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Category:    Home > Reviews > Variety Show > Music > Comedy > TV > Rockumentary > Australia > Biopic > Soul > Pop > Cable TV > The Best Of Ed Sullivan (Star Vista/Time Life DVD Set Compilation)/Sunbury '72 + Sunbury '73 (Umbrella Region Free/Zero PAL Import DVDs)/Whitney (2014 Cable TV Movie/Lifetime/Lionsgate DVD)

The Best Of Ed Sullivan (Star Vista/Time Life DVD Set Compilation)/Sunbury '72 + Sunbury '73 (Umbrella Region Free/Zero PAL Import DVDs)/Whitney (2014 Cable TV Movie/Lifetime/Lionsgate DVD)


Picture: C+/C/C/C Sound: C+/C/C/C Extras: B-/C+/D/D Main Programs: B/B/B-/D



PLEASE NOTE: The Sunbury Import DVDs are now only available from our friends at Umbrella Entertainment in Australia, can only play on DVD players that can handle the PAL DVD and can be ordered from the link below.



Here are some mew music releases with all kinds of highs and lows...



The Best Of Ed Sullivan might seem like a music-only compilation reflecting the syndicated shows of his catalog over the years, but it actually contains a series of relatively more recent specials that kept getting high ratings for a desperate CBS. The 6-DVD set includes Carol Burnett hosting Unforgettable Performances, The Smothers Brothers hosting The 50th Anniversary Special, The All-Star Comedy Special, World's Greatest Comedy Acts and Amazing Animal Acts. The pre-Internet formatting might seem like it drags at times, but this is a worthwhile set that gives you an idea of how great the show was. If you want more than just a few clips or what you saw on TV here and there, this set is a good place to start.


Extras include two hours of new interviews with legends who were on the show including Phyllis Diller, Joan Rivers, Flip Wilson, Milton Berle, Jackie Mason, Smokie Robinson, Rich Little and many others, plus the only surviving on-camera interview with Sullivan and his wife Sylvia.



Ray Wagstaff's Sunbury '72 and Peter Faiman's Sunbury '73 are two major, exciting, landmark rock concerts that happened as part of the worldwide counterculture movement, but this time, in Australia. Though none of the acts really made it in the USA (aka The States) and would be better known in the UK and definitely in New Zealand, that takes nothing away from them. The big attraction both times was Billy Thorpe & The Aztecs, a band from the 1960s really breaking out and rockin' out as the country's premiere rock band.


Shot on color 16mm film like all Rockumentaries of the time, '72 is well edited, shot and captures the non-stop energy of the time in a show worthy of the best shows the US and the UK ever had with everyone having a really good time. Umbrella is reissuing this on DVD, though it deserves a Blu-ray and restoration is necessary and overdue for it. Chain, Warren Morgan, Max Merritt & The Meteors (delivering a great cover of Try A Little Tenderness that is missing the audience reaction when they wrap up), Scra, Lobby Laden & The Wild Cherries, Pirana, Michael Turner and Phil Manning and someone doing a nice cover of Led Zeppelin’s Immigrant Song. It's a great show deserving of discovery and serious rediscovery. The Aztecs' cover of CC Rider mows over all over recordings, live and studio of the overplayed classic by making it their own. This runs a too-short 97 minutes.


For '73, a switch was made to professional PAL videotape, though it was early reel-to-reel tape and in black and white. Though the excitement is captured and we get the fun of seeing a then state of the art TV video studio, hosted by Ken Sparkes. The Aztecs are joined this time by Mississippi, Ross Ryan (with a cover of Don McLean's American Pie), Greg Quill & Country Road, Broderick Smith & Carson and (introduced by a young Paul Hogan) classic vocalist Johnny O'Keefe. This runs 45 minutes, but is enough of a Rockumentary, even if shot on old video and does a good job of capturing the show. Like the last show, I just wish this one ran longer.


