This article was published on Blair Space at:
http://music.blairspace.com/reviews/12.html
Britney Spears - My Prerogative DVD
When Britney Planet published the news of Britney’s DVD to go with her greatest hits DVD it was described as “featuring all the hit videos, enhanced features and loads of cool stuff.” I question how much “cool stuff” there actually was but all in all, not a bad DVD.
When you first fire up your player you are presented with a 3D timeline of all the videos which you can scroll up and down on to get to the disk you want. That said the navigation can be a little confusing although that’s a minor problem.
There is no shortage of videos with everything from My Prerogative itself back to Baby One More Time. To go back to the menu though it has some neat effects with it appearing seamlessly from the opening scene and it flicks through each video which plays while the others stop. That said I am still finding myself hitting the wrong arrow key every now and then – and pressing the opposite button does not necessarily bring you back to where you were before.
The other parts of the navigation allow you to play everything, have a random video selected and some weird clock thing which appears to do the same thing. Ok I am going to move on now, the fact is, the menu is crap but we can skip past that as it isn’t what the DVD is about.
The other major feature of the disk is alt-view where you can experience the videos in “new or different ways.” When you select alt view it flips the menu round and you can browse through it.
Unfortunately I question the usefulness of this section. For instance the material for “Opps! I did it again” is a solid three minutes of Britney dancing around in her red suit. Appealing yes but it there is a reason it is intercut with the rest of the video. It is less appealing when you are watching the same thing throughout the entire video. It isn’t just this video either.
Luckily not all videos fall pray to this – I’m a Slave To You offers an acapella version of the song with Britney dancing in front of the camera. It gets better too you can flick between audio for just Britney’s vocals or the whole song and have a choice of camera angles too.
For what it’s worth the DVD does attempt to throw variety at you on the alt view. For instance Toxic is done in karaoke without Britney’s vocals and with the words for you to sing along to. How this got classified as a U I don’t know though – the new angel has Britney topless on the screen only just covered over by the bulky green letters of the lyrics.
The hidden extras appear to be less hidden than I expected (presuming what I think they said were “hidden extras” where what I found and I didn’t miss the actual ones ;) as during the videos random words will appear to allow you to activate new audio and video.
Not that I am complaining about the obviousness, hidden features really bug me when they are advertised, if I paid for a DVD I expect to be able to access content. If they are going to keep it hidden then don’t advertise it as a product feature! I mean do Microsoft list “hidden game” as part of the Excel feature list? Of course not. Enough ranting, on with the review.
As for lasting appeal, I’m not sure. Avril Lavigne’s My World DVD has some but there was a documentary on that, with the lack of detailed extra content I’m not sure how much you will keep coming back to it.
So my conclusion – if you’re a big Britney fan and you love the videos and watch them a lot then check this one out. You will have easy access to them and all the extras. However if videos aren’t your thing then give this one a miss as you aren’t missing much else.
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