The Centre Of The World

The picture quality is high enough, so as to differentiate between a couple of subtle visual styles within the film. The nature of the cinematography means there's not much to showcase the picture quality; it does its job without drawing attention to itself. The same can be said of the sound quality, which only ever needs to keep the fabulous soundtrack as slinky as possible. It's a shame that the subtitles aren't available on the extras as well as on the film, although there's no problem with them as such.

The Centre Of The World is a neatly put together DVD. There aren't mountains of extras, but those there are will be watched and appreciated. Animated menus aren't going to ever sell a DVD, but praise should be given for creating menus that are stylish, subtle, and perhaps most importantly, geared to usability. Equally, production notes are never going to be important to anyone, but these are some of the best written and informative I've come across.

"We had Mr Miyagi (Pat Morita) from Karate Kid in our film, but we had to cut his part out and we're sorry" seems to be the motivation for the extended cab ride scene. It's as good a motivation as any other I've seen! The alternative endings are an intriguing mix of unseen scenes and recutting the original ending. Wayne Wang made the right choice in choosing the ending he did.

Although the documentary about creating the film's website is rather short, it feels right. It's not boring and technical for the unversed and piques the interest of the geeky enough to send them to the site. On arriving at center-of-the-world.com, however, they find that the site no longer exists. Drat! Double drat that they didn't think to include the website as a DVD-ROM extra. Ah well, such is life.