"Actor: Beth Colt"

• Chuck And Buck | DVD | (06/12/2004) from £6.54   |  Saving you £-3.55 (-118.70%)   |  RRP £2.99

  Once upon a time, in a childhood land of lollipops and sleepovers, Chuck and Buck were the best of friends; their days marked out with "fun, fun, fun". The trouble is that Chuck grew up and Buck did not. When the pair are reunited at a family funeral, Chuck (now a thrusting music exec with a pert girlfriend and an apartment in the Hollywood hills) finds himself bothered and bewildered by the creepy lost boy he thought he'd left behind. "I like your house," mumbles Buck, sticking out like a sore thumb at an uptight yuppie party. "It's very old person-y." Shot on a shoestring budget by Miguel Arteta, Chuck and Buck offers a uniquely rich and strange comedy of retarded childhood. Think of this as a Peter Pan for modern-day America, or the Tom Hanks film Big viewed through a glass darkly. The slender premise contains deep pockets of ambiguity. After all, who's the real victim here? The harassed Chuck (played by American Pie co-creator Chris Weitz) or the spurned, saucer-eyed Buck (Mike White, who also wrote the script)? And who is the hero: the successful, status-conscious professional or the dopey, tearful wild card? Throughout the tale, you find your sympathies swinging back and forth between them. Make no mistake, Chuck and Buck is alive with hilarious, often horrific set-pieces. Yet Arteta's direction keeps it on a tight leash, prevents it from descending to the level of a simple freak-show. Instead his film blossoms from an odd-couple farce into a drolly provocative (and oddly humane) portrait of that shadow period between infancy and adolescence. White's character comes across as a very human kind of movie monster. Resplendent in stripy T-shirt, Buck is Chuck's conscience, his id, the ghost of childhood come back to haunt him. --Xan Brooks

• Chuck And Buck | DVD | (24/12/2007) from £20.00   |  Saving you £-14.01 (N/A%)   |  RRP £5.99

  When does a close friend become too close? From Mike White the writer of Dead Man On Campus and producer of TV's Freaks and Geeks comes a tale of comically twisted obsession. Chuck and Buck are childhood best friends whose lives have taken very different paths. While Chuck moved away and now has a real life Buck stayed behind and developed a dangerous fixation -- on Chuck's life. The result is a wickedly hilarious story of two guys about to learn that growing up is the strangest trip of all. Stars Lupe Ontiveros (As Good As It Gets Picking Up The Pieces Selena) and marks the acting debuts of Chris Weitz (writer of Nutty Professor II and Antz producer of American Pie) and Mike White.