DVD Review: Dan in Real Life
Published March 28, 2008
Ultimately, Dan in Real Life is the kind of film that doesn’t hide where it’s going to end up very well. But that’s okay. Sentimentality is not used as a substitute for real emotion and the penultimate scenes with Dan and his daughters are truly touching. A couple more script rewrites wouldn’t have hurt, but a standout performance from Carell and excellent direction from Hedges make Dan in Real Life a winner.
The DVD comes with a good amount of special features, including an audio commentary track by writer/director Peter Hedges, deleted scenes with Hedges’ optional commentary, and several minutes of mostly unfunny outtakes.
Two featurettes — “Just Like Family: The Making of Dan in Real Life” and “Handmade Music: Creating the Score” — are both rather interesting. The former is your standard “making-of” featurette, but it’s got good interviews and the type of interesting production information you might normally have to sit through the feature-length commentary to learn. The latter is about Norwegian artist Sondre Lerche’s score. Hedges picked the pop-folk musician to handcraft the entire score – it’s definitely one of the film’s strengths. Lerche has a small cameo near the end of the film as well.
Dan in Real Life — yeah, it’s a pleasant movie. What’s it to you?
- DVD Review: Dan in Real Life
- Published: March 28, 2008
- Type: Review
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: Romantic Comedies, Video: Drama, Video: Comedy
- Writer: Dusty Somers
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Terrific little melancholic dramedy. Solid performances all the way around and the sequence in which the Carell and Cook characters sing a duet was heart-breaking.
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pleasant is pretty much the best description of the movie. i thought steve carell was perfect and lovely and even though i only saw real sparks between the two a couple of times, juliette binoche was lovely as well. and dane cook, whom i actively dislike, totally surprised me by not only being likeable, but also being sympathetic. he did a good job and he should find another role like that ASAP. i wish the script had been better, that there'd been more setup for binoche and carell to get together and a bit more of her and cook to seal the fact that they weren't a good match. there seemed to be a little something missing that, had it been included, could have made the movie perfect in every way.