Silent Hill Movie

Silent Hill
$2.99
Very happy with my dvd; service was just great; wouldn't hesitate to shop for more products. Have always had good luck with Amazon.

Biograph Shorts: Griffith Masterworks
$29.95
(At least some of them!) As we are informed, DW Griffith was an actor in early films then with The Adventures of Dollie, became quite a prolific director, averaging 2-3 shorts per week. The films are quite good and quite interesting. As we know from DW Griffith, his films have a high moral tone to them and are almost exclusively about good vs. evil. Many have high adventures such as Dollie getting trapped in a barrel and surviving going over some waterfalls or an attack by Indians in the Battle of Elderbush Gulch. All that practice must have inspired DW Griffith to try the first American feature film over an hour, A Birth of a Nation based on The Klansman. The movies here are well restored and extreme care was taken in putting this contemplation together. I really enjoyed the musical scores. I have stereo speakers above my TV and the music is just beautiful and perfect for the films presented. Very nice.

Laurel & Hardy: Battle of Century (Silent) [VHS]
$9.98
It's unfortunate that the entirety of this film does not survive, since it seems like it could have had a lot more substance and a better-developed plot if the missing sections were intact. Here we see the first reel, featherweight boxer Stan up against a big burly opponent (the great character actor Noah Young). Stan knocks him cold in the first round, but things don't go so nicely in the following round. Ollie, his manager, knows that something has to be done to bring in the money and to make sure that Stan gets out of the ring before he has another chance to be slaughtered. And this is the section that is lost. What we don't see is Ollie taking out an insurance policy on Stan so that they'll stand to collect a lot of money if he gets injured. Ollie also arranges for Stan to conveniently get injured, by slipping on a banana peel. However, as we find out in the surviving half of the second reel, a pie delivery man (the always wonderful Charley Hall) slips on it instead, and as fans know, this little guy had a big temper. Before long pies are flying in all directions, with everyone in town, seemingly, getting in on the act. Of course, this was also the biggest pie-fight in movie history. And the ending shot alone is priceless, gorgeous Anita Garvin falling right on top of a pie and clearly having pie filling lodged in a very uncomfortable and inconvenient area. She walks off with the picture as she walks away, discreetly trying to shake the pie filling off. That kind of thing would probably have never been allowed after the Hays Code came into being.

This film was on the brink of decomposition when it was rescued and restored, even in this abridged surviving format. Some people might like the other version which includes the script and stills, but that's not really as entertaining as watching the surviving format. That kind of thing is good to watch once for curiosity, but I don't think most people would prefer to watch a film constantly being interrupted by pages of scripts. And as for people dense enough to claim that the reason this film doesn't survive in full is because it wasn't important and hasn't stood the test of time are seriously misinformed about the real reasons behind the poor survival rates of silent films. We're lucky all of L&H's silents have survived apart from 'Hats Off' and the missing sections of this film; many other big stars were not as lucky. It had nothing to do with how good or bad these films were or how important they were to a person's career; it had everything to do with people not caring about an artform that was deemed a dinosaur overnight, and not even caring about preserving a large portion of film history till for many films it was too late.

Silent Hill (Fullscreen Edition)
$14.94
An excellent portrayal of how people can be terrorized into committing horrible crimes. Being an atheist I often wondered what it would be like to be branded as a heretic and burned alive at the stake by the church like what has happened throughout history. I wonder no more -- This movie did an excellent job of portraying just that. One might counter "we don't burn people at the stake anymore and beside this was only a movie -- this is the 21st century. WRONG. In 1952 a man was burned at the stake in Spain. Also a pacifist I again wonder how one could forgive a church who did things like this to their children. There seems to be no limit to the cruelty portrayed in this movie and its parallel to real life. It reminds me of the brazen bull; a device used during the beginning of the Christian era in which whole families including children were placed inside and roasted to death. I would like to believe these are isolated incidents and this sort of rare event could not happen to me or another person who disagrees with a church or religion. But then who wants to be part of a rare event that ends their life by being burned to death.