While I'm glad to have a copy of BBM at home now and appreciative to Focus for rushing it out to us, I cannot help but agree with the author of the review below...and that of the article recently in the Advocate. Maybe if we write Focus and ask for another, more delux version in the future, we'll get what the Crash dummies (I mean, fans, sorry - couldn't resist the saying and the image of all those smashed fenders...) got.
http://www.austin360.com/movies/content/movies/stories/2006/04/7brokebackcrash.html 'Brokeback Mountain' vs. 'Crash,' Round 2
Both are great films, but new edition of 'Crash' offers more extras
By Bruce Dancis
THE SACRAMENTO BEE
Friday, April 07, 2006
Is "Crash" a better movie than "Brokeback Mountain," the film it upset to win the Academy Award for best picture? That issue was hotly debated after the Oscars.
The controversy is coming up again, because new DVDs of both movies were released this week. Both are excellent films. But in terms of their respective DVDs, "Brokeback Mountain" (Focus Films/Universal Studios Home Entertainment, $29.98) comes in a distant second. The problem is that 45 minutes — the sum total of the four documentaries included on the "Brokeback" DVD — doesn't do the film justice.
We do find out a bit about the "cowboy boot camp" that actors Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal attended. And Ledger shows insight when he comments that to play Ennis Del Mar, "I knew I had to mature as an actor and as a person."
But in two of these short documentaries, we hear co-screenwriter Larry McMurtry give the exact same anecdote — that when he read Annie Proulx's 1997 short story, his initial reaction was that he wished he had written it. The same brevity and shallowness affects any discussion of Ang Lee's Oscar-winning direction. An audio commentary by the director is sadly missing.
In contrast, the new "director's cut" of "Crash" (Lions Gate, $26.98) is filled with extras. Carried over from the initial DVD release last September is a useful feature-length commentary by Paul Haggis (director and co-writer), Bobby Moresco (co-writer and co-producer) and Don Cheadle (actor and co-producer). Together with "Behind the Metal and Glass," a documentary on the making of the movie, and another short documentary on Haggis, we learn much about how Haggis came up with the idea for a movie about racial antagonism in Los Angeles and Cheadle's crucial role in both obtaining financing and persuading other major actors to sign up.
Sandra Bullock and Matt Dillon discuss how hard it was to play characters they disliked and say dialogue they found abhorrent, yet they so believed in "Crash" that they were willing to do it.
Another excellent documentary, "L.A. — The Other Main Character," explores the city's mixture of racial and ethnic groups and its stark contrasts between wealth and poverty. "Unspoken" looks squarely as the race issue.
Two other features are exciting in a film education vein. In two "Script-to-Screen Comparisons," the screen is split between the printed screenplay, scrolling on one side, and the actual scene on the other. Similarly, "Storyboard-to-Screen Comparisons" splits the screen so that one can simultaneously look at the director's artistic conception of a particular scene and how it actually looks when filmed.
"Crash" illustrates what's so rewarding about DVDs when they're made by filmmakers with a passion for sharing. Perhaps when "Brokeback Mountain" eventually comes out in a "special" or "director's cut" DVD edition, its creators will do it right.