The Real ‘Moulin Rouge’ Love Story

Australian director Baz Luhrmann began work five years ago on “Moulin Rouge,” his audacious, bold and colorful musical drama starring Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman. At that time, he says, the DVD format was “just a glimmer in the eye of cinema.”

But when he started post-production on the film last year, Luhrmann became a DVD buff. The format gives you “the ability to enrich your relationship with a film you already love,” he said, citing “Lawrence of Arabia” as an example. “It is like you are involved with someone and then, years later, you discover layers to them that make them more and more interesting.”

Luhrmann, who also directed the innovative “Strictly Ballroom” and “Romeo + Juliet,” points out that he is not a director for hire. “One could do many movies in four or five years if you were for hire,” he said by phone from his office in Sydney. “We [he and his creative team] decide what we want to make and we make it on our own terms. Because of that, I didn’t want to leave the DVD of ‘Moulin Rouge’ in the hands of a cynical marketing [plan].”

He didn’t want it, in other words, to feature “250 hours of junk.”

Fox’s two-disc set of “Moulin Rouge” ($30) is the first DVD entirely created by the director of the theatrical version of the film. It includes six hours of extra goodies, including documentaries, interviews, commentary and a neat “Behind the Red Curtain” version of the film that gives viewers a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the making of the film.

“I really wanted to invite the audience into the movie,” he says. “We are a bit silly on it, but you get to see the pain and the heartache and the fun [of making the film] and what it means to be really passionately involved in creating your art. I just wanted to let the audience feel they were part of it.”

One of the most challenging aspects of the DVD for Luhrmann was re-creating the vibrant look of the film in the digital transfer. “‘Moulin Rouge’ has a type of cinematic form we have developed over the past 10 years,” he says. “The color tells you when you are in a screwball comedy and when you are in a tragic opera. By repeating the look of F.W. Murnau’s ‘Sunrise’ in the black-and-white sequences, it tells you this is a memory. It took a long time to get a color language that was close to the cinematic form. I couldn’t allow that to be in the hands of someone else.”

One of the surprise hits of the summer was the G-rated Disney comedy “The Princess Diaries,” starring Anne Hathaway as a high school nerd who discovers she’s the princess of a small foreign country and Julie Andrews, in her first Disney flick since 1964’s “Mary Poppins,” as her regal grandmother. Directed by Garry Marshall, the comedy, which is strictly for the kiddies, also stars Hector Elizondo and Heather Matarazzo.

The serviceable DVD is available in both full-frame and wide-screen editions, includes eight deleted scenes with funny commentary from Marshall, an OK documentary on the making of the film, two music videos and two audio commentaries: one with Marshall and the other with Andrews and Hathaway. And in a DVD first, Andrews and Hathaway have a typical British tea party while watching the film. So between their discussions of the movie, Hathaway and Andrews chat about different types of tea and finger sandwiches. Both of them are utterly charming; one just wishes that the film was too.

John Cameron Mitchell stars in, wrote and directed “Hedwig and the Angry Inch,” the acclaimed adaptation of his off-Broadway hit play about a would-be rock star from East Germany who had a botched sex-change operation to leave the Soviet bloc and ended up abandoned in a trailer park in Middle America. A boy named Tommy steals Hedwig’s songs and becomes a huge singing star. As part of his revenge, Hedwig ends up following Tommy’s tour, performing in small, tacky restaurants.

The digital edition of the film (New Line, $25) includes a feature-length documentary about the creation of “Hedwig.” It’s far too long, but there is fun to be had in watching the evolution of “Hedwig” from Mitchell’s first performance at a gay nightclub to the feature film.

The disc also includes a wide-screen version of the film, the trailer, deleted scenes, a select-a-song feature and commentary from Mitchell.

Humphrey Bogart fans will want to check out the DVD of “Sahara” (Columbia TriStar, $25), a sturdy 1943 World War II melodrama about a tank battalion stranded in the African desert. Zoltan Korda directed this classic that also stars a very young Lloyd Bridges and J. Carrol Naish, who received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination as an Italian prisoner. The movie was also Oscar-nominated for best cinematography--which looks wonderful on the digitally restored transfer--and best sound.

Also new from Columbia TriStar ($25) is the digital version of Fritz Lang’s 1953 film noir classic “The Big Heat,” starring Glenn Ford, Gloria Grahame, Jocelyn Brando (Marlon’s sister) and Lee Marvin. It’s a brutal film in which the wife of earnest police detective Ford is blown up in a car and cruel mobster Marvin throws scalding coffee into the face of his moll (Grahame). The performances in this thriller about corruption are first-rate, as is Lang’s direction. The DVD also features vintage advertising from the film.