The Movie: This movie is not quite as cheesy as its title might make it out to be. The title is actually a throwback to an actual Tucker promotional film. Tucker: The Man And His Dream is based on the true story of Preston Tucker, visionary automaker of the 1940's. He was a man with a dream (duh) of building a car with many innovative safety features like a padded dash, headlights that turn with the steering wheel, and even seatbelts. At that time, Detroit automakers thought adding seatbelts to a car would be a bad marketing move as it would suggest that the car is unsafe (!?).

The problem with this car is that it was too innovative and the existing car companies became threatened, so it becomes the story of a crazy guy with a great idea being squashed by big corporate America through various conspiracies. In the end, though only 50 of these cars were ever produced, yet Preston Tucker did win a victory of sorts.

Francis Ford Coppola put this story together in an interesting way, with some innovative cinematic tricks of his own, perhaps to match the innovative style of Preston Tucker himself. It's framed, and indeed, done very much in the style of an old corporate promotional film, almost as if this movie is trying to sell the car. Overall, I think the film is more interesting for its historical value than its cinematic value, but its worth watching nonetheless.

The DVD: Having been produced by George Lucas, it's no surprise that the DVD for this film received Lucas' "THX" treatment, so you know that the video and audio are of good quality. One little oddity however is the fact that the original theatrical aspect ratio of the film was 2.35:1, yet the DVD version is presented with it cut down to a 2.0:1 aspect ratio, cutting the sides off the original film. I'm not sure why this was done, but I have seen this treatment before on the DVD version of another Coppola film, Apocalypse Now. Maybe someone should ask Francis about this.

Special features on this disc include the actual Tucker promotional film from 1948 (with optional audio commentary), and you can clearly see its influence over the film's design, and you can also see some shots that were recreated in the film. You also get a making-of documentary which is actually a new documentary that was assembled from "lost" tapes from 1988. Finally, you get an audio commentary track which is interesting, insightful, and full of little tidbits of information, something I've come to expect from Coppola audio commentary tracks ever since I actually sat through all 9+ hours of commentary on the Godfather series.

Overall, it's a pretty decent DVD setup if you can get over the wacky aspect ratio thing that's going on.