Two New DVDs

While at Target shopping for CDs recently, I happened to notice that they were carrying the recently-released DVD versions of two of my favorite movies I've seen in recent memory: Bill Maher's Religulous and the Swedish art film Let The Right One In. Well, tonight I finally finished rewatching both (including bonus features), and I hate to report that while I grew to love one of them even more, the other has sorta faded for me. Care to guess which is which?

If you guessed that Religulous didn't hold up as well as it did during my first viewing in the theatre, you would be right. Sure, it's funny in bits, and it does make some good points, but I feel like I've heard some of Maher's arguments over and over, and the ending really is too heavy-handed. I don't really understand why Maher thought it would be good to get all militant about religion at the end of an otherwise tongue-in-cheek comedic documentary. Whatever. Still glad I picked it up.

So that leaves me liking Let The Right One In even more than before. Sure, it hit me harder the first time, but this viewing only proved to me how beautiful this film is. I almost want to go read the book it's based upon now (despite having A LOT of reading to catch up on). All this said, I still think you should see it without looking into it at all, so I'm not going to say anything revealing about it this time either...

One thing that did catch me off-guard about the DVD though was that it gives you the option to watch the film either with subtitles or with English overdubbed. In fact, right out of the box, it assumes that you would prefer it in English, which I think is a bit tacky. So, I accidentally watched the first couple of minutes in English, trying to figure out what was going on with my copy of the film, and although it wasn't horrible, I was convinced the Swedish would be better, so I switched it to what should have been the default setting. Strange decision, especially considering they're planning on doing an English-language remake in a couple years. Whatever...