Taking up the offer is artist Theo (the new Mrs. Michael Douglas, Catherine
Zeta Jones),
Armageddon's
Owen Wilson as Luke and Nell (Lili Taylor), who just recently
lost her mother after spending a lifetime looking after her. The film is
stretched out with a lot of introduction to the back-story of the house and
how it came to be, then slowly, but surely, do weird things begin to happen,
initially to Nell and the trio discover what Dr. Marrow is really up to
that's just half the story.
The film also includes cameos from Bruce Dern as caretaker
Mr. Dudley and Virginia Madsen as Nell's inconsiderate sister Jane.
Like all other Jan de Bont films, this one is also presented in 2.35:1 and
is anamorphic. He uses the entire width of the frame all the time, so I'd
hate to see how the glorious interiors and superb, subtle - and not so subtle - SFX result in
being cropped to 4:3 fullscreen.
The average bitrate is a high 6.24Mb/s, often peaking over 8Mb/s.
The sound is in Dolby Digital 5.1 for both English and German
and is well-used throughout the film, initially to provide creepy voices
of children in Nell's mind and even more so later on when more spooky effects
take place, which thunder through your speakers and will be heard in the
next town if played loud enough.
Extras :
Two Trailers, both anamorphic, one in 2.35:1 and the
other cropped to 16:9, a 27-minute Featurette introduced by
Catherine Zeta Jones and including interviews from cast and crew members
mixed in with clips. Finally, the enclosed booklet contains a couple
of pages of brief production notes.
The number of chapters, 24, is fine and the subtitles come in
English (and hard of hearing), Dutch, Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian and Danish.
The menus are all silent and static.
Overall, this passes a fairly interesting couple of hours, but while it's
not something I'd care to watch time and again, it's a damn good demo disc
for Dolby Digital 5.1 sound.
However, as Lily Tomlin gets far more to do than any of the rest of the cast,
she shouldn't have been as low down as fourth in the list.
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
