The People's Passion

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General		Extras
Category	Music	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1999	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	49:01 minutes	Other Extras	Cast & Crew Listing DVD-ROM: Libretto Booklet
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Selection then Menu
Region	2,3,4,5,6	Director	Tony Cash
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Jessye Norman Thomas Allen Patricia Hodge Ron Moody Kevin Whately Jonathan Cope
Case	Super Jewel
RRP	$39.95	Music	Donald Fraser

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1	Dolby Digital	None
16x9 Enhancement		Soundtrack Languages	English (Linear PCM 48/16 2.0, 1536Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	?	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	English French German Spanish	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes

    The People's Passion, as the name suggests, is a contemporary musical version of the story of the last week in the life of Jesus Christ. This DVD presents a staged-for-video production of this work. Jessye Norman stars as the Narrator. According to the liner notes, Jessye Norman should be a name well-known to me as she has won a copious number of awards for her singing, however, I must confess to being completely ignorant of her work prior to this point in time. This is probably a significant factor in my relatively negative reaction to this production, as two really appalling clichés are presented within the first two minutes and I never really got over them.

    The first cliché is that of Jessye Norman herself, bursting forth in song. How to put this delicately? Jessye Norman is a robust woman, and this does make for quite a disconcerting visual image when she is first presented in her entirety on-screen.

    The second cliché is that of Jonathan Cope, who "dances the Spirit of Jesus" in a see-through white silk shirt - unbuttoned of course.

    I'm sorry, but the combination of these two images made it very hard for me to take this production at all seriously. Add to that the somewhat lacklustre music, and I was less-than-enthralled for the 49:01 that this production ran for.

Video

    The transfer is not the greatest that I have ever seen, and can best be described as passable only. Overall, the transfer is generally too dark, despite being staged especially for video, and not especially sharp. The only shots which were of sufficient brightness were the close-up shots of some of the singers. The overall darkness of the transfer led to a loss of shadow detail, with blacker areas of the picture simply being crushed into complete darkness with no shadow detail. Fortunately, there was no low level noise to mar the image at any time.

    The colours were variably presented, but tended to be oversaturated in response to the overall darkness of the transfer. As with the brightness of the close-up shots, so too did the colour rectify itself in these shots. There was a very small amount of chroma noise exhibited in the large fields of single colour which made up the backgrounds of many shots.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. There was some minor judder apparent early on during some slow pans across some of the characters, but this seemed to settle down as the transfer progressed. There was a single vertical skip in the video at 27:59 but otherwise there were no artefacts spotted in this image.

Audio

    The vocals were a little hard to make out at times, particularly during the louder passages of music, where the music simply drowned out the vocalists. Audio sync was variable. This production was clearly mimed when it was being filmed, and so the relative lip sync skills of the artists involved is reflected in the quality of the lip sync, which varies from spot on to very noticeably out.

    The music, by Donald Fraser, did little for me other than isolated passages which showed some promise. Your opinion may differ.

    Being a stereo mix, the surround channels and the .1 channel were not utilized by this soundtrack at all.

Menu

Cast & Crew Listing

DVD-ROM Extras

Booklet

    The video quality is marginal, but generally too dark.

    The audio quality is acceptable.

    There are virtually no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna (read my bio)
17th June 2000