Philadelphia: Anniversary Edition

Okay, a movie about AIDS may not be on everybody’s holiday wish list, but it was a great movie and this DVD is loaded with extras that may remind everybody about the film’s power.

Deleted scenes include great character moments. Denzel Washington runs off some important statistics, Antonio Banderas gets a meaningful moment in bed with Tom Hanks, and a scene of the judge encouraging the opposing teams to settle is really interesting philosophically. More jury deliberation is always good since that’s kind of what the audience is going through.

The raw footage of interviews outside the courthouse should probably go with the deleted scenes. You’re basically seeing the scene from the film from the point of view of the video cameras recording it to be played on TV sets within the film.

The retrospective documentary captures the evolution of the film from the emergence of the disease in society to the film’s release. Key players from the film share personal stories of AIDS touching their lives. This is really in depth. They even show title pages for scripts that were rejected. That’s deep and ballsy in the industry. Noticeably absent is Denzel Washington, who only appears in canned EPK footage from 1993. When they talk about how a certain deleted scene didn’t work, it’s unclear because you see the scene on its own and it does work. But maybe in context…

The other documentary is specifically about the AIDS epidemic with patients sharing their stories. It’s sobering stuff, even though most of the patients use humor to deal with their situations. Here is where you may want to go back to the moviemaking elements, but if DVDs are supposed to present the context of a film outside the film itself, this has to be included with Philadelphia.

The Joe Miller commercial is cute. It’s Denzel Washington doing a sleazy TV lawyer thing. It probably appeared in the film in the background, but they had to shoot the whole thing. Thank God for DVD.