Sydney: A Story of a City

Rating:
Summary: Much more than a love story
Review: "Sydney: A Story of a City" is an attempt to make a hip IMAX film. The tagline is "a modern love story ...with a past" but the romance element is hardly visible. It's by and large a documentary on the history of Sydney, told through the eyes of Virginia (Lucy Bell), an English woman searching for her ancestors. Along the way she meets Marco (Paul Mercurio), an archaeologist uncovering relics from the first years of the colony. He helps with her search, pointing out the highlights of Sydney along the way.

As usual with IMAX, the views of Sydney are glorious and quite diverse. It's not just shots of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, as one might expect. There are views of The Rocks, the Blue Mountains, Bondi beach, the Hyde Park War Memorial, and many of the oldest buildings in the city. Unfortunately, they are rarely identified, so it helps to have some familiarity with the city. This is possibly the only IMAX film to actually include an IMAX theater, seen zooming past as the duo drive across a bridge.

There are four bonus features, each running 5-10 minutes. The first is a crash course on how to play the digeridoo. The next is a digeridoo performance with pop-up info-bites about the instrument. The last two features are Aboriginal stories with some very low-budget special effects. I found none of these to be particularly interesting, but when the main feature runs just 40 minutes, it's nice to have any special features at all.

I recommend this DVD to anyone looking for picturesque views of Sydney with a light history lesson. The actors are often shown as small dots in the foreground, so I couldn't recommend it to their fans.

Rating:
Summary: Much more than a love story
Review: "Sydney: A Story of a City" is an attempt to make a hip IMAX film. The tagline is "a modern love story ...with a past" but the romance element is hardly visible. It's by and large a documentary on the history of Sydney, told through the eyes of Virginia (Lucy Bell), an English woman searching for her ancestors. Along the way she meets Marco (Paul Mercurio), an archaeologist uncovering relics from the first years of the colony. He helps with her search, pointing out the highlights of Sydney along the way.

As usual with IMAX, the views of Sydney are glorious and quite diverse. It's not just shots of the Opera House and Harbour Bridge, as one might expect. There are views of The Rocks, the Blue Mountains, Bondi beach, the Hyde Park War Memorial, and many of the oldest buildings in the city. Unfortunately, they are rarely identified, so it helps to have some familiarity with the city. This is possibly the only IMAX film to actually include an IMAX theater, seen zooming past as the duo drive across a bridge.

There are four bonus features, each running 5-10 minutes. The first is a crash course on how to play the digeridoo. The next is a digeridoo performance with pop-up info-bites about the instrument. The last two features are Aboriginal stories with some very low-budget special effects. I found none of these to be particularly interesting, but when the main feature runs just 40 minutes, it's nice to have any special features at all.

I recommend this DVD to anyone looking for picturesque views of Sydney with a light history lesson. The actors are often shown as small dots in the foreground, so I couldn't recommend it to their fans.

Rating:
Summary: Escape to the past and come to the present
Review: A great history / love story DVD in IMAX, I especially liked the Phil Jones special feature that teaches about the Didgeridoo and Australia.

Also some cool folk stories about Emus andnew slant on how the world was created.