(R) (Gory crime scenes, violence,
profanity)
United States, 1995
U.S. Availability: 9/22/95 (wide)
Running Length: 2:03
Theatrical Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Cast: Brad Pitt, Morgan Freeman, Gwyneth Paltrow, John
C. McGinley, Richard Roundtree, Kevin Spacey
Director: David Fincher
Producers: Arnold Kopelson and Phyllis Carlyle
Screenplay: Andrew Kevin Walker
Cinematography: Darius Khondji
Music: Howard Shore
U.S. Distributor: New Line Cinema
Cinemastuff Rating: ****
The recent re-release of Seven, as part of New Line Cinema's Platinum Series, is one of the best five DVD's I have ever seen. It is everything a DVD should be and more. It has two discs and tons of bonus features. In general, you can never go wrong with renting a New Line Platinum Series DVD. I own several, including Blade and Wag the Dog, and you always get your money's worth. These discs generally contain commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and alternate endings. They also give you some insight into how and why the movie was made.
The only thing bad about this DVD is that it did not come out years ago. Years ago is when I bought the original Seven DVD, which had no extra features. Click here to read my rant about DVD's.
Disc One: The Movie
First of all, I should say, that this move is great. It is suspenseful, original, well written and in the tradition of great film noir movies. It creates one of the most memorable movie villains of all time and it has become a classic.
This edition of the DVD is particularly excellent. All too often DVD's have a commentary track, but it is filled with lame stories from the director and/or actors talking about what happened on the set the day they shot a particular scene. BORING! Actually, this DVD has one of those tracks. It is slightly better than most, but it also has a separate and really good commentary track. It features not only the director, but also the writer and a film critic. These guys provide what a commentary should be. They give insightful commentary on the story, the style of the film and the impact it is supposed to have on the audience. They also discuss alternate endings and scenes and the difficulties they had to overcome to get the "head-in-the-box-movie" made the way they wanted to make it.
I especially like the way they describe the psychic torture that the movie inflicts. You go into the movie knowing that there are seven deadly sins and seven murders. That's it. There is nothing you can do about it. You can't stop it. There is no heroic Mel Gibson character to stop the bad guy from hurting the innocent victim. This movie is often described as being extremely violent. It is a very graphic movie, but all they really show is the aftermath of violence. Disgusting corpses and disgusting crime scenes. But that makes it harder on audiences. We are helpless to stop the murders, and so are our heroes.
The real brilliance of this and any other suspense movie is in what they do not show us. Hitchcock understood this and so did the makers of the Blair Witch Project. Fincher tells us a story on the commentary track about a party where an angry woman came up to him after recognizing him as the maker of Seven. She said something to the effect of: "I don't know what is wrong with you or who raised you, but there was no reason to actually show that poor woman's head in the box!" He tried to tell her that there was no such shot in the movie, but she had convinced herself that there was. Now that is what I call filmmaking! I love movies that effectively pull the wool over our eyes like The Usual Suspects, the Sixth Sense and Fight Club. These movies put ideas into our head and convince us of something that isn't true. To actually put an image into someone's head like that is even more impressive.
I have listened to a lot of these tracks and they are seldom worth listening to. They are almost never worth spending 2 hours or more listening to unless you are really in love with the movie. I love Blade and the Usual Suspects so I listened to the entire commentary on those DVD's, but even those commentaries could have been a lot better.
If the studios were smart, they would throw a film critic into all of these commentary tracks. I say that because the only other commentary that I found was worth listening to all the way through, was Roger Ebert's commentary on Dark City (also part of New Line's Platinum Series). The critics provide what I think the commentaries are supposed to provide: Insight into the story and things which we may have not have noticed before that will add to our enjoyment and appreciation of the film.
Disc Two: The extras
They threw everything but the kitchen sink into this disc. Storyboards, deleted scenes, alternate endings, production design, audio and video tests, and more.
Usually I skip over the production design crap on these discs because usually they just show concept sketches of costumes and sets. BORING! In these discs, we get to explore the psychotic journals of John Doe, which took a lot of time and money to make for the movie. In the movie, these journals are given only a couple minutes of onscreen time, but now we can really explore them. And they has some crazy stuff in there! They even stuffed a real suicide note soaked with tears into one of these journals.
Another thing you can explore on the disc is the crime scene photos that John Doe took. Like the journals, a lot of time, effort and money went into producing these photos, but they are only given a few seconds of time in the actual movie. Now you can look at them in detail. OK, it is morbid but still interesting. A lot of thought went into them. Also, if you watch the commentary of the photos on fast forward, you can watch a reconstruction of the actual murder. Weren't satisfied with just seeing the dead, tortured, gluttonous, fat man? Well now you can see the actual murder and see him being tortured while he is still alive. Pretty cool, huh?
Well, that is for you to decide. But the fact that they put such interesting production materials in there is very impressive. I imagine that the same thing could and should be done for other movies as well. There truly is a wealth of information on this DVD.
You could make a day out of going through this DVD and that is what I did.
Get this movie on DVD!
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