The Movie: Strictly Ballroom is the 1992 release from Baz Luhrmann, Australian film maker who later went on to bring us Romeo+Juliet and Moulin Rouge.

Set in the world of ballroom dancing competition, this film starts out in a mockumentary fashion along the same vein as Waiting for Guffman, but thankfully, this device is only used to get the movie going, and is not the basis for the entire film. I guess the basic gist of what this story is about is a man who wants to dance his own steps and go his own way in this world of strict ballroom dance competition that did not take well to people who did not want to follow the traditions already set aside. His dance partner leaves him, and against conventional wisdom, chooses a beginner to be his new partner -- a beginner that is willing to dance the way he wants to dance. There's a bit of a theme, something to the effect of "A life lived in fear is a life half-lived," so get out there and claim your dreams or something. There's also a bit of a love story in there... in fact, some people would even call this movie a "musical comedy".

This is a somewhat stylized film -- not near as over the top as Moulin Rouge but you definitely see the influence of the same man behind these two films, and perhaps with Moulin Rouge the major difference might have been a big budget.

All in all though, I found this to be a pretty average movie. Though it did manage to hold my attention, I was not riveted to my seat, or falling off my seat laughing.

The DVD: The video transfer on this disc was adequate, but not too great, with excessive edge enhancement employed, some washed out whites, and the reds (which there are quite a lot of) seemed to blow up off the screen. The audio was also nothing to write home about, with what seemed to me like a slightly limited dynamic range, and very minimal use of surround effects.

There are a number of special features, however. You'll find an audio commentary track, a little (and rather old looking) documentary on ballroom dancing called "Samba to Slow Fox". There is also a "Design Gallery" section that I was fully expecting to be just text and images, but actually turned out to be images and narration by director Baz Luhrmann, and had a very slick 3D menu design. Finally, there are a bunch of video trailers for a number of other Miramax films, but none for this one in particular.