Product Details

• Actors: Meryl Streep, Tommy Lee Jones, Woody Harrelson, Lindsay Lohan, Virginia Madsen
• Directors: Robert Altman
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, Full Screen, NTSC
• Language: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Surround), English (Dolby Digital 5.1)
• Subtitles: English, Spanish
• Region: Region 1 (U.S. and Canada only. Read more about DVD formats.)
  
• Aspect Ratio: 1.85:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Studio: New Line Home Video
• DVD Release Date: October 10, 2006
• Run Time: 106 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (206 customer reviews)
• ASIN: B000H6SXYM
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #11,556 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)
• Learn more about "A Prairie Home Companion" on IMDb

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

Robert Altman and Garrison Keillor combine reality and fantasy in this smooth, ebullient take on the long-running Prairie Home Companion radio show. Set during the show's fictitious last broadcast--the host station has been bought--the film has plenty of elements from the real PHC radiocasts, including a live audience and the sensational Shoe band. The onstage program is mostly music numbers, a beguiling mix of standards and old-style country. However, the show's usual comedy sketches are never presented, save for the commercial parodies--this may be a PHC show, but Lake Wobegone is never mentioned. Instead, the sketches are played out as backstage banter that feautres the Johnson Sisters (Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin), a harried stage hand (Maya Rudolph), a former listener turned angel (Virginia Madsen), and Keillor himself (a crusty alter-ego named simply G.K.). A few characters from the real PHC are given life: the singing cowboys Dusty and Lefty and gumshoe Guy Noir are embodied by Woody Harrelson, John C. Reilly, and Kevin Kline, respectively. Old flames are fanned, stories are spun, new talents are found (Lindsay Lohan has a chance to shine as Streep's daughter) and everyone wonders if G.K. will do something to ebb the tide of cancellation (personified by Tommy Lee Jones as the corporate Axeman). All of the actors do right as singers, and seem to be having the time of their life. Keillor's screenplay is perfect fodder for Altman's usual brand of storytelling, as characters babble on with the camera picking them up often in mid-thought. The film appeared a few months after Altman received an honorary Oscar, and the director is still at the top of his game, creating this smile-inducing, song-filled time, ending with an ethereal last musical number. --Doug Thomas

Product Description

Robert Altman directs an all-star ensemble cast in this cinematic adaptation of one of public radio's longest running hit shows - Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion. Still going strong as ever, PHC is heard every weekend by over 4 million listeners each week on over 580 radio stations around the world!

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

106 of 120 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Death and awful jokes: A wonderful Prairie Home Companion June 15, 2006

By C. O. DeRiemer TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Amazon Verified Purchase

I wish I'd said this: A Prairie Home Companion is a lovely film about death, and with some great bad jokes. Death and how we deal with it drifts through the film like a dream, but it turns out to be real. Word has gotten around that the 30-year-old radio program is giving its last show. The theater where it has been broadcast from all these years has been sold and will be turned into a parking lot. A woman in a white trench coat moves dream-like through the place, searching for a person whose time has come, and then finds him. And then she finds another. Memories of past successes are talked about, but sometimes not. Reminiscences are wept over or laughed over. The backstage emergencies happen and are dealt with and the radio show goes on. It's just a marvelous movie. People who dislike the actual A Prairie Home Companion will probably not like this movie. Those who do like the radio show I'm sure are going to run out and buy the DVD of the movie as soon as it's available.

Garrison Keillor is not center stage so much as he's the imperturbable head guy who isn't always there, even when he's there. Most of the regular members of the radio show are present, as well as some new names. Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep are incredibly authentic and incredibly funny/poignant as the two remaining members, Rhonda and Yolanda Johnson, of a country-music family singing group. Woody Harrelson and John C. Reilly are great as the dim cowboys, Lefty and Dusty. Their bad-jokes song is one of the highlights. Guy Noir looking like Kevin Kline tries to keep a lid on the crises. Streep and Tomlin (and Harrelson and Reilly) sing their own stuff and they are first class. Tomlin, in particular, gives a terrific performance as Rhonda, tough, funny, a little bitter and a trooper.

After 105 minutes you may find death not too frightening, may find a kind of comforting acceptance of life, and may find funny some awful jokes...like the name of the country song Lefty sang on last week's show, "I'll Give You My Moonshine If You Show Me Your Jugs." Or a great new wheezer, "Did you hear about the crate of Viagra that was stolen?" "No! Who took it?" "The cops don't know but they're looking for hardened criminals."

I also wish I'd said this, from the New York Times: A Prairie Home Companion isn't great, it's wonderful.

