MADE (SPECIAL EDITION)
Artisan Home Ent., $24.98
ONE OF 2001’s more conspicuous box-office nonentities, Made was es- sentially a de facto sequel to Swingers—the film that put Vince Vaughn and Jon Favreau on the B-list—yet it never scored a wide theatrical release. Not a trace of defeat is evident on this lavish single-disc memoir, where the boys laud their baby’s handheld virtuosity and miniscule $5 million price tag. (Still, the film barely turned a profit.)
The happily initiated should get off on a bounty of relatively half-baked alternate scenes, notable for their insight into Favreau’s filmmaking mentality. This tale of two amateur L.A. boxers who fly to N.Y.C. to do a mob job is hardly Scorsese, despite Favreau’s insistence that random Hawaiian and penguin imagery constitutes meaningful symbolism. Wisely, he let Vaughn, Peter Falk, and a surprisingly unobtrusive P-Diddy (a.k.a. Sean “Puffy” Combs) improvise to sustain the quirky fun. (Check out the interactive screenplay on DVD-ROM and you’ll notice that Vaughn’s funniest bitching and moaning is nowhere to be found.)
Another enjoyable feature lets you restructure the hilarious ceramic painting scene with Favreau’s outtakes, although this function is obviously better suited for, say, The Matrix. Vaughn and Favreau weigh in with “action commentary,” which consists of occasionally circling continuity errors on-screen, ࠬa John Madden. They own up to Made‘s most irksome flaw: the nonstop, ad-libbed profanity. “Sometimes when you improvise, you run out of things to say and you just say ‘fuck,'” Vaughn confides. “We did that a lot. Unfortunately.”
Andrew Bonazelli
FORTUNATELY FOR movie lovers, the Oscar-nominated Divided We Fall and Zhang Yimou’s The Road Home are out on disc (no extras). Jurassic Park III arrives Dec. 11 on a single-disc “Collector’s Edition,” with bonuses including lots of dino-related special effects stuff that kids will presumably love. Something impressively labeled the “Infinfilm Edition” of Rush Hour 2 reaches shelves on the same date; among its goodies, mercifully, Chris Tucker does not supply the commentary. The Score has little to recommend besides its Brando-De Niro-Norton teamwork. More worthwhile, and now undoubtedly being reconsidered for Oscar nominations, Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge debuts on disc Dec. 18.
Eds.
