Night at the Museum

Ben Stiller plays an unfocused dreamer of a divorced dad who, after a history of failed business plans and short-lived jobs, takes the night-guard job at New York City's Museum of Natural History and discovers history really does come a live at night. It's a big, bright, busy effects comedy, where a T. rex skeleton romps around like the world's biggest puppy, Attila the Hun pillages neighboring displays and a wax Theodore Roosevelt (Robin Williams) pines for a Sacajawea trapped behind museum glass with a bickering Lewis and Clark. There is a sense of fun in the effects; the chemistry between Stiller and Owen Wilson (who plays a 3-inch-high cowboy from a diorama miniature) is genuine; and the casting of Dick Van Dyke, Mickey Rooney and Bill Gunn as retiring guards with a sneaky endgame is inspired. But you have to wonder how they've kept these magical figures within the museum walls all these years with a security system that can't keep anyone out. You're not supposed to worry about those kind of details, of course -- the filmmakers didn't -- just enjoy the slapstick shenanigans and Stiller's smart remarks as he brings a new angle to engaging with history. Shawn Levy directs this monster hit; Carla Gugino, Jake Cherry, Ricky Gervais and Kim Raver co-star.

Levy, in his commentary track, describes how much of the production was improvised ("If I stopped to tell you everything in this movie that wasn't scripted, everything in this movie that was just Ben and the other actor improvising, we'd never get anything done"). He also talks about combining that process with the rigors of a special-effects movie in nontechnical terms. A separate, irreverent commentary track by screenwriters Robert Ben Garant and Thomas Lennon is far less informative but significantly funnier. The bonus supplements on the two-disc set are essentially a children's museum version of the DVD special edition: largely nontechnical behind-the-scenes peeks in bite-sized documentary bits and promotional featurettes. Highlights include 17 minutes of deleted and/or extended scenes (most were removed to speed the film along, as Levy's helpful commentary explains) and a storyboard-to-screen comparison of key scenes (which shows just how often they reworked scenes on the set). But the most instructive and informative extra is an episode from the Fox Movie Channel interview series "Life After Film School," featuring Levy answering practical questions about filmmaking from film-school students.