Bombon: El Perro

The 16x9 enhanced wide screen image transfer of Bombon: El Perro is wonderful - superbly capturing the film's cinematographic texture. Audio, presented in Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0, is serviceable for the most part, but lends the score a splendid and pleasing heft to the charm of the film's story. You shouldn't be disappointed with the presentation. No obvious typos in the subtitles, either.

Extras are somewhat lacking: two featurettes, the trailer and promotional material.

Let's start with the most interesting featurette, the 20-minute Notes On El Perro. It is a retrospective of the film, a talking heads documentary interspersed with relevant on-set footage, dailies and whatnot. Most interesting is director Carlos Sorin's admission on melding the form of a documentary with the narrative structure of a straightforward story. His insistence on using non-professional actors reminds us of neo-realist efforts in pure storytelling, making the performers live in the moment - along with the nightmares induced by the art director and cinematographer. There's interesting material here, in spite of the slim running time.

The Making Of featurette is definitely the lesser of the two - for the most part, it is a large collection of B-roll footage - dissecting the filmmakers at work in selected scenes. The rest is filler, including recycled pieces from Notes, and the crew messing around on set with mariachi music in the background.

The trailer - always good to have.

And the promotional trailers for upcoming Pathe releases - Festival and Crash - complete the DVD's insubstantive content.