STUDIO: MGM
RELEASE DATE: March 18, 2008
STARRING: Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Robert Wuhl, and William O'Leary
WRITTEN BY: Ron Shelton
DIRECTED BY: Ron Shelton
FEATURES: Audio Commentary from director Ron Shelton
Audio Commentary from Kevin Costner and Tim Robbins
"The Greatest Show On Dirt" Featurette - Twenty years later the cast, crew and fans remember Bull Durham
"Diamonds In The Rough" featurette - Explores minor league baseball
"Between The Lines: The Making Of Bull Durham" featurette
"Kevin Costner Profile"

"It's a long season and you gotta trust. I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball."

Home plates are being dusted off and hundreds of fielders are loosening up their mitts. Every professional player has the dream of a World Series championship in their hearts and millions of fans are tuning up their fantasy leagues and planning how to get to the ballpark for Opening Day. But there are literally thousands of players working in the trenches and playing their guts out that will never make a rotisserie league or even the "big show." They're in the minor leagues, taking buses, barely making ends meet, straining muscles, and working as hard as any player on the New York Yankees. That world and nearly everything important about the sport of baseball is there in Bull Durham, one of the best sports movies ever made and it's been released this month in a glorious new Collector's Edition, just in time for the shout of "Play Ball" to be heard around the world.

Bull Durham gets just about everything that a true baseball fan loves about the sport right. On one side, there's the incredibly odd dynamic that any baller has in that your fellow player is both a teammate and a competitor. He's both your brother and the guy who's going to steal your ticket to the show and your girl by being better than you. No movie has ever gotten that element of sports as right as Bull Durham. And then there's all the other variables of baseball - the superstitions, the canned speeches, the grit, the dirt, and the incredible highs and lows of a game where ninety percent of the people who play in the minors will never see the majors. It's a great movie that has only gotten better over time with arguably the best sports screenplay ever written. The amount of brilliant, quotable lines in Bull Durham are too many to count. Watching it again twenty years after it was released only makes its impact on the last two decades of sports cinema that much more pronounced. And the fact that no one has even come close to producing a sports comedy as good since Bull Durham is a testament to how perfect Ron Shelton's screenplay truly was.

MGM Collector's Editions are a mixed bag. Half of them are clearly for-the-buck releases, pulling a title from the vault and slapping it on to a disc to call it new. Not this time. Bull Durham has been on DVD before, notably in a 2002 special edition, but this is no quickie edition. It's a necessary upgrade for fans of the movie. The anamorphic widescreen picture has been improved and the audio track is just as good (even if it's just barely surround). The picture is shockingly clear for a twenty year old film with a few of the dark scenes looking a little softer than they probably should. The special features are where the disc really shines. Fans will find two old commentaries imported and a collection of new featurettes, including a look back at the film featuring new interviews with the cast, crew, and fans of the movie. If you haven't seen it in years or you've never seen it, after you watched the pros start the 2008 season, take a trip to the minors in one of the best movies of the 1988 season with the Collector's Edition of Bull Durham.