The Movie: When this movie arrived from Netflix, I was shocked, as I couldn't have imagined that I had put it in my list, but since it was here and I paid for it, I might as well watch it, right? And when I noticed that Charlize Theron was on it, I thought maybe she'd be worth it, so I gave it a shot.

The Legend of Bagger Vance is supposed to be a mythical and uplifting story of a man (Matt Damon) who has "lost his swing", and overcomes adversity, and more importantly, himself, to find it again, and get his life back in order. Before he went off to fight in WWI, he was a golfer of legendary skill, not unlike our Tiger Woods of today. But he was so shocked after the war that he just disappeared out of sight, and no one really knew what happened to him.

One day, a magical caddy by the name of Bagger Vance (Will Smith) appears and helps Matt Damon find his swing again, overcome his demons, get back with his old girlfriend, and win the golf tournament all pretty much at the same time. It's supposed to be uplifting and make you feel good, but I was more interested in watching these people run around with their southern drawls of varying consistency and accuracy.

The story didn't really do much to move itself along. There was no sense of urgency, or danger. Nothing strong enough to create drama and to motivate these characters to do what they needed to do. Consequently, I didn't have much sympathy for the characters because they didn't make me believe that anything was really that bad or needed fixing in the first place. This all added up to this being a pretty boring movie that was not only predictable, but gave me no desire to care about what happens in the end anyway.

Some segments of this movie were reminiscent of certain parts of Happy Gilmore, and I almost chuckled in a few parts, but this wasn't supposed to be a funny movie, and I wasn't supposed to be chuckling at those parts.

When this movie was in the theaters, I used to joke with my friends after seeing the trailers that The Legend of Bagger Vance stars Will Smith as Morgan Freeman. He appears wearing that Morgan Freeman suit, and that Morgan Freeman hat -- you know, the ones he wears in like 85% of all the other movies that he is in? Interestingly enough, I found out through IMDB that this movie was originally supposed to star Robert Redford (who directed this movie), and Morgan Freeman as the golfer and the caddy! But Redford decided that it would be better if younger people played these characters. But at least now I have the satisfaction of knowing that the Morgan Freeman-ness of Will Smith's characters was actually by design!

Another interesting thing to note about this film is that although he is not credited for it, this was Jack Lemmon's final appearance on film before his death. His character served as the frame for the story, and also as the narrator.

All in all, I would only recommend this movie to people who are having trouble falling asleep at night, and to people who are so in love with the game of golf that they will watch anything they can find on the subject.

The DVD: When you first pop this disc in, you are left to stare at an insufferably long intro to the menu. You can tell the menu is going to pop up soon, but it never seems to actually appear, until finally, all of the graphics and animation are over and you actually have control of your DVD player. Pretty damned annoying.

Once you do get the movie going, however, you will find an excellent anamorphic video transfer (which is something I've come to expect from DreamWorks DVDs), with deep, saturated color, excellent brightness and contrast, and a wonderful clarity. In a couple of very brief moments, I did notice a bit of gradient stepping however, but it is still overall an excellent video transfer.

The DTS audio was amazingly clean and crisp -- I could almost imagine Jack Lemmon narrating this movie from inside my living room. There were a few clever uses of surround placement, but this is a mostly dialog-centered movie, so there isn't a whole lot of gee-wiz effects going on.

In the extras department, we get two featurettes, two trailers (fully produced with anamorphic widescreen transfers), and some text features like cast/crew bios and production notes. Does anybody actually ever read these production notes? Well, I suppose I would on a film that I really enjoyed.