Say Anything... Special Edition (2002)

Image credit: Say Anything: Photofest

SAYS SOMETHING Skye and Cusack provide witty commentary

When you're an 18-year-old boy, Lloyd Dobler is the guy you want to be: fearless but fragile, self-assured but shaky, handsome but humble, passionate but a little bit pretentious, and above all things, a kickboxer. If you're an 18-year-old girl (or 25, or 37), Lloyd Dobler is the guy you want to be with. As we've put forth recently in these very pages, Cameron Crowe's Say Anything... is the modern romance that resonates like no other, and it is, like so many great films of the '80s, a movie that many of us first found on video. So it only seems right that its wizened heart beats loudest on DVD.

The centerpiece of this disc -- which also boasts a bevy of deleted, extended, and alternate scenes -- is the commentary by Crowe, John Cusack, and Ione Skye, which starts a full 20 minutes before the actual film begins and allows Crowe to tell of the film's genesis and his kickboxing ex-neighbor named Lowell. It's full of everything you want in a commentary: production anecdotes, playful banter, and performer revelations (during the scene in which Lloyd teaches Diane how to drive stick, Skye offers: ''If we didn't have boyfriends or girlfriends, this would've been the day we would've gone home together''). And the movie still hums, like an old flame, after all these years.