Duma (Widescreen Edition) dvd movie.|
Duma (Widescreen Edition) buy bestselling dvd movies, videos find reviews, ratings, prices |
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List Price: $12.98 Our Price: $11.99 You Save: $0.99 Features • AC-3 • Closed-captioned • Color • Dolby • Dubbed • DVD-Video • Subtitled • Widescreen • NTSC In Theaters : 2005 DVD Release : 16 May, 2006 |
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Duma (Widescreen Edition) description This African tale follow the rhythms of director Carroll Ballard's earlier films The Black Stallion and Fly Away Home, namely a child is drawn into the mysteries and magic of an animal. Xan (newcomer Alexander Michaletos) is a 12-year-old living in South Africa with his parents (Campbell Scott and Hope Davis, who appeared as a much different couple three years earlier in The Secret Life of Dentists) when they find an abandoned baby cheetah. They bring it up as their own and name it the Swahili word for cheetah, Duma. After some time, the creature is too big to stay domesticated and Dad tells the boy they will have to journey back to Duma's home to set him free. A sickness makes the family pull up stakes and head to the city where Xan and Duma don't fare well. Xan must take Duma on his own to set him free. To tell more would be a crime. As with any Ballard film, the story is subtext, the visuals rule. First-time cinematographer Werner Maritz fills the screen with the desert landscape and is able to capture the magnificent speed of the cheetah. Ballard's films seem to build on their own inertia, creating scenes that seem to be simply happening instead of scripted, although this often suffers in the balance of wonderment versus all-too-lucky occurrences. Based on the children's picture book/memoir How It Was with Dooms by Xan and Carol Cawthra Hopcraft, this is a film worth seeking out, especially for families and kids above 5 years old. --Doug Thomas |
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| ♥♥♥♥♥ | beautiful but lacking |
| i had high hopes for this movie based on the reviews, but i as well as my family were a bit let down with it.
thankfully we saw it on home box office in HD, because there really are some stunning scenic moments in this movie. the shots of the cheetah growing up are priceless and any cat owner that watches the movie will find themselves captivated by how similar members of the cat family are of any size. but when a movie gets this good of reviews yet was never a big success something must be amiss. i first have to say the audio recording in the movie is poor at best in many scenes. after getting tired of hearing complaints from everyone that they could not hear the people talking, i finally took a minute and cranked the center channel of my receiver all the way up to be able to understand what anyone was saying, a first of hundreds of movies watched. yes, they had accents, but it wasn't that. i did not read the book, but by the sounds of it the book has a better story line than the movie. i know this movie was geared for kids and adults should try not to get hung up on the details that are not realistic but come on. not sure where to even start. the kid almost dies in the desert without food and water yet somehow only a few scenes later is tricking tourists to steal their food in order to stay lost instead of begging them to get him home. by the way, the scene stealing their food was ridiculous. just because a snake pops out of his shirt, 20 people with no place to go literally disappear leaving them to have their way with the food? some other parts dragged making it difficult to keep my kids attention while others like the 'danger' scenes were just cheap scare tactics. i am a cheerleader for this class of movie and was excited to sit down with the family to watch it but in my opinion it didn't stack up. my 5 year old did cry at the end if that counts for anything. actually it was the second to last scene saying goodbye to the cheetah. i on the otherhand cried at the final scene at such a terrible ending with the boy reuniting with his mother. really bad... |
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