Mortal Kombat: Legacy has done a great job of changing things up and staying interesting so far. The first two episodes of the series looked like excerpts from a big budget action film. Then the third was a parody of celebrity news and reality TV. This episode keeps up the intrigue by starting out with some animation. It begins with a fairy tale voice over telling us about the history of some sort of mystical land. We get castles and mountain backdrops, and it’s all presented in a stylish, almost water color looking animation. I thought it was an interesting thing to do for a series that has been, up to this point, all about keeping things set mostly in our modern reality. But then the animation transitions into live action and everything goes bad. So bad that, by the end of this episode, I was left feeling a lot less confident about the direction Mortal Kombat: Legacy is going in.

Synesthesia (syn-es-the-sia, Brit. syn-aes-the-sia): “The production of a sense impression relating to one sense or part of the body by stimulation of another sense or part of the body.” Synesthesia is a neurological disorder in which the experience of one sense motivates an involuntary association with another sense. Those who experience synesthesia, known as synesthetes, are able to either perceive letters or numbers as inherently colored, hear movement, or – in probably the best-known cases of the disorder – see music in the form of colors and/or associative shapes. Now, cognitive sciences seem, on the surface, to have little to do with the study of cinema, but the topic of synesthesia can be particularly helpful in understanding the way in which we interpret the interaction of the two senses most available in watching movies: the aural and the visual.

As part of our Year in Review, we’ve asked our resident DVDologist Brian Gibson to lay down his 15 favorite releases from 2008.

Brian Gibson loves to buy DVDs. Come with him on his weekly journey into the depths of credit card debt as he tells you what to buy, rent and avoid.