The Movie: Scratch is an award winning documentary that covers the art of the DJ and its influence on hip-hop music, from its birth with the earliest hip-hop DJ's on up through its evolution into what they call "turntablism" today. I found myself enjoying it overall, and that was with me just having a mild interest in the subject matter at hand. I'm sure it will be enlightening to just about anyone, and maybe even inspiring to someone who is genuinely interested in DJing.

Many of the interviews and stories as told by the artists themselves were both entertaining and enlightening, as were the demonstration sections. Some of the DJ's appearing in this film are: DJ Shadow, Mix Master Mike, DJ Qbert, and Rob Swift along with some old schoolers like Afrika Bambaataa and Grand Mixer DXT. The total package was cut together in a slick, exciting way. It's quite a well done documentary. On the downside, at times I wished the demonstration sections lasted a bit longer as there was some truly jawdropping stuff going on, and I think the film really slowed down a lot about 2/3rds of the way through the film, borderlining on getting boring, but thankfully, it picked up again at the end and finished strong.

I very highly recommend this film to folks who are interested in turntablism, highly recommend it to people who have an interest or a love for hip hop music, and just plain recommend it for anyone else.

The DVD: This is a two-disc set, with the main film and some special on the first disc, and some more special features on the second disc.

The video on this DVD reflects the extreme graininess of the original film, which looks to have been shot on 16mm. Although shadow detail is actually pretty good, overall contrast is poor, and the colors are not as saturated as you'd see on a modern major big big budget motion picture, but I'm pretty sure the DVD faithfully reproduced the quality of the original film.

Audio quality ranged from not so good, to great, depending on the original source material from the film, with a handful of little surround effects thrown in for good measure.

Special features on the first disc include audio commentary by the director, some deleted footage, a trailer for this film, and some trailers for some other films. I particularly enjoyed the extended footage from the DJ Shadow interviews.

Special features on the second disc were not so special, as they were basically all advertisements for other DVDs. One was an excerpt from DJ Qbert's "do it yourself" instructional DVD, which actually was quite innovative with its use of the DVD format's multiple angle and audio track abilities, another was an excerpt from the animated movie "Wave Twisters" based on music by DJ Qbert, and selections from the DVD series "Battle Sounds".

There was actually a couple of interesting things on this second disc that weren't necessarily ads for other products however. The first is a little lesson in the art of DJing with DJ Z-Trip which provides some insight into some of the techniques and skills employed by successful DJ's, and the other was a short demonstration of the scratch notation system for the transcription of scratch routines. Oh yes, and there are more trailers for more other DVDs on this second disc as well.

Overall, it's a pretty nice little DVD release, though I do wish the second disc didn't seem so much like a collection of advertisements.