Customer Rating: 
Summary: This is amazing:D
Comment: I am a big big fan of Chris Cunningham's work and I just love everything about this DVD. It has music videos that I love on them so I can show my family how brilliant he is. I was sad that they didn't have rubber Johnny on there but that is ok. The only thing that is really on this thing is music videos and one behind the scenes with Bjork and Chris. I would only recommend buying this if you want the music videos in your possession.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't work!
Comment: If you are a UK customer - DO NOT BUY THIS! Bought one for myself and one as a gift and they didn't play - just read 'wrong region disc'. This should be made more clear when buying product. Better things to do with my time than to be sending back unsuitable goods, so didn't get a refund. I also received another one which I had cancelled so I've ended up with 3 completely useless DVDs!!! F***ING RIP OFF!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Why stories aren't necessary for well executed nightmares
Comment: I write this review mainly to react on a kind of comment I often here but never realy get. It's the standard comment that a a book, a movie or a video, how skillfully crafted or how originally conceived in the beginning, is never really good when there is no real story line. Apparently there must be a tale to be told, going from A to B and ending with Z. (And if you are Christopher Nolan or David Lynch your stories may go from B to D to Y and ending with J or something. But, at the end, a lot of people keep on saying: "there must be a narrative".)
Why? I ask. What is wrong with a single image? I mean look at American painter Edward Hopper, to me the greatest artist of all: He haunts us with scenes of alienation and loneliness that stick, that haunts and reflects. Cetain photographers win World Press Photo Awards for capturing big events in one single shot, or: one single blink of the eye. Of course, the pictures created carry with them loads of tales and history, otherwise the pictures wouldn't have been taken in the first place.
Now here we have a video artist, Chris Cunningham, whose work we now can admire on one disc: Eight video's which presents us with nightmarish worlds in anonymous urban landscapes (Leftfield's "Afrika Shox" and Aphex Twins' "Come to daddy" and "Windowlicker"), nameless deserts (Madonna's "Frozen"), surreal Japanese lunybins for deranged kiddies (Squarepusher's "Come to my selector") and a static white room where futuristic robo-intelligence is perfectly combined with claustrophobic erotisism (Bj�rk's "All is full of love"). All of these worlds presented here have a kind of autism, in the sense of `being in it's own world'.
So following this comment I conclude that Cunningham makes Art For The Sake Of Art. (the original Frensh slogan for this kind of work of course, by the way, is: l'Art pour l'art).
These video's are sometimes scary as in the case of the menacing bunch of ever-grinning gettho-midges in "Come to daddy", but at the same time, drenched in a juicy sause of oozing black humour. The same can be said about "Afrika Shock" in which a psychotic black guy wanders the streets without anyone reaching out for him, literaly losing his limbs one at the time. Creepy, otherworldy and yet filled with moments for sickening laughs: We don't know whether to be seriously shocked or secretly amused, as with the best works of Kafka.
And talking about Kafka, here is one of the best writers in the world, whose real strength to me are still his short pieces of fiction, which are as plotless as Cunninghams visions right here, but which visually stunning, arresting and, at best, are little drops of liquid acid, secreted underneath our eyelids.
Story isn't necessary is just what I want to say, when a well crafted portrait, scene, vision or visual prophecy is enough to captivate us, and makes us shiver (or, okay okay, secretly laugh out loud).
And we have Cunningham to prove it. So I can now rest my case.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The videos aren't bad, but the presentation is horrible...
Comment: "All is Full of Love" is a brilliant video in every respect - it's perverse and transcendent at the same time, mixing in humaniform robots with flowing water and hard ceramic - it looks like the future of robot porn.
However, what makes me only able to listen to it for brief periods is the menus. Whoever decided that it'd be a good idea to play a hideous cacaphony of every song on the disk, apparently played backwards and at high speed during the menu screens, ought to be horsewhipped for ruining an otherwise good disk. (Even if it is Chris Cunningham.) When the menu screens make you want to take the disk out and throw it out the window, you gotta reconsider the wisdom of doing that.
Fortunately, I believe that "All is Full of Love" is available on another Bjork video collection, so I'll buy that and sell this one to the local CD/Video concern.
-Darren MacLennan
Customer Rating:
Summary: not 400 minutes - more like 60. Quality awesome, quantity really bad
Comment: I saw this DVD for sale in Urban Outfitters, and decided to use the money I got from returning another gift to the store to get it, after I confirmed on Amazon.com that the running time was long (they say 400 minutes above!). I was worried because it didn't list very many works on the back cover, but I thought maybe they didn't list everything.
Well, I just pulled it out now and after an hour and a half at most, probably more like an hour, I'm done watching the entire DVD. I feel kind of cheated, if what the other reviewer here says is true, that Chris Cunningham actually has a lot of other music videos that weren't put on this DVD. The "flex" video was particularly disappointing, it starts off with so much potential and then suddenly ends, so that it's obvious that they cut it off.
To make things more insulting, the booklet that they include with the DVD, which is full of pictures from his videos and some interviews, includes lots of still frames from videos that aren't on the DVD. There are all these cool shots of videos that I would love to see, but they didn't include them. Nor is there any attempt to explain why they're not there. In fact, in some cases (for example, "Engine") it appears that they actually cut out scenes from the videos on this DVD.
What they do have is great, which just leaves me wanting more. "All is Full Of Love" is mesmerizing, I had to watch it twice it was so good. "Leftfield," "Windowlicker" and "Come to Daddy" manage to be both funny and haunting at the same time. Portishead's "Only You" is a bit of a disappointment, but I could see how others would like it. Madonna's "Frozen" is also beautiful. Anyway I don't want to get more specific lest I ruin it for those who haven't seen it already.
At any rate, I would not recommend this purchase for most people. For *SOME* people it might be a good purchase, if like me you've seen maybe one of the videos and really liked it and want to check out some more of his work. But if you're looking for a complete collection of Chris Cunningham's work, this unfortunately isn't it, and I don't think it will be worth your $20 to get it since all the main features are things you probably have already seen several times.
Also - don't be fooled by the fact that it says it's a "collection of music videos, short films, video installations and commercials." There is one short film (a 5 minute interview with him and Bjork) and 2 video installations (a video called "Monkey Drummer" which is not all that great, and flex which gets cut off). There are 3 commercials, none of which is all that good, except maybe the "mental wealth" one (if you can understand it which I can't).
Anyway, somebody from Amazon.com should fix that runtime listing.
(Incidentally, it looks like the rest of the Director's Label DVD's don't suffer from this problem, they have a lot of content.)
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