Save Your Legs! (Blu-ray) (2012)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Featurette-Save Your Legs 2005 documentary Audio Commentary-Cast and Crew Featurette-Bound 4 India with Ted & Col Theatrical Trailer Trailer-Madman Progaganda x 4
Rating
Year Of Production	2012
Running Time	91:54
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Boyd Hicklin
Studio Distributor	Madman Entertainment	Starring	Stephen Curry Brendan Cowell Damon Gameau David Lyons Darshan Jariwala Pallavi Sharda Darren Gilshenan
Case	Standard Blu-ray
RPI	?	Music	Cornel Wilczek

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English DTS HD Master Audio 5.1 English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 English Descriptive Audio Dolby Digital 2.0
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	?
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

     Ted Brown (Stephen Curry) is caught in a time warp. He is 34 years old, has no girlfriend, and lives for Saturday and games of cricket with the D grade Abbotsford Anglers Cricket Club in Melbourne, of which he is President. Sadly for Ted, his friends in the club are moving on with their lives. Vice-captain Stav (Damon Gameau) has a wife and children and, even worse, cricket captain Ricky (Brendan Cowell) is about to have a baby with his girlfriend. In an attempt to turn back the clock and to reignite the passion of his teammates for cricket, Ted persuades his employer Sanjeet (Darshan Jariwala) to sponsor the Anglers on a cricket tour of India where they will play a number of competition games. The stage is set for a clash of personalities, cultures, and cricket.

     Save Your Legs! is based upon the real Abbotsford Anglers Cricket team tour of India in 2001. That tour was the subject of the 2005 documentary Save Your Legs which was directed by Boyd Hicklin (the documentary is included as an extra on this Blu-ray) who also directs this film. And for non-cricketers, “save your legs” is the call used to tell batsmen they can stop running between wickets because the ball has hit the boundary.

     Save Your Legs! is certainly full of clichés. The cricket team includes the uptight president who will not grow up (Curry), the big talker (Damon Gameau), the captain more interested in a good time in India with drink and hallucinogenic substances (Brendan Cowell), the player interested in spiritual enlightenment (David Lyons), the brash young outsider (Brenton Thwaites) and the buttoned down statistician (Darren Gilshenan), and when they get to India there are the usual jokes about the culture and the food. Save Your Legs! has received indifferent reviews overseas, but this is to undervalue Australian humour. Save Your Legs! is often amusing, only occasionally crass, always colourful and with infectious good