hans Christian Blech. Elsewhere, the movie jumps around to sidebar stories (cowardly James MacArthur becomes a leader, wheeler-dealer Telly Savalas falls in love) while messing around with the historical facts of the battle. There are interesting episodes, such as the Malmedy massacre of American POWs and the Germans' use of English-speaking spies, but overall Battle of the Bulge has the feeling of having been patched together from different scripts. On the physical level the movie comes up short, with the Spanish locations rarely suggesting the wintry misery of the battle, and the use of models and studio sets highly inadequate. A number of war films from this era are compelling on their own terms, but in the wake of Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, this one looks antique. --Robert Horton

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Joy Division (The Miriam Collection)

Sales Rank:3780
List Price: $22.95
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

Format:

Closed-captioned
Color
NTSC
Widescreen

Director(s):

Actor(s):

Tony Wilson
Bernard Sumner
Peter Hook
Stephen Morris
Peter Saville

While Michael Winterbottom's 24 Hour Party People took on impresario Tony Wilson and Anton Corbijn's Control concentrated on singer Ian Curtis, Grant Gee's Joy Division opts for non-fiction over biopic. Together, the three films create a multi-dimensional portrait of Manchester in the post-punk era. Curtis's minimalist quartet arose simultaneously as a product of and a reaction to their industrial environment. As Factory Records co-founder Wilson states, "I don't see this as the story of a pop group, I see this as the story of a city that once upon a time was shiny and bold and revolutionary." (Wilson succumbed to cancer shortly afterwards.) Written by Jon Savage (England's Dreaming), the narrative follows the oral history form. Aside from the surviving members of the band, Bernard Sumner, Peter Hook, and Stephen Morris (Curtis committed suicide in 1980), other speakers include designer Peter Saville, Curtis's girlfriend Annik Honoré, and musician Genesis P. Orridge (Throbbing Gristle). Only Curtis's wife, Deborah, chose not to appear on camera, so Gee (Radiohead: Meeting People Is Easy) uses text from her biography, Touching from a Distance. Loaded with rare audio and visual material, like Joy Division's aborted RCA sessions and manager Rob Gretton's notes, Gee presents the definitive documentary of a timeless band. Unlike Corbijn's stately feature, his stylish tribute ends on a more optimistic note: with the birth of New Order in the 1980s and the re-birth of Manchester in the 2000s. Extra features include 75 minutes of bonus interviews and a BBC performance of "Transmission." --Kathleen C. Fennessy

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Spain... On The Road Again

Sales Rank:1482
List Price: $39.95
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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Director(s):

Actor(s):

Gwyneth Paltrow
Mario Batali
Mark Bittman
Claudia Bassols

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A History of Britain - The Complete Collection (2008 Repackage)

Sales Rank:1848
List Price: $39.95
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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Box set
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What do you get when you combine the resources and ethos of the BBC with the literary panache of one of the world's best narrative historians? The answer is Simon Schama's History of Britain television series. In this well-written and thoughtfully crafted survey, Schama, the bestselling author of books on European cultural history such as The Embarrassment of Riches and Citizens, has managed to be both conventional and provocative. He tells the official version of Britain's story--Roman Britain, the Norman Conquest, the struggles of the Henrys and Richards, Elizabeth I, Scottish rebellions and the English Civil Wars, the American Revolution, the growth of the British Empire, Queen Victoria, the industrial age, and Winston Churchill. But while sticking to a script familiar to anyone who sat up and listened during history class, Schama brings it all alive with memorable prose and presence--Simon de Montfort's rebel parliament is described as inaugurating the "union between patriotism and insubordination"; with Henry VIII, Schama says, "you could practically smell the testosterone." Schama is also particularly enlightening on the symbolism of buildings, memorials, language, and ceremonies, and on the complex relations between England and its Celtic and Catholic neighbors. If history must have gloss, then let it be presented like this. --Miles Taylor

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New York City Ballet: Bringing Balanchine Back

Sales Rank:2971
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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'New York City Ballet: Bringing Ballachine Back' follows the New York City Ballet, lead by Master in Chief Peter Martins to the Mariinsky theater in St. Petersburg, where ballet legend and NYC Ballet co-founder George Ballachine, along with other greats, took their first ballet steps. The eagerly anticipated trip is the first for the company since 1972 and is gracefully illustrated with both behind-the-scenes and performance footage.

