The Movie: I believe Bottle Rocket was recommended to me by "Celicaman" on the riceboypage message board. Written by Owen Wilson and Wes Anderson (who later teamed up on Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums), it's the story of three best buds who decide to add a little excitement to their suburban lives by forming a crime gang, with the hopes of attracting the attention of a bigger crime lord (played by James Caan) and becoming part of his team.

The only problem is, they suck at being criminals. Owen Wilson's character is an inflexible and overbearing control freak of a leader that cannot deviate from his plans which are always way too complicated and elaborate for the situation. Luke Wilson's character is a cool, laid back guy who just wants to fall in love and enjoy living life. Meanwhile, Bob, played by Robert Musgrave, is an insecure coward that even as a 26 year old is still suffering under his abusive older brother.

During the movie I was constantly puzzled by the actress who plays Inez, as I kept feeling like I recognized her from somewhere, but I couldn't put my finger on it, but just after the end of the movie I realized she was Tita from Like Water for Chocolate.

It's a pretty light-hearted and amusing movie, and actually, I'm not even really sure why it got an "R" rating from the MPAA... there have been way worse movies made that received PG-13 ratings, in my opinion. But anyway. Check it out if you are looking for something fun and a little different.

The DVD: This is a dual-sided disc with an anamorphic widescreen transfer on one side, and a pan-and-scan version on the other, formatted for "your" television (unless of course, you have a widescreen TV!). The transfer, although not the sharpest I've seen, was actually remarkably clean, with very little grain, dirt, dust, scratches, and other little bits that tend to get on film, with nice, crisp color. This is actually probably one of the cleanest looking transfers I've seen on a dual-sided disc.

The audio was also clean, with the dialog always clearly audible, but the surround mix was mostly centered in the front, and nothing really too exciting going in the effects department. As far as I can tell, there weren't any extras on this disc. Some sources claimed that there is a trailer on this disc, but I'll be damned if I can find it.

Upon further investigation, It seems as though the 4:3 version of this movie isn't pan and scan, but is actually an uncropped version of the original footage. Most movies you see that are shot on 35mm with a 1.85:1 aspect ratio are actually shot with a full 4:3 frame exposed, but are projected with the top and bottoms of the frame cropped off to end up with the 1.85:1 aspect ratio. It looks like the 4:3 transfer is the full frame that was originally exposed, and not a version that "pans and scans" across the 1.85:1 frame. But the movie was still shot with the 1.85:1 aspect ratio in mind. What this means is that if you are watching the 4:3 version, while you aren't getting the director's "original vision" of how it was supposed to look... you're not "losing" any part of the image by cutting it off. In fact, you're seeing more stuff than they originally wanted you to see.

This is actually a pretty common method of transferring 1.85:1 aspect ratio movies to video, but one side effect is that in the uncropped transfer, you might see some things like microphone booms and whatnot off the top of the screen that you weren’t supposed to see since that part of the frame wasn’t supposed to be shown. This generally doesn’t work with a 2.35:1 movie though, as those are generally shot with an anamorphic lens that squeezes the extra side information onto a standard 4:3 film frame... so there is no extra information that is being cropped off that you can add back.

Maybe you care, maybe you don't, but maybe this was an interesting tidbit that you'd like to know, or maybe I’m just a huge nerd.