June 16, 2005

By TOM MAURSTAD / The Dallas Morning News

When you get down to it, the DVD market is all about getting you to buy the same movie over and over again. The result is that packaging frequently trumps content. The same old movies are billed as new and improved with special features and special editions.

A key weapon in this marketing makeover campaign is the anniversary edition; attach the word anniversary to something and it is instantly transformed into something important and precious, an achievement to be celebrated. Or so the sales pitch goes. Some new releases put that theory to the test, with decidedly mixed results.

Let's start with the best-case example. The 10th anniversary edition of Casino has everything going for it. First, it's a movie worth celebrating, a distinction which in an ideal world wouldn't be necessary, but in this world, where a movie such as Weekend at Bernie's gets the anniversary treatment, is rarely the case.

Martin Scorsese's portrait of Las Vegas has just gotten better with time. It's brilliantly, if inevitably, cast with Robert De Niro as Sam Rothstein, a casino manager with the Midas touch, and Joe Pesci as yet another combustible gangster. Sharon Stone, in her best performance (admittedly, not a hotly contested title), plays Sam's self-destructive wife and James Woods is just the right mix of creepy and charismatic as her loser boyfriend.

This is the best Vegas movie ever. Set in 1973, it's a snapshot of the last days of old-school Vegas. But you can glimpse the corporate theme park it was about to become.

The disc also features several documentaries that break down elements of the movie (the characters, the real-life story, the mob in Vegas) in ways that are interesting and deepen your appreciation of the movie. Best of these is the short examining "The Look" of Casino. Vegas is all about dizzying razzle-dazzle, and Mr. Scorsese and an assortment of designers explain how important the movie's color and flash is to the story and what they did to create it. Mr. De Niro's wardrobe is its own special effect.

And then there's the anniversary package that takes a great movie and turns it into an exercise in mediocre repackaging. Which brings us to the 30th anniversary edition of Jaws. It comes with a handsome commemorative photo journal and a second-disc of special features. The only trouble is that it was just five short years ago that the 25th anniversary edition of Jaws was released, with nearly all the material included in this "new" package.

As a marketing gambit, it's a success. It got the lead-review treatment in USA Today and Entertainment Weekly and video clips on all the cable-news channels' entertainment segments. But as a consumer product, it's just a flashy but pointless package. If you don't own Jaws, then this is the cutting-edge edition for you. But there's nothing here worth buying that wasn't there five years ago.

Last and certainly least, is the celebratory packaging of a movie that was lousy to begin with. Something titled "The 15th Anniversary Special Edition" of Father of the Bride is like the punch line to its own joke. The movie is a sappy and silly comedy about that worn-out theme of a father letting go of his grown-up little girl. But watching it now, this 1991 release plays as sickly celebration of gilded consumerism. That house, that furniture, all the shiny cars: It's like a full-motion Martha Stewart magazine.