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analysis w/e 14.5.11 |
DVDs out 9.5.11 |
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@ DVDfever Youtube |
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May 11 2011 
DVDfever co uk
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Director:
Producers:
Screenplay:
Music:
Cast:
Flatliners
takes five American medical students, one of which wants to see what lies beyond
death and then live to tell the tale. When Nelson achieves his task, three of
the remaining four also begin to get ideas above their station. However, as if
bringing someone back from the dead wasn't enough to bring about tension, old
feelings and experiences are reawakened and one by one the students are forced to
confront their demons from the past.
Kiefer Sutherland plays Nelson, the first to go under, a man with a clear
sense of direction to begin with, even if he has doubts later on. There's very few
films in which I can easily watch Julia Roberts, this being one and
My Best Friend's Wedding
Perfection is the name for the picture quality on view here. A bad encoding job could easily have helped the disc to fall apart at the mixture of blues and reds on display, but someone at Columbia deserves a big pay-rise for doing such a fine piece of work for one of my favourite films of all time. The film is presented in its original widescreen ratio of 2.35:1, the only way of doing complete justice to a Joel Schumacher film, especially one where the director of photography is Jan De Bont, who later went on to direct the actioners Speed, Speed 2 and Twister. The image is enhanced for 16:9 widescreen televisions which provides 33% higher resolution - and the average bitrate is 4.78 Mb/s. The sound quality is also spot-on. James Newton Howard's incredible score plus the sound FX as one encounters the after-life come across without a hitch. Just make sure the volume's loud. Since full multi-channel Dolby Digital hadn't been born yet, the Dolby Surround mix is translated to Dolby Digital 2.0 for this DVD release, so it should sound excellent whatever your hardware.
Extras :
Chapters and Trailer :Columbia break the trend of 28-chapters-whatever-the-length as this film provides 35 throughout the 110 minutes of the film which is most welcomed. The original theatrical trailer is also included.
Languages/Subtitles :Both English and German are available in Dolby Digital 2.0, with subtitles in FOURTEEN languages : English, Polish, Czech, Hungarian, Icelandic, Hindi, Hebrew, German, Turkish, Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Greek and Norwegian. The English subtitles condense the dialogue, but don't make a particularly good job of it.
Filmographies/Biographies :Brief filmographies are available for all five main actors plus director Joel Schumacher.
Menu :The menu is static, but more attractive than the region 1 release. On playing the disc you see the Columbia TriStar logo before the main menu appears.Upon selecting the "Start Movie" option, you'll first see a "Sony Pictures DVD Center" logo, the copyright info and then the film itself.
Flatliners is one of the few films that I fell in love with the first time I saw it, even if it hasn't got the most coherent of plots. After seeing the film in the cinema, the haunting score by James Newton Howard over the end credits kept me hankering for a soundtrack CD, but just my luck that a rare thing occurred - a film without such a CD to accompany its release, even in America and I know as I made several enquiries. Things went from bad to worse in early 1991 as the retail video release approached and I crossed my fingers that the unwatchable fullscreen version would be accompanied by a widescreen version, but to no avail, even later when a PAL Laserdisc was announced since when Joel Schumacher shoots a film in 2.35:1, there's no compromise possible when it comes to constructing a pan-and-scan image. Overall, this release fares better than the USA equivalent which also contains an anamorphic widescreen print, but while it has three language options, it has only two subtitle options, no trailer nor any other extras, apart from a pan-and-scan version which is about as useful as...well I think you can guess. The UK version also has a slightly higher average bitrate: 4.78Mb/s compared to Region 1's 4.58Mb/s on the widescreen side.
Review copyright © Dominic Robinson, 1999.
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:
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