Rating: 
Summary: A Breath of Fresh Air!
Review: 1 Giant Leap shines above the cookie-cutter, formulated music & visuals that are thrown at consumers these days. It's beautiful to look at, thought provoking and moving to listen to.
Rating:
Summary: A Masterpiece
Review: A beautiful blending of philosophy and world music put together with loving care. Can be watched again and again.
Rating:
Summary: Music for Todays Spirit!
Review: A great CD! The more I listen to it, the more I love it.
Rating: 
Summary: Mildly interesting, but mostly a disappointment
Review: A great deal of hard work and technical and artistic expertise have gone into making this ingeniously-designed film, but IMHO it was mostly to no avail. While the film contains some beautiful imagery and some beautiful music, its philosophizing is truly lame, and I found several of the speakers who appear in the film to be enormously pretentious, stupid, and irritating. This is MTV-style pseudo-philosophy of the shallowest kind.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting...sort of.
Review: A melange of quick-cut, commercial-style, mostly third-world images (think Powaqqatsi on fast-forward, but without the thematic cohesion) set to a pan-Indian/African flavored soundtrack (similar to the band Deep Forest), interspersed with occasionally insightful, sometimes banal philosophical and political observations by mostly non-academics (actors, musicians, etc.) on a variety of themes (time, death, money, etc.) at one theme per chapter. Each chapter is accompanied by its own song, and each song is a skillfully assembled montage of the voices and instruments of musicians from around the world, recorded on location and later interwoven. The sound quality is good (excellent 5 channel separation), but suffers from a certain sameness throughout (compare the soundrack to Baraka, for example, which has greater variety and remains truer to place and theme). Shots of the skillful musicians performing are surprisingly uninspiring and prosaic (the film needs a good cinematographer). Editing is frenetic, lacking the visual poetry of Baraka or even the vastly overrated Godfrey Reggio films, and half of the too-short and frequently repetitive scenes in each chapter aren't well contextualized and could just as easily have been in another chapter. Unfortunately, the frequent speaking parts impede the film's success as a good ambient video (at a party for example), and because the speaking parts aren't voiceovers, it also fails when used in that manner with your own music instead of the film's own soundrack (who wants music to an ordinary talking head, even of ex-pornstar Sharon Mitchell). Eh.
Rating:
Summary: a rarity amongst media pieces
Review: Every year, there are a few media projects that capture the imagination, and provide wider perspectives on "life, the universe, and everything."
Here you have one. Or two. The Music is inspirational and poignant.
The arrangements draw from many cultures, with the musical performers being some of the best on our globe. Baaba Maal, Asha Bhosle, Brian Eno, and many, many more. The PASSION obvious in the screen production of the "1 Giant Leap," DVD is a joy, and a reality-check. Both. Throughout.
Some of the speakers are rarely heard outside of the books they write.
There are strong moments, as some in this arena have mentioned before. See it first before your children do, or as the DVD is segmentalized into "concepts," one can choose the parts appropriate for any particular audience.
The DVD is not a completely "light" feeling production, at times, but it is sparkling, at others. Highly recommended.
Can you tell...?
Rating:
Summary: Truly eye-opening.
Review: Everyone should watch this DVD at least once. It provides an eye-opening view of our relation to all of humankind. The images are amazing. The music is incredable. And the editing is first-rate. It's broken up into chapters (money, masks, culture, inspiration, God(faith, blasphemy, unity), sex, time, confrentation, death, happy). These make it easy to pick and choose what you want to watch again... and again.
Rating:
Summary: Enlightened, Encouraged & Energiized
Review: For more than 2 months a local, independently owned theater here in Durango showed 1 Giant Leap to sold out audiences. In a time when peace, tolerance, acceptance, and unity are so desperately needed throughout our world everyone should experience the incredible results of Duncan and Jamie's ambitious undertaking. I cannot conceive of ever tiring of listening to the CD or viewing the DVD and am committed to spreading the word of 1 Giant Leap in my world. To Duncan, Jamie and all those who participated, many, many thanks for sharing your creativity!
Rating:
Summary: A beautiful leap...
Review: Having travelled to many of the locations featured in this beautiful film, and getting a very real chance to relive some of those experiences by viewing this DVD, I can only say buy it-it is real. This is NOT a film about RACE as -myopically- stated by an earlier reviewer and it is NOT a new age look at the world - it is about SO many things-consumerism, religion & God, sex, love, life, mortality, music...it is REAL. This review is not based on whether this movie was conceptually, an original idea, but on the thought provoking content.
I could go on & on. Wonderful.
Rating:
Summary: Truly a Giant Leap!
Review: I was fortunate enough to stumble upon the first public preview of this DVD last month at Yerba Buena Gardens, in San Francisco. This DVD is so incredible! It didn't take long to recognize the creative alchemy and authenticity that went into this work. The result is a treasure of profound beauty and thoughtful wisdom.The music, the imagery, the story-telling and spoken word, all fused brilliantly with inspired arrangements... I've not seen anything else quite like it--1 Giant Leap is as thought-provoking as it is beautiful to watch. The information is densely packed, throughout. The DVD is initially set to let you play just one chapter at a time. This is to allow viewers to take it all in and evoke discussion. There is also a 'jukebox mode' to let the viewer create their own viewing experiences, as well as a 'loop mode' to play the whole thing in its entirety. One Giant Leap is a a real treasure, and I whole-heartedly recommend it!
|
