The Movie: This movie was produced, written, and directed by Jon Favreau who also starred in it along side Vince Vaughn (who also produced). If you don't know, these are the same two guys from Swingers, a movie that so many people claim as their favorite. I didn't particularly enjoy Swingers, I think mainly because I couldn't identify with most of the characters (in fact, I was annoyed by most of them, which makes it hard to care for them).

So in some sense, I watched this movie with some reservations about it. What I got was an entertaining little mobster movie with a comedic edge that's a bit smarter than your typical comedy. No slapstick, no dark "hahaha look at that guy whose head just got blown off" comedy, no lame jokes or one liners. The comedy comes from the way the scenes are built up and broken down by the characters, if that makes any sense.

On the other hand, I still found myself completely annoyed by Vince Vaughn in this movie and just wanted him to shut the hell up. But that's exactly how he was supposed to make you feel. Oh yeah I guess I'll give you a little bit into what this movie is about... these guys are like entry level mobsters on their first job. Jon Favreau's character just wants to get it over and done with quickly, meanwhile all of Vince Vaughn's antics get them into more and more trouble. This movie also has small roles played by Puff Daddy (oh I'm sorry, P-Diddy), and one of my favorite actors, Peter Falk.

Was it "Swingers 2"? Yes, and no. You have Vince Vaughn playing pretty much the exact same character he was in Swingers. Jon Favreau's character wasn't such a pathetic, spineless fool, however. I think the overall story was better than Swingers, and found Made to just be a better movie overall.

I gotta make special note for the camera work which I thought was pretty great. Overall, I found this an entertaining movie that's worth a rental, but I don't see it as something that I could watch over and over again. Of course, some die hard Swingers fans would probably think otherwise.

The DVD: This is another "special edition" that doesn't have a "standard edition" to go along with it. But it is packed with a whole bunch of bonus features. But first, the actual movie is presented in a 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen with a great looking transfer. There's a 5.1 audio mix that wasn't bad, but wasn't particularly noteworthy either. The menus were kind of cool, although sometimes they seemed to take forever to load.

Special features. There's a lot. First there are a few little "making of" featurettes, which really are more like three parts of the same documentary than three separate featurettes. There is a whole bunch of additional footage including scenes that were completely deleted, outtakes from scenes that were actually in the movie, and alternate versions of scenes that were in the movie.

There was also a section where you could listen to the music that was used in the movie, as well as a bunch of music that ended up not being in the movie. Then there are your standard theatrical trailers, but the real interesting part of the special features is the "Scene edit workshop". Basically you take a scene that has four shots, and for each of those four shots, you can choose from four different takes. You get to choose which of the four takes you want to use for each of the four shots, and then play it to see how it looks, or compare it to the way the director chose to have the scene appear in the movie. It's kind of fun, though not particularly sophisticated, not that you could really get all that sophisticated with the software on a movie DVD anyway.

I should also note that all of the special features and menus are in an anamorphic widescreen format (yay for me), except for the two trailers which for some reason are still letterboxed. Even the outtakes were anamorphic transfers... so it doesn't really make much sense, but whatever. Overall, I'd say the DVD content on this disc is great, and is worthy of bearing the title "Special Edition" unlike so many special editions that are just full of junk that was thrown together.