The Movie: Out of Sight is the 1998 movie starring George Clooney as an escaped convict who falls in love with Jennifer Lopez, a U.S. Marshall, directed by Steven Soderbergh, who also went on to direct the remake of Ocean's Eleven in 2001... and he's actually the reason why I wanted to see this movie, as I was hoping to find something along the same vein.

One side effect of going through and watching all these movies that I should have seen but haven't yet is I start to notice things in new movies that have been recycled from old movies. For instance, at the beginning of Out of Sight, George Clooney robs a bank. The way he robbed this bank -- friendly with the teller, calmly telling her what to do, but showing great knowledge of bank security procedure... the words he spoke... you'd swear that scene was lifted practically word for word from Dog Day Afternoon, the 1975 movie starring Al Pacino who robs a bank exactly the same manner, saying almost exactly the same things. Hmmmmmmmm....

Anyway. This is your typical big Hollywood movie with your big Hollywood stars. It entertained me from beginning to end, but was pretty unremarkable in most ways, except perhaps for some creative editing. But like I said, it entertained me enough and was a fine way to spend my evening. Not nearly half as cool as Ocean's Eleven ended up being.

One highlight for me was a rather substantial role for Don Cheadle, one of my favorite character actors in Hollywood today -- he is an incredibly talented man and well, I hope to see him in a starring role some day.

The DVD: This movie was presented in a 1.85:1 Anamorphic widescreen format. The video transfer didn't leave much to complain about, except for an occasional problem with some compression artifacts, but overall pretty clean, and it gets the job done. The 5.1 audio was rather unremarkable, but as such, there wasn't anything negative to say about it either. Like the video, it got the job done.

Special features include a documentary, and some music highlights, director's commentary, and over 20 minutes of deleted scenes, including a very lengthy version of the trunk conversation at the beginning of the movie.