Home-viewing specials

MARQUEE

Friends "" especially the ones who don't know the difference between a DVD and VCD, or worse yet, still haven't figured out how to use a DVD menu "" accuse me of being obsessive about DVD extras.

I plead guilty: I think it's vital for directors to use the medium creatively and dynamically, to provide maximum value to home viewers. The era of videocassettes with limited running times is long gone, we live in an age where the Internet has made information very cheap, and home movie-viewers have the right to be more demanding than they once were.

The 12-disc extended edition of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, now available in Indian stores, represents the most thoughtful use of the DVD medium that I've seen yet. This is a sumptuous production and it's obvious that Jackson and his team relished the opportunity to share a hoard of background material about one of the great movie epics. "Specially created for home viewing" says the package, and the booklet accompanying the set adds that with no constraints on running time, each film in the trilogy was extended by between 30 and 50 minutes. But rather than simply inserting deleted scenes, Jackson approached this extended edition as if he were creating a whole new version of the film. He and editor John Gilbert carefully evaluated material to be integrated, and then worked to bring each scene up to the same polish as the rest of the feature.

Each of the three films "" The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the King "" has its own box with four discs. Two of the discs in each box are labelled Appendices and Jackson himself introduces these, explaining the bonus features and how the menus should be navigated. The features include dozens of good-sized documentaries about various aspects of the filming; extensive galleries with thousands of images (storyboards, artwork created for the production); four separate feature-length commentary options (by the director and the writers, the cast, the production and design teams, each group providing a specialised perspective); and detailed interactive maps, based on the ones that Tolkien created for his books, which allow the viewer to trace the routes taken by various sets of characters (a mini-screen simultaneously plays part of the relevant scene from the film).

It's staggering to think of how long it would take to get through everything on this set "" you'd have to be an obsessive fan of the trilogy, or a Tolkien-nerd, and also have an obscene amount of free time on your hands. The films by themselves add up to around 12 hours and if you were to listen to all four of the commentary tracks (did say you need to be obsessive), that means a cool 48 hours spent in front of your TV screen. The documentaries run into several hours too, and it's impossible to estimate the amount of time needed to see all of the images in the galleries or to trace all the map routes. At any rate, this is value addition at its very best.

Time was when the DVD of a Bollywood film would supply nothing more than a "select songs" menu, but I'm pleased to note that Indian directors are starting to use the medium efficiently. The DVD of Chak De! India has around 40 minutes of deleted scenes, the Johnny Gaddaar disc includes audio commentary by director Sriram Raghavan, and even Aamir Khan has taken a break from blogging to provide commentary for selected scenes on the Taare Zameen Par disc.

I don't expect to see anything comparable with the LOTR box-set in the near future, but at least this is a start.

(jaiarjun@gmail.com)