My Left Foot (Special Edition) (DVD)

It is very rare that I watch an Oscar-winning film and just sort of slough it off once it is over, in the case of My Left Foot I was doing my sloughing less than 30 minutes into it.

I had never seen, and, to be honest, I don't think I will ever watch this film again. This slow paced tale about Irishman Christy Brown's (Daniel Day Lewis) dealings with cerebral palsy is no more interesting than reading a text book about the debilitating handicap itself. While Lewis gives a remarkable performance, a performance that won him the Oscar for Best Actor, it does nothing for me if the film itself is an utter bore.

Christy Brown's accomplishments as a person are above and beyond remarkable and are worthy of a feature film, but for me writer/director Jim Sheridan's adaptation of Brown's own life story seems to have very little drama. It doesn't give us a whole lot more than an inside look at the often times disgruntled handicapped Brown who has developed an extraordinary talent to live a "normal" life while writing books and painting with his left foot all while confined to a wheel chair.

Now I know that description above is rather simplistic, but for me that is all I got out of the feature, and on top of that, for those of you expecting a "collector's edition" of this movie you are in for a rude awakening as there is nothing to shout about with this new DVD.

Within the first few seconds of the film you will see that the so-called "digital remastering" of the picture are virtually non-existent as scratches and shotty film are very distracting in the opening moments, so much that I had to check the DVD cover to be sure this was in fact supposed to be a higher quality video transfer. Now with the audio it really doesn't matter much as this is not an auditory driven film, unless the constant breathing through the nose by Christy Brown is meant to be heard at high volumes and in better quality.

As for the special features, the featurette on the real Christy Brown and the making-of documentary last no more than 16-minutes, and while they do contain enough information you would think that a film as highly acclaimed as this one and a winner of two Oscars would warrant more than a few minutes of featurettes, a still gallery and a few reviews.

Overall, I think it goes without saying that I was less impressed with this movie and with this DVD. My Left Foot is certainly a film made for the Academy, but as for the emotion needed in such a drama there is just something missing in my honest opinion.