The Movie: 21 Grams is a pretty damned good movie. It follows the course of the lives of three main characters who are all brought together due to a freak accident, however due to the film's fragmented, non-chronological story telling style, you don't really figure out exactly what's going on until near the end.

That might sound like a recipe for a disastrous film, but I found myself absolutely riveted, with each new scene putting in just one more piece of the overall puzzle, and I just absolutely couldn't stop watching until I had all the pieces and the picture was complete.

Sean Penn and Naomi Watts turn in some pretty awesome performances. Benicio Del Toro was also pretty impressive, though I felt he might have been held back a bit by the one-dimensionalness of his character which I felt was not quite as well developed as the other two main characters.

I don't really want to say much else about this film as I don't want to give anything away -- putting the pieces of the puzzle together in your mind is half of the fun of watching this film, though I can say that having the opening shot of the film showing some exposed Naomi Watts nipple doesn't hurt it at all :)

One final note, a lot of people seem to get the notion from the title that this is a "drug movie". Although there are some references to drug use in this film, it's not really a "drug movie" and the title isn't even a drug reference at all. Rather it refers to a series of rather unscientific experiments conducted by a man who concluded that people lose 21 grams in weight the moment they die, speculating that 21 grams is the mass of a person's soul... and I'd have to say that this film has a lot more to do with people losing their souls than it does with drugs :)

The DVD: The grainy, gritty, blown out look of the original film is preserved with amazing clarity, although there were some momentary hints of compression artifacts during some shots with complex movement, such as the silhouettes of a huge flock of birds flying against an evening (or was it morning?) sky.

Audio was also pristine, particularly with the DTS audio track, though you won't really find a whole lot of surround effects in this film, not that you'd particularly be expecting any. As far as special features go... I couldn't find any, though some websites make reference to a making-of featurette being on this DVD somewhere.

One thing that was somewhat annoying about this disc is the fact there's no way to completely bypass the advertising previews that load up when you first put the disc in. The "menu" and chapter skip buttons are disabled and the only way to skip the ad is to use the fast forward feature... ugh.

But overall this is quite a nice, film-only presentation of a movie that I highly recommend.