The Movie: Written by, directed by, and starring Christopher Guest (writer and director of Best in Show and the six-fingered man of The Princess Bride among other credits), Waiting for Guffman is a humorous mock-umentary about Blaine, Missouri that is producing an amateur theatrical production, and the talent (or lack thereof) of the townspeople.

This movie has a real low-budget feel to it, having been shot on 16mm with many hand held shots, cheesy zoom effects, and a musical score that obviously came from a synthesizer (despite the fact that there's a full orchestra there playing along...) all of which (and so many little details!) add to the humor of this film. Waiting for Guffman came highly recommended to me by many people I know. Although I enjoyed it, I didn't think it was as great as other people seem to think it is, but I did find it worthwhile to watch.

An interesting note is that this movie was edited down from 60 hours of footage, almost all of which was improvised, which really added to the spontaneous, documentary feel of the film.

The DVD: This disc features an anamorphic widescreen transfer that retains all of the graininess of the original 16mm film, but with very little dirt, dust, or compression artifacts -- basically it's as good as it could have been, considering the original source material. The audio was pretty horrible and poorly mixed, but again, it adds to the charm of the movie.

But, this movie has many fans, and for those fans, this DVD will not disappoint, as it includes 14 additional scenes (from that original 60 hours of footage) that were not used in the theatrical version of the film, including an additional musical number. Also on the disc are a fully produced, anamorphic theatrical trailer, and a short text-based behind the scenes section.