The Movie: I borrowed this cool little DVD from my cousin Jason. It's a collection of music videos directed by Spike Jonze, who has since moved on to direct feature films such as Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. All I can say is this guy's brain is definitely wired in a different way, and his experimentation with different frame rates, slow/fast/reverse motion, and his interesting concepts definitely put his music videos in a higher category than your regular run of the mill type stuff.

The videos you get are: Wax - California; Beastie Boys - Sure Shot; The Pharcyde - Drop; The Breeders - Cannonball ; Beastie Boys - Sabotage; Daft Punk - Da Funk; Fatlip - What's Up Fatlip?; Weezer - Undone (The Sweater Song); Fatboy Slim - Praise You; Dinosaur Jr. - Feel the Pain; MC 900ft Jesus - If I Only Had A Brain; Notorious B.I.G. - Sky's The Limit; Fatboy Slim - Weapon of Choice; Weezer - Buddy Holly; The Chemical Brothers - Elektrobank; and Björk - It's Oh So Quiet.

On top of that, many of the videos have audio and/or video commentary from the artists, some even have multiple commentary tracks, some of which are quite wacky. Fatboy slim does all of his commentary tracks while sitting in a bathtub. Christopher Walken's commentary on the "Weapon of Choice" video is worth hearing, as is the commenary by Puff Daddy on the Notorious B.I.G. video which was done posthumously, and talks about how the concept of the video came together.

There's also a 40 minute long segment with the Beastie Boys doing running commentary while watching some of theirs and other artists' videos on this DVD, with an almost Beavis and Butthead style vibe.

But hey, that's just side A! Flip the disc over and you get a number of rare short films and documentaries by Spike Jonze. I particularly enjoyed the short film "How They Get There" which explores one way old shoes might end up on the side of the road, and "Amarillo by Morning," a documentary about a couple of suburban Texan teenagers with a dream to become pro bull riders though they are the only two wannabe cowboys in a high school full of hip hop heads.

As if all that wasn't enough, there's also a 52 page booklet full of Spike Jonze's photographs, drawings and interviews on the various videos. There's a lot of pretty darned cool stuff in there. If you're a Spike Jonze fan, or you're into filmmaking that's just a bit on the edge, I'm sure you'll find a lot of stuff in here that will be interesting and entertaining to you!

The DVD: Video quality on this disc seems to vary with the video quality of the original source, with some older videos like "California" (which is a single slow motion shot of a guy running down the street on fire and was featured on Beavis and Butthead shortly after it was ruled they were no longer allowed to say the word "fire") bing a little dimmer, a little fuzzier, and a little grainier than others, while super bling-bling big budget videos like "Sky's The Limit" and "Weapon of Choice" look fantastic, with crisp resolution and bold colors.

Videos which were shot with widescreen aspect ratios in mind are shown in hard-matted non-anamorphic widescreen, though it could be argued that all of these videos were meant to be watched on TV, so I won't count that against this DVD.

Audio quality was generally very good, again varying with the quality of the original source, though the lower quality clips were still pretty good. And as far as special features go... except for the music videos themselves, this entire DVD is pretty much one gigantic special feature, as you can see by what I've written about it above.

The menu design is also interesting, without being over the top, featuring some animated versions of Spike's own drawings. The one thing more I'd like to see on this DVD is some of the work Spike has done on TV commercials, particularly the brilliant Y2K commercial he did for Nike. Overall, a very clean execution on this DVD release. Check it out!