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Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry

Sales Rank:6239
List Price: $19.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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Since 1897, the universities of Michigan and Ohio State have faced off in what has become the most hotly contested rivalry in college football, if not all American sport. This HBO Sports documentary takes a look at the origins of the Michigan-Ohio State rivalry, as well as how the contest evolved through the decades into the all-encompassing rivalry it has become today. No matter what the ranking, the football programs at these two schools gear up every year with a common goal: to beat their archrival on the third weekend in November, and gain bragging rights for a year. The Rivalry: Michigan vs. Ohio State arrives just in time for the 2008 showdown coming this weekend! Be sure to post today! Run Time: 79

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Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

Sales Rank:1135
List Price: $14.98
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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One of the greatest scandals in American corporate history is chronicled in the riveting documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. Based on the bestselling book by Fortune magazine reporters Bethany McLean and Peter Elkin, and directed by Alex Gibney (who also produced The Trials of Henry Kissinger), the film is an epic morality tale, drawing upon a wealth of insider interviews and archival material to show how Enron, once the nation's seventh largest corporate entity, essentially faked its bookkeeping to report profits that never existed. The corrupt and closely-guarded mismanagement by Enron executives (including Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, later placed on criminal trial) is revealed through such heinous concepts as "Hypothetical Future Value" (a way of reaping fortunes based on false profit projections) and the use of offshore "shell" companies to hide the massive losses that eventually toppled the company (along with the venerable Arthur Anderson accounting firm) and left 20,000 employees jobless. As a maddening portrait of hubris and white-collar crime, Enron transcends political and corporate boundaries by showing how smart and powerful men grew blinded by greed and brought ruin upon themselves, along with thousands of otherwise innocent victims. For better and worse, it's a perfect double-feature with eye-opening 2004 documentary The Corporation. --Jeff Shannon

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Victory at Sea - The Legendary World War II Documentary (History Channel)

Sales Rank:5645
List Price: $39.95
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MPAA Rating: NR (Not Rated)

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Actor(s):

A 26-episode World War II documentary, Victory at Sea is one of the most important series in the history of television. Made in 1952, the show was a huge success, winning many major awards and even spawning albums featuring the orchestral score by Richard Rodgers, best known for his musicals with Lorenz Hart and Oscar Hammerstein II. Produced with the full cooperation of the U.S. Navy, each 26-minute program consists of black-and-white wartime film set to a narration by Leonard Graves. The two years leading up to America's entry into the war are dismissed in episode one, while the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor gets a show of its own, the raid depicted in a brilliantly edited montage that almost certainly contains "docu-drama" footage. Each episode contains at least one powerful stand-alone sequence in the tradition of Serge Eisenstein (Battleship Potemkin), these action-suspense set-pieces giving the programs an urgent, surprisingly modern feel. Indeed, the emphasis is at least as much on entertainment as information, the factual content delivered in poetic narration, the score transforming the war into a more than usually serious Hollywood adventure. The documentaries are nothing if not wide-ranging, covering parts of the land war despite the title, and including everything from the Atlantic convoys and U-boat "Wolfpacks" to war in Alaska, the South Atlantic, and the Far East, the Pacific War, and the Fall of Japan. There is an attempt to include other nations--certainly the D-Day episode acknowledges the British far more than Saving Private Ryan--but inevitably the focus is on America's war. The very dated narration gives a fascinating insight into how America saw WWII in the early 1950s, while the dynamic cutting and often genuinely remarkable wartime footage make Victory at Sea still gripping today. Twenty years later, Granada's The World at War would become the definitive television WWII history, but this release offers a unique opportunity to see a series of great importance from the very early days of television. --Gary S. Dalkin

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Biography - Barack Obama (Election Update Edition)

Sales Rank:2729
List Price: $12.95
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MPAA Rating: PG (Parental Guidance Suggested)

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This cable-television biography about the life of Illinois senator Barack Obama was made before he began campaigning to be the Democratic party's candidate for the 2008 presidential race. Still, the program suggests Obama has one or another kind of profound, Anerican destiny as a mixed-race activist who never comfortably fit into one or another group, and had to look deep into his own roots to understand his identity. The son of a white American mother and black Kenyan father, Obama was abandoned by the latter when he returned to his native country to work for its improvement. Raised by his mother--whom Obama credits with teaching him many of his values--and his grandmother, Obama lived in Hawaii as a child but moved to Indonesia for a few years when his mom remarried. There, Obama saw cyclical poverty and the underlying factors that perpetuate it before returning to Hawaii. Interviews with childhood friends and his sister describe Obama's restlessness before attending Harvard law school and propelling himself into a life of public service and community activism. Often accused of lacking enough political experience to qualify him for the White House, Obama comes across in this show as a visionary and experienced consensus-builder who can reach across opposing points of view. The program ends with details about Obama's entry into the U.S. Senate and his rise in the Democratic party, but a post-program coda catches us up with the history of his recent campaign. --Tom Keogh

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