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining radio experience! June 9, 2006

By Maurice Williams VINE™ VOICE

This is definitely one of the most entertaining film experiences I've had in a while. Garrison Keillor plays himself in this musical dramady that depicts the sundown performance of the popular National Public Radio program "A Prairie Home Companion". Robert Altman directs the screenplay by Keillor. The film is nostalgic in timbre with elements of noir detective mystery. Keillor's dry and straight-faced humor coupled with the stellar performances of the star studded caste makes this film a must see. I saw it in a packed theatre which helped create the experience of actually being in the audience of the real show. As the show's last performance ensues, we are given a look into the private lives of the shows performers and the past life of one of the show's listeners. "A Prairie Home Companion" is smart, funny and musically astute, just like the real show. NPR fans will get an extra lift from this flick but anyone with a bit of wit and an ear for great story telling is bound to find this movie enjoyable. Highly Recommended!

66 of 83 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Funeral for a Tuxedoed Penguin June 18, 2006

By Samuel Chell HALL OF FAMETOP 100 REVIEWERVINE™ VOICE

No movie has packed more punch than Robert Altman's "Nashville" as a criticism of life, a chilling yet exhilarating dissection of a culture incapable of living the examined life. Altman was in control with that film, seizing upon a "real" place as a microcosmic landscape of mid-1970's America, then orchestrating the actions of characters who ironically have lost their place. But Garrison Keillor is himself the personification of control, a highly skilled literary and dramatic artist not the least of whose creations is the wise and witty persona serving as host of his faux-retro radio show, which is his own criticism of life.

Altman captures Keillor's cosmos, but nowhere does it acquire the life-like authenticity of "Nashville," "The Player," or "Gosford Park." The ironies that Altman's camera normally exposes have already been attended to by another ironist of undeniable brilliance. This is Keillor country, ordered exactly as its creator writes, acts, narrates, and sings it. I've attended a broadcast of "Prairie Home Companion" and found it curiously distant and unengaging, my presence and that of the rest of the audience serving as props, or a bit of window dressing, for the purpose of establishing the show's credibility for a home audience. In fact, the entire premise of the movie is absurd--the last broadcast of a folksy variety radio show that was never more than a contrived simulation from the start. As a place, Nashville took itself seriously. By contrast, Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" has the feeling of those small town renovations with anachronistic gas lanterns, pricey soda fountains and quaint antique shops. It's clever, even artful, kitsch, yet Keillor makes it work, often putting his finger on what is most genuine and real, the repressed stuff of consciousness suddenly taking on a welcome familiarity.

One of the throwaway jokes in the film turns out to be a matter of life and death: One penguin asks another, "Why do you appear to be wearing a tuxedo?" The other penguin answers,"Why would you think I'm not?" No matter that the joke was responsible for the angel of death who shadows the characters in the show; it's also a reminder that there's no reason we shouldn't trust Keillor's sleight of hand. "Reality radio show" or not, "Prairie Home Companion" becomes the stage for a strangely compelling essay on time and change, chance and paradox, the presence of absence (the bust of F. Scott Fitzgerald). The final scene of the film is lifted from Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," when the angel of death walks in on the diners, assembled this time not at a Knight's castle at Elsinore but at Mickey's Cafe in St. Paul. It's a deeply affecting moment, one that moreover has the effect of bringing the audience in on Keillor's literary conceit--an inclusion I missed when I attended the actual production. Keillor shares with Altman cynicism about many features of the present mediascape as well as an elegiac attitude toward a gentler, more cohesive American community. Like the reader who's finished James Joyce's "The Dead," the spectator at the end of this film is at one with a human community of equals, embraced by the ties that bind.

As a movie "A Prairie Home Companion" is at once more lively, colorful and honest than it is as a variety show. Altman serves Keillor well, no less than Meryl Streep serves the director, enabling him to compose shots that are too warm and glowing to be forgettable images merely. In fact, in her second appearance on the show within the show, Streep's singing a song about her childhood past reprises and nearly equals the soulful, heart-stirring moment in "Nashville" when Ronee Blakey performs the song "Dues."

Perhaps this film, which is at once archetypal and particular, allegorical and human, will be the octogenarian filmmaker's farewell. Deep down, however, I hope that a film we might regard as Keillor's film-directing debut doesn't wind up being Altman's swan song. There's got to be another "Nashville" in the protean imagination of the great director--perhaps like Shakespeare's "The Tempest" a film allowing him a fitting valediction to his cinematic magic while ushering us into a brave new world.