Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil

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General		Extras
Category	Thriller	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1997	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	149 minutes	Other Extras	Menu Animation Cast & Crew Biographies Production Notes
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (87:17)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Movie
Region	4	Director	Clint Eastwood
Studio Distributor	Warner Brothers	Starring	Kevin Spacey John Cusack
Case	Snapper
RRP	$29.95	Music	Lennie Niehaus

    I really liked this movie. Contrary to expectations, I was not bored for a moment. Admittedly, it does take around 30 minutes to really get going, but after this I was fascinated. Remember, folks, that this comes from someone who hated L.A. Confidential, and loved Hush, so your opinion may vary to mine.

    Midnight In The Garden Of Good And Evil is a story set in the deep south of America, in Savannah. Jim Williams (Kevin Spacey) is a flamboyant eccentric who throws legendary parties. It is de rigeur for the local set to attend. He is also homosexual, but since he doesn't flaunt this, it is conveniently ignored amongst polite Savannah society. At least, it is ignored whilst Jim is in.

    John Kelso (John Cusack) is a freelance reporter who has been sent to cover one of Jim's parties for a magazine, which he does, but he is so fascinated by the oddball cast of characters that he meets that he stays on, figuring that there must be a book to be written featuring all of these colourful characters.

    Jim shoots his lover, Billy Hanson (Jude Law) in somewhat mysterious circumstances, claiming that he did it in self-defense. John figures that the best place to be is on the inside of Jim's team, which includes Jim's very protective lawyer Sonny Seiler (Jack Thompson) and a voodoo practitioner named Minerva (Irma P. Hall). Incidentally, either Jack Thompson put on weight after his suit fitting or he was supposed to look like his suits were a size too small, I wasn't sure which.

    We then watch the progress of Jim's murder trial, meeting a serious of very eccentric people along the way, the most outrageous of which is Chablis Deveau, played by herself.

    This movie is filled with eccentric and outrageous people, and this is what I enjoyed most about the movie. There is also some excellent cinematography which helps the story along as well.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was razor sharp and crystal clear. Shadow detail was excellent. No low level noise was apparent.

    The colours were beautifully rendered with deeply saturated greens and browns. This was a particularly excellent aspect of this transfer.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some barely perceptible aliasing and some very slight image wobble here and there, but unlike other recent transfers, the artefacts here are kept well under control. Film artefacts were extremely rare, which is consistent with the recent vintage of this transfer.

    This disc is an RSDL disc, with the layer change occurring between Chapters 23 and 24, at 87:17. This is quite a disruptive layer change, occurring during cross-examination of one of the witnesses at the trial.

Audio

    Dialogue was initially quite hard to understand, with ambience tending to drown out the dialogue to a certain extent. This settled somewhat later on in the movie. This problem was compounded by the Southern accents of the characters, meaning that significant amounts of dialogue were missed early on.

    There were a few ADR issues with this disc, with some of the ADR dialogue marginally out of sync, but this was an infrequent occurrence. Dialogue mostly sounded very natural and in sync.

    The music by Lennie Niehaus appropriately accompanied the on-screen action, though most of this soundtrack is comprised of cover versions of Johnny Mercer standards.

     The surround channels were moderately used for music and for ambience, creating a reasonably enveloping soundtrack, though this was not particularly an enveloping movie, being predominately character and dialogue based.

    The .1 channel was rarely used, if at all. Once again, there simply was no low frequency information in this soundtrack to be sent to this channel because of the nature of the movie.

Menu

Cast & Crew Biographies

Production Notes

    The video quality is essentially perfect.

    The audio quality is acceptable, though there is some difficulty with the dialogue early on, and some bad ADR work here and there.

    The extras present are very limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
19th March 1999