‘Walk the Line’ hits the right note on DVD

REVIEWS

By David Germain

updated 3:16 p.m. ET Feb. 27, 2006

“Walk the Line”
Johnny and June return just in time for their big night at the Academy Awards. Joaquin Phoenix as country legend Johnny Cash and Reese Witherspoon as his one true love, June Carter, earned Oscar nominations for director James Mangold’s portrait of Cash’s roots, his early musical success, his drug battle and the long courtship he shared with Carter. The film comes in a single-disc or two-disc edition, both with 10 deleted scenes, accompanied by commentary from Mangold. The two-disc set also has three extended song performances by Phoenix and Witherspoon, plus featurettes on Cash’s career, his romance with Carter and the making of the film. Also new to DVD is “The Gospel Road,” Cash and Carter’s 1973 musical testament to Jesus Christ. “Walk the Line” two-disc set, $39.98, single DVD, $29.98; “The Gospel Road” DVD, $19.98. (20th Century Fox) Read the review

“Yours, Mine & Ours”

Paramount Pictures

Dennis Quaid and Rene Russo star in this dopey update of the Lucille Ball-Henry Fonda comedy about a woman with 10 children and a man with eight kids who get hitched, the union producing 90 minutes of lame slapstick as two very different styles of parenting and 18 mutinous offspring fail to click. The DVD has deleted footage with commentary by director Raja Gosnell, who also offers commentary for the full movie. Other DVD extras include six featurettes examining the movie’s casting and script, the lighthouse setting where the family takes up residence and the production’s collaboration with the U.S. Coast Guard, for whom Quaid’s character works. DVD, $29.99. (Paramount) Read the review

“Pride & Prejudice”

Focus Films

Also arriving in time for your pre-Oscar perusal is director Joe Wright’s excellent adaptation of Jane Austen’s romantic classic about relations between 18th century Britain’s haves and have-nots. Keira Knightley earned a best-actress nomination as Austen’s free-thinking heroine, one of a family of impoverished sisters whose mother schemes to marry them for money, not love. DVD featurettes include a glimpse of the modern sensibilities Austen set forth in her fiction nearly two centuries ago. The disc also offers a look at the colorful family at the center of the story and a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the film’s grand dance ball, along with commentary from Wright. DVD, $29.98. (Universal) Read the review

“Lady and the Tramp”
Has it really been half a century since a mutt and a prissy pooch kissed over a shared strand of spaghetti? Walt Disney’s animated charmer returns to DVD in a 50th anniversary edition of one of Hollywood’s most endearing screen romances, between a rascally canine and his uptown girl, a pampered, pedigreed cocker spaniel. The two-disc set offers storyboard reconstructions of two deleted scenes, including a fantasy sequence in which dogs rule, dragging their puny human pets around on leashes. The set also has a terrific documentary tracing the long development of the 1955 film, whose original concepts date back to the late ’30s (Lady once had two suitors, a Russian wolfhound named Boris and a mongrel named Homer; luckily, Walt Disney hated the early concepts and later stumbled on a Cosmopolitan short story about a cynical dog, which he grafted on to the story). DVD set, $29.99. (Disney)

“Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network”
“Attica, Attica!” “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Two defining epigrams of angry Hollywood of the 1970s appropriately return on the eve of the Oscars, which feature one of the most defiant film lineups in years. Al Pacino bellowed the first line in Sidney Lumet’s 1975 bank robbery fiasco “Dog Day Afternoon”; a year later, Lumet’s “Network” starred William Holden, Faye Dunaway and Robert Duvall in a vicious satire of TV news, with Peter Finch winning the best-actor Oscar for his “mad as hell” on-air rants. Earlier bare-bones DVD releases of the films are replaced by two-disc sets, each with extensive making-of background and commentary by Lumet. DVD sets, $26.99 each. (Warner Bros.)

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