Beauty in a Jar

Very Informative! A Must-See!
You might not think that a documentary about the make-up industry would be interesting, but it really was. The work goes from saying how women in the 1890s would have associated wearing make-up with evening ladies, to women in the 1950s not walking around the house without being made up, to 1970s feminists condemning makeup, to its future in this century. The work is inclusive of Black women, not only post-Civil Rights, but a century ago when Madame C.J. Walker became a millionaire. The work even interviews Lypsinka, a drag artist, touching upon how issues of makeup and femininity may be of importance to biological males too. An essential undercurrent of the work is how female makeup creators really used their products as a stepping stone to bring women into the business arena. This work was a fascinating glimpse at how history, advertising, and gender politics interact with each other. It also speaks about makeup preferences between the generations: I could see grandmothers,...

Documentary Make-Up Autobiography
This DVD left me with an understanding on why and how the Beauty Industry got its start and its lasting impact on women. The narrators Debi Mazar, Kathy Peiss, Helen Gurly Brown, A'lelia Bundles, Iman, Linda Wells, Naomi Wolf, and others moved this autobiography along many avenues such as marketing, distribution, and cultural dynamics.

educational and entertaining
As a beauty school teacher, I love this movie. It isn't a boring documentary, and even my students live it! Sure, some of it is old fashioned like the editor of Vogue, but it actually adds to the comedy value.

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Modern Marvels: 80s Tech (History Channel)

Interesting and Educational!
Integrated circuits (ICs) became cheap and prevalent in the 1980s, thanks to Moore's Law (power doubles in about 18 months). Intel's 8088 chip (1981) had 29,000 transistors; its latest has 713 million.

Wozniak designed Apple's initial hardware and wrote the software as well; Jobs was the business mind. Wozniak also developed GUI for Lisa, but it didn't sell well because it required lots of costly memory; later was updated to become the Macintosh.

ICs then brought arcade gaming, home games (eg. Atari), VCRs, the tape wars (Betamax's slightly better quality, vs. VHS' cheaper and longer, allowing an entire movie), Walkmans, CD players, Discman, camcorders, miniature headphones, and cell phones - all in the 1980s. Sony was a leader in all, except VHS and cell phones.

DeLorean brought out his own car design - popular at first, then sales stalled because it was underpowered and overpriced. Simon and Rubik's Cube were also immensely popular...

It will stroke your nostalgia.
This was a good DVD. However, as a critical diva, let me get my one criticism out of the way. This work spends a long time on the De Lorean car. The only time I ever saw that was in "Back to the Future" (and no, I never bothered to see the sequels, especially with Michael J. Fox's whiny, annoying voice). I have never seen a person drive one nor talk of wanting one. Perhaps there were few automotive technological innoverations in that decade, but that segment was a time killer.
This work is unique in two ways: it didn't just focus on the mechanical, engineering-based features of 80s inventions, but it also looked seriously at how these products were marketed. So we learn how porn videos helped promote VCRs over Betamaxes, for example. Again, this is science-y, so Teddy Ruxpin, "The Breakfast Club," and Lionel Richie's "Dancing on a Ceiling" don't come up.
If electronic toys seem like they are the preoccupation of males, this work strokes that images as all the...



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