(Black Widow, Blood and Wine, Head, Man Trouble, Mountains of the Moon, Poodle Springs, The Postman Always Rings Twice, TV: The Monkees)
Producers:
Bob Rafelson and Richard Wechsler
Screenplay:
Adrien Joyce
Cast:
Bobby Dupea: Jack Nicholson (Batman (1989), Blood And Wine, Chinatown, The Crossing Guard, Easy Rider, A Few Good Men, Hoffa, Little Shop Of Horrors (1960), Man Trouble, Mars Attacks, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest,
The Shining, The Two Jakes, The Witches Of Eastwick, Wolf)
Rayette: Karen Black (Airport 75, Burnt Offerings, Drive He Said, The Great Gatsby, Invaders from Mars, Nashville)
Catherine Van Oost: Susan Anspach (Montenegro)
Five Easy Pieces
stars Jack Nicholson as a classical pianist who hasn't followed the
vocation of his gift or the lifestyle of his well-to-do family and spends
most of his time drifting from oddjob to oddjob with best friend Elton, while
dating the dizzy Rayette (Karen Black). The other drifting he does is
as an opportunistic philanderer when he goes chasing after other women.
But home comes a-calling when his father takes ill and off he sets with Rayette,
via a partially-amusing skit when they pick up two female hitchhikers with very
negative attitudes, but Bobby's loins begin to stir at the sight of America's
answer to Tara Palmer-Tompkinson, Catherine Van Oost (Susan Anspach).
What's a guy to do? Stick with his girl who's now carrying his child, or go
for a walk on the wild side?
The film may be 30 years old, but the picture quality shows it. It needs a good
remastering but we're not going to get that here. It may be anamorphic and in its
original widescreen ratio, but the print is poor with grain most of the time and
bizarrely, vertical white lines all over the picture for about a minute, 61 minutes
into the film.
The average bitrate is an above-average 5.29Mb/s, occasionally peaking
above 7Mb/s.
The sound is in its original mono but very muffled and I had to turn up the
volume to hear it more clearly.
Extras :
Chapters :
The usual 28 chapters are applied here but there is no trailer, unlike the "menu"
on the back cover would have you believe.
Languages/Subtitles :
Mono in English, French, Italian, Spanish and German, plus subtitles in TWENTY languages :
English, French, Arabic, Portuguese, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi, Hebrew,
German, Turkish, Spanish, Italian, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Greek, Norwegian and Dutch.
And there's more... :
Well, just brief filmographies for the film's two principal stars and director.
Menu :
Static and silent, it can be seen on the back cover, although that's the American
version presumably, since this disc has nothing to do with "Bonus trailers" whatsoever.
The problem with Five Easy Pieces is that it's a very standard tale of family
life, only offset on the very odd occasion by Jack's trademark standoffish behaviour
(for which, here, he somehow was Oscar-nominated). Just a shame that I could
count on my hand the number of times he exhibits this here.
Add to that a poor picture, muffled sound, next to no extras and you have no reason
to buy this disc, other than the staggering number of subtitles which the
otherwise, similarly anamorphic and featureless Region 1 DVD can't match.
FILM : *
PICTURE QUALITY : **
SOUND QUALITY : *
EXTRAS : ½
-------------------------------
OVERALL : *
As of April 2009, Blu-rays and DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TH-37PX80B
37" Plasma TV with a Sony BDP-1500 Blu-ray player and played through a Yamaha DSP-AX820 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
Since Jan 2011: Intel Quad Core Dell XPS 8100, i7 CPU 860 @ 2.80Ghz, 8Gb RAM, nVidia GeForce GTS 240, Windows 7
Since Nov 2005: Intel Pentium D 830 3.0Ghz, 1Gb RAM, 128Mb nVidia GeForce 6700XL, Windows XP
Since Aug 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.66Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb GeForce4 MX440 graphics, Windows XP
Since May 2003: Intel Pentium 4 2.6Ghz, 512Mb RAM, 128Mb ATI Radeon 9600TX graphics, Windows XP
Since Jun 2002: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, 64Mb ATI Radeon 8500LE
Since May 2000: Intel Pentium III 600Mhz, 384Mb RAM, Windows 98 SE, Voodoo 3 3000 AGP
