It’s been an interesting week for documentaries, folks–first I tackled Chris Rock’s opus Good Hair, with decent results, and now I go back to the Discovery vault to tackle T-Rex: A Dinosaur in Hollywood, which they sent me a copy of.

It’s an admittedly–self-admittedly, even–tongue in cheek biography of the great dinosaur who stomped into the world’s imagination just a hundred and five years ago (this October!)–Tyrannosaurus Rex.  In a thoroughly Forrest Gump fashion, we discover the life and times of Rex, starting from his discovery by paleontologist Barnum T. Brown, all the way up to the present day.

It’s a bit too tongue in cheek, sometimes, playing up the “dinosaur as movie star” angle just a little too hard, but there’s still a lot of information here, and it’s presented in a straightforward and very accessible fashion.  And the conjecture, where it’s applied, is also pretty entertaining–the conjectural image, for example, of a T-Rex at an awards show covered in feathers is actually something to see, even if it’s absolutely nothing like what you’d expect a T-Rex to look like.

If there’s a down side to the movie, it’s that it’s entirely too short.  I only got about forty six minutes out of this, despite the box’s insistence of a run time of 86 minutes.  However, the other forty minutes will be devoted to another title–”T-Rex of the Deep”.

This one is also well put together, but much more serious in tone and heavy on the information.  You wouldn’t believe how many gigantic fish and aquatic reptiles there were back then, and many of them had horrendous arrays of teeth and even, in some cases, claws.

The Screenhead Ten Scale knows a good value when it sees one and thus hands T-Rex in Hollywood an eight out of ten.  Lots of great information presented in that exciting Discovery Channel style makes this an incredibly worthwhile video.