“You always should have ambition,” begins a younger version of Aussie pop star Kylie Minogue at the beginning of Kylie: Rare and Unseen. She looks fantastic, as always, but it’s too bad that this poor excuse for a DVD has no desire to be anything more than a purposeless melange of clips taken out of context.
The DVD is obviously a part of The Rare and Unseen Collection and attempts to string together a heap of footage that most people have never seen. Of course, this day and age of YouTube and other internet video sites makes the notion of something being “rare and unseen” somewhat prickly. Happily for the people behind the bloody thing, the interviews and portions are not dated or set up in any way, making it hard to track the general obtainability of the clips.
It’s hard to claim that Kylie: Rare and Unseen is insightful at all. There’s quite a bit of footage from Minogue attending a series of movie and TV show premieres and the accompanying sound bites could virtually be from anywhere and could pertain to just about anything. It’s an incredibly careless approach, unfortunately.
Kylie: Rare and Unseen is the furthest thing from a exhaustive look at the pop star, but, in fairness, it doesn’t attempt to be. That’s where the practicality of such a collection comes into the argument, as this muddle of clips and snippets only brushes over the surface of some rather colossal events in Minogue’s life. The breast cancer diagnosis is only used as a structure for her comeback, for instance, and the vital early bits of her career are presented without any perspective.
It’s clear that Kylie: Rare and Unseen has no affiliation whatsoever with the performer. The video uses a second or two, at the most, of something that sounds like Kylie’s music in transitioning from “scene to scene.” The lack of actual licensing prevented any more than that, I presume, and all the talk of “Locomotion” being her first big hit is extremely pointless when the DVD doesn’t even play the song. There are a few seconds from live theatre performances and Aussie soaps on the disc, though. These clips are, again, presented with absolutely no context.
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