I'm not even sure why I bought this. I hated the book. Not because it is poor literature, on the contrary, it is actually well-written. I hate Lord of the Flies simply because it is so depressive. It has nothing good to say about humanity, that as a whole, without law and order, we devolve into anarchy. The bold, honest truth of it shocks you.

That said, the movie is well-filmed. The acting is reasonable and believable for the most part, even considering all the actors and the film crew are complete novices. And actually improves as the film progresses due to ther gaining experience in the medium (the film was short in sequence with events in the book). Something has to be said for the style of filming too, which mirrored the story itself. An island where children eventually shirk off rules, sinking towards anarchy. And a method of non-directing, filmmaking without rules. Set up the shots, let the children know what is basically required, and then let them improvise the solution. It proved to be quite effective.

Perhaps not technically a great film, but certainly an effective film. Not one I can watch much, simply because it upsets me to watch it. It is a pessimistic, though truthful, snapshot of humanity at its worst.

There is a good collection of extras on the disc and the commentary is reasonably interesting.

If you're going to post several reviews per day, please try to consolidate them into a single thread.

--Heather
DVD Reviews moderator

Perhaps you should stop being quite so uptight.

It makes it easier to comment on a specific review if they are in individual threads.

If you don't like it, then tough. Pull an SS on my posts if you want.

Dog Breath, I'll be contacting you via e-mail.

--Heather
DVD Reviews moderator

Heather, I would appreciate it if you could explain in public what the problem is. I wasn't at all aware of this "rule". He's supposed to review completely unrelated movies in one thread? That doesn't make sense to me. It's not like he's spamming the board, he's providing exactly the service that this forum was created for. If the DVD Reviews forum was especially busy I could understand it, but it's not. It gets about 10 new threads per day at the most.

Please explain.

Dog Breath, over the past couple of days, has posted 7 separate reviews of Criterion discs. I asked that he consolidate them because his reviews are bumping other reviews and requests off the front page of topic listings when he could simply have a "Criterion Reviews" thread. It would be easy to maintain and easy for people to reply to, as we have not only quoting features but also post subject lines. I've made the same request in the past when we've had particularly active posters, just as I made a similar request when the Talk forum became overrun with polls several months ago. I think the reviews are great, but it wasn't unreasonable to ask that he not post all of them separately, especially when he was posting so many of them.

Also, some members may be unaware that Dog Breath's first several posts at DVD Talk were spam for a Criterion web site, which violates forum rules. It's fine to be a vocal fan of a company's, but he was taking it to a level that had members flooding my inbox, and the webmaster of the site he was promoting apologizing (see the Feedback forum).

--Heather

[Edited by DVDer on 05-27-01 at 10:31 PM]