Extras on '72 include text on the history of the festival, six bonus songs by The Aztecs in black and white including CC Rider and Heartbeat Hotel on videotape, another four songs by the band on 16mm film off of a black and white TV (it is monophonic, but the credits say there is a 8-track recording of this show; where is it?), a clip of the band talking about dealing with VD on the road, a special random mode to enjoy the concert songs and 3 trailers for other Umbrella releases, while '73 has no extras.



Finally we have a TV movie so bad, many are still in shock. Actress Angela Bassett tries her hand at directing with Whitney (2014), an extremely idiotic, inaccurate, silly, stupid attempt at a biopic of the late singer with a script from Bizarro world that I still cannot believe it was made... until I see it was from the nitwits at the Lifetime Network! In 88 horrific minutes, we see Whitney Houston (Yaya DaCosta) meet New Edition member-gone-solo Bobby Brown (Arlen Escarpeta) meet and shockingly fall for each other immediately. Unlike real life, Houston is naïve-nice and Brown seems more like he is ready for the cast of the original What's Happening!! than the troubled performer he is, always has been and always will be. So unnaturally nice here, you'd think Brown 100% funded this mess.


Then there are few of Houston's hits (poor Deborah Cox tries singing those few with disastrous results), we hardly see any other big names despite the success of both and mother Cissy Houston, then the tale is cleaned of the well-documented drugs and drinking the real life couple became known for. Music history means nothing (film history gets a few lines for what Houston did) and the weakest link of all is the hideous, angry (and arguably homophobic) portrayal of Arista Records President and Houston advocate Clive Davis.


Instead of being the music genius and all-time producing success he was, he is played here as an opportunistic jerk (as if he just arrived in the music business!), master manipulator, goof and in a bigoted turn, semi-white nationalist who was trying to keep Houston 'white' so she could sell more records. The script hints at this early with one of his first lines of dialogue (yes, I caught that one!) and every time Davis shows up, he just want Houston to work more, make more money, be a money machine and treat everything else as secondary. If Davis was not a public figure, this would be a defamation-of-character lawsuit, but anyone with a brain will be defamed watching this mess.


As a result of its stance, layout, ideology and structure, the telefilm is suggesting that fame, pressure and her marriage did not kill Houston, but that Davis is the one who eventually pushed her over the edge, disrespecting Bobby and thinking of all of his African American music artists as a joke in the worst kind of race baiting I have ever seen in a TV movie. Translation, Houston being forced to do 'white music' cost her her 'soul' making Davis a 'devil' as if all of Houston's songs were lite and had no soul content. Debates about the various songs are a separate essay, as debatable as the music of Diana Ross, Shirley Bassey or cousin Dionne Warwick, whose classic, groundbreaking Bacharach/David classic were 'too white' for African American audiences and vice versa. It is ugly, angry and highly intellectually dishonest race bating and as for Miss Bassett, who played Tina Turner, is she actually implying Turner's hits has more Soul content or were 'more Black' than Houston's? Totally asinine logic, historically inaccurate and musically illiterate to boot!!!


There are thankfully no extras.



The 1.33 X 1 image on Sullivan ranges from old black and white tape and kinescopes to color videotape and is just fine for older transfers for the respective original years of the TV specials, but look for some flaws and aliasing errors, which is also the case for the all monochrome Sunbury '73, which is softer and on the clean side. Sunbury '72 was shot on 16mm color film (possibly Kodak, plus maybe Agfa and/or Ilford?) in a print that is scratchy and has mixed color.


That leaves the anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image on Whitney actually softer than expected and despite being at least 40 years newer than the rest of the entries here, is poor throughout.


As for sound, the lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono on the Sullivan (with barely stereo newer material in some specials) and both Sunbury DVDs are not great by today's standards, but the Sunbury releases are a generation down, so be careful of high levels and volume switching. So you would think the lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 on Whitney would be the sonic champ here, but it is so compressed and weak that the soundstage is a mess and at too low a volume.


Why did they even bother?



To order either of the Sunbury Umbrella import DVD, go to this link for them and many other hard to find releases at:


http://www.umbrellaent.com.au/



- Nicholas Sheffo


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