Mill Creek Entertainment's July 2 Blu-ray Double Feature Teams Lasse Hallestrom’s Once Around With Lajos Koltai’s Evening

Mill Creek Entertainment will be back with another one its popular priced-to-collect Blu-ray double features on July 2.

Titled Double the Romance, teams director Lasse Hallestrom’s 1991 romantic comedy, Once Around, with filmmaker Lajos Koltai’s 2007 romantic drama, Evening.   

These are two films, with very different tones, about love-found and love-lost.

In Hallestrom’s Once Around, Renata Bella (Holly Hunter), the oldest of the Bella family (Danny Aiello and Gena Rowland play the parents) three offspring, is at a crossroads in her life.  Her long-time fiancé has finally revealed the truth, he has no real desire to get married and she’s now back living with her parents.   

What to do?   Indeed, what to do when you are in your mid-30s and no prospects?

Off to Florida she goes to attend a real estate sales seminar.   Perhaps she has a future in peddling condos?   Instead, she happens upon Sam Sharpe (played by Richard Dreyfuss), who is something of a force of nature.   It’s love at first sight … he’s older, well off from being very good at what he does and wants a family.

 If Sam is water, then the Bella family, especially Joe (Aiello), is oil.  Oil and water don’t mix!

We won’t give away the ending, but let’s just say that both Renata and Sam — who come from very different worlds — in the end, get what they desire.   It’s the getting there that is the most fun and Sam, by his very nature, rubs the Bella family the wrong way without even trying!!

The second feature is Koltai’s film adaptation of Susan Minot’s 1998 novel, Evening, and it stars Vanessa Redgrave as Ann Grant Lord, who is bed ridden and dying.   We enter her mind and shift immediately back to the 1950s where Ann, now played by Claire Danes, recalls the love she had for Harris Arden (Patrick Wilson).   It was a romance, with many complications, that did not work out. 

Back in the present day, Ann’s daughters, Nina (Toni Collette) and Constance (Natasha Richardson), do the best they can to make their mother comfortable in her final hours.  A connecting reunion with present day Lila (Meryl Streep) and the early version (Mamie Gummer) brings the relationship with Harris Arden full circle.