The Movie: I never had any desire to see this movie when it was in the theaters, and then when it was released on DVD I had even less of a desire to see it. I mean, just look at the DVD cover artwork... it makes it look like it could be the cheesiest, sappiest, TV movie of the week ever made... and the fact that it stars everyone's favorite cute little boy Haley Joel Osment wasn't helping the cause any either. But then, one day, I was at the Golden Gate casino in Las Vegas, Nevada, getting one of the famous 99 cent shrimp cocktails from their snack bar when I noticed a photograph on the wall of Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt inside the Golden Gate casino, and below the photo was an inscription noting that this photo had been taken during the shooting of the movie Pay It Forward.

I thought to myself, "Pay It Forward is a Vegas movie?", so then I decided I should add it to my Netflix queue, since I love watching movies that are set even partially in Las Vegas, because, well, I love Las Vegas. And if the movie is in Las Vegas, I'll want to watch it, no matter how crappy the movie is, as you can see by looking at the list of DVD's I've reviewed here.

Pay It Forward is set almost entirely in Las Vegas. But it's not the slick and cool Las Vegas of Ocean's Eleven, nor is it the tragic, seedy underbelly of Las Vegas like Leaving Las Vegas. It's the mundane, single mom of a pre-teen kid just trying to make ends meet living in Las Vegas side of it. It's the side of Vegas that the thousands of people who actually live there see.

Enough about Vegas, what's this movie really about? Well, it's about a junior high school kid (Osment) who looks at the world around him and, well, frankly, it sucks. So in response to an offbeat assignment from his social studies teacher (Spacey), he decides that there might be away to make the world a better place, and he calls it "paying it forward". You do a favor for someone -- something big, that they can't do on their own, and instead of that person returning the favor to you, you tell them they have to pay it forward and do three of these favors for three other people, the theory being that soon there'll be thousands of people helping each other out.

The movie kind of splits between two different tracks -- one follows the progress of this pay it forward "movement" and the lives that it touches, and the other is basically the love story between Kevin Spacey and Helen Hunt who plays the struggling, alcoholic, single mother of Haley Joel Osment. I'm sure it all sounds really cheesy, but the movie somehow pulls it off so that you're not just sitting there gagging yourself over how cheesy and cute the movie is. Though it is indeed, cheesy and cute.

I think Kevin Spacey turned in a really great performance here, perhaps even outshining everyone else in this film. The theme music sounds uncannily similar to the music from American Beauty which also starred Spacey, and it came as no surprise to me to find out that it was the same guy that did it.

Overall, I'd say this is a "delightful" movie, one that is supposed to lift your spirits, and it will do so in varying degrees depending on just how cynical you really are. For me, the great location shots in Las Vegas were a special treat, and I have to admit that if it weren't for that aspect, I would have given this movie a "2" instead of a "3".

The DVD: The anamorphic widescreen transfer was certainly bright with great color and clarity, leaving just enough of that original film grain there... it did, however, seem to have a large amount of dust and specks for a transfer of this level of quality. Nothing too bad, just more than you'd expect from something with such great color and clarity.

There was nothing particularly notable about the audio.. it was perfectly functional, with nothing to really fault, though nothing praiseworthy either. Special features include a theatrical trailer in anamorphic widescreen, cast/crew bios, and an HBO "First Look" special which mostly featured a lot of self-back patting by the filmmakers, as such things usually do.

There is also an audio commentary track by director Mimi Leder, which I didn't listen to in its entirety, but did skip around in, and almost thought it would be better to just not have offered it in the first place. There's tons of long gaps of silence, and when she did speak, Leder giving what amounted to little more than a play by play of the action going on the screen, without adding anything really interesting or insightful that a smart viewer wouldn't already notice. At one point she noted something like "this scene was one of the toughest to shoot"... which was followed by a long string of silence. Great, so it was hard to shoot, but why was it hard to shoot? That's the kind of stuff that should be on these commentary tracks!

But for the overall movie viewing experience, this is a pretty good disc with a solid transfer, that I'm sure fans of this film will be happy with.