In Good Company

Color, 110 min. plus supplements, Dolby Digital 5.1, widescreen

Street: May 10

DVD: $29.98

First Run: L, Jan. 2005, $45 mil.

UNIVERSAL

This amiable comedy about corporate restructuring and the ins-and-outs of aging in America offers a sex symbol for everyone--from the ruggedly good-looking Dennis Quaid (playing older than he is; "They had to age me to play it," he says during one of the supplements) to sexy starlet Scarlet Johansson and newcomer Topher Grace. It's not insignificant to talk about aging since In Good Company centers around Quaid's character getting a new boss (Topher) half his age, who begins to date his daughter (Johansson). It's an intelligent film that goes down easily, but it's intelligent in a way that many comedies are not, thanks to the talents of director Paul Weitz (About a Boy), who provides both a commentary and a behind-the-scenes documentary on this DVD. The documentary kicks off with a slightly silly concept--using the word "synergy" as an acronym for each brief segment (s = Stars, y = Youth and so on)--but the content and interviews are quite interesting. A "Real Life" segment has interviews with corporate businessmen and magazine ad executives as they detail the similarity between their jobs and those in the movie. The coolest spot in the documentary is the "Editing" feature, in which Weitz admits that the process is "an extremely unnatural re-creation of reality," and that his film first clocked in at 2 hours and 45 minutes. Only 16 minutes of those cut scenes are included here, and it's obvious why they had to die--they are funny but not needed to flesh out the story, which works just fine as is.

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