Director Antonia Bird, who also directed Carlyle in
Face, a film which
co-starred
Blur's
Damon Albarn - also the co-composer of the music here, brings to the
screen a film which is mildly diverting and worth a look once you get past the
ever-so-slow first fifteen minutes, but it's not one that should be made top
of anyone's list.
It does have one classic line, the speaker of which I won't name as it'll spoil
one plot point:
"It's lonely being a cannibal... Tough making friends."
I have little complaint with the sound or picture. Framed in the original 2.35:1
widescreen ratio and anamorphic, the quality can be mostly considered excellent
bar the odd glitch that most people won't really notice, probably because
their mind is trained to the gory blood all over the place, not to mention the
gruesome, but entertaining, final fight scene.
Audio-wise there's nothing that stands out to any major degree, apart from the
occasional use of the score, but any directional effects are impressive and
the soundtrack is clean and free of distortion.
The extras consist of a Trailer (2 mins, non-anamorphic 16:9),
Picture Galleries for movie stills, costume and set design,
10 Deleted Scenes, with or without commentary but all in
non-anamorphic 2.35:1 and muffled sound and 3 Audio Commentaries:
one from Antonia Bird & Damon Albarn, another from Carlyle on his own and
a third from screenwriter Ted Griffin and actor Jeffrey Jones.
There are 26 chapters which is fine, menus are static and silent
and the subtitles come in 11 languages: Czech, Danish, Finnish, Hebrew,
Hungarian, Icelandic, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Swedish and English for
the hearing impaired.
DVDs reviewed by the editor are watched on a Panasonic TXW32R4 32" widescreen TV
connected to either a Creative Dxr2 DVD-ROM player or Microsoft Xbox and
played through a Sony STR-DB930 amplifier.
PC games reviewed by the editor are on:
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
