Adrienne Maxwell

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As I watched The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and made my way through the new Special Two-Disc Collector’s Edition DVD, there was something so familiar about it all. Maybe it was the fact that I’ve read C.S. Lewis’ book several times in my life, and director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) wisely chose to remain faithful to the original story, fleshing out certain details but never embellishing. Maybe it’s the archetypal good-versus-evil theme or perhaps the Christ allegory: A powerful but gentle hero chooses to sacrifice himself to fulfill the law and save others. Or maybe it was just so darn similar to The Lord of the Rings in its themes, music, locales, special-effects artistry, and even its DVD packaging.

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Let’s do a little math. If a film comes out in 1992, and its 10th-anniversary Special Edition DVD arrives in 2002, what year should the 15th Anniversary Edition DVD be released? Granted, I was an English major, but even I can count to five—something Lionsgate apparently cannot do. How else do you explain the October 2006 release of this two-disc set? Perhaps the more relevant question is, do we need a 15th-anniversary DVD of Reservoir Dogs?

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Many a time have I listened to friends lament that a movie isn’t as good as the book on which it’s based. I just smile and nod, thinking smugly to myself that, if these poor people would just stop reading, they’d be much happier moviegoers. Then one of these friends gave me the novel The Da Vinci Code as a gift. I knew full well that Dan Brown’s insanely popular religious-themed murder mystery would someday become a film, yet I foolishly read it anyhow. And now here I am, forced to utter the same five words I once so smugly dismissed: “Eh, the book was better.”

Video: 4
Audio: 5
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The hardest decision a filmmaker has when creating a biopic is deciding what events to include. It may be easy to pare down the sum of my existence into a tidy, two-hour package, but I’m no Gandhi…or Richard Nixon or William Wallace or Mozart. These men led complicated, dense lives, and their biopics reflect that complexity with running times of three hours or more. In Walk the Line, director and cowriter James Mangold shows remarkable restraint in telling the story of his idol, Johnny Cash, in just over two hours. Cash’s life was no less dense, no less complicated. But Mangold chose to focus on the events leading up to 1968, a pivotal year in which Cash recorded At Folsom Prison, kicked his decade-long drug habit, and married June Carter. Up to that point, Cash lived a troubled, haunted existence, but, in 1968, he found redemption. That, for Mangold, was the story to tell, and he tells it very well.