The Movie: I rented Passionada because someone told me it had something to do with card counting at blackjack, and I guess it sort of does, but not really. This is a romance, through and through. It stars Sofia Milos (of CSI: Miami fame), Jason Isaacs, and the very cute Emmy Rossum as the meddling teenage daughter of Sofia Milos.

So this is how the story goes. Meddling teenage daughter hits up a local Indian casino and meets a man who counts cards. She wants to learn, but he doesn't want to teach her. Later, card counting man discovered Sofia Milos singing in some lounge somewhere and falls in love and does everything he can to track her down. Turns out, Sofia Milos is the meddling daughters' mother. And she's still in love with her long dead husband. In fact, she lives next door to her mother in law. Meddling teenage daughter makes a deal with card counting man -- he teaches her how to count cards, she hooks him up with her mom.

Overall, a pretty cheesy love story that seems unbelievably contrived at times. Plus there are just some little weird things about it, like the fact that it's supposed to be taking place in a predominantly portuguese town in Massachusetts, yet almost all of the "ethnic" elements in the story are Spanish, not Portuguese. But I will say that given the poor writing, the actors did make the best of what they had and turned out performances that are about as good as you could expect from a script like that.

The DVD: The anamorphic transfer was fairly clean, but not particularly sharp (perhaps with a touch too much edge enhancement, even), and seemed overly noisy/grainy (perhaps as a result of that touch too much edge enhancement), but color was well saturated, and contrast was good, though not great. Audio was very... average, with no remarkable features, really.

Special features include a trailer, commentary with the executive producer and the writer, commentary with the director and the cast (which includes some shots at the writer!), and some deleted footage, including the longest, most elaborate, most contrived alternate ending I've ever seen on a DVD so far. But I'm glad they got rid of it because it was long and terrible and melodramatic on a daytime soap opera scale, complete with leading man in a coma and everything. The new ending is much more clever, and much more becoming of a romantic movie.

Overall, I'd say pass on this one unless I guess what you've read here has made you really interested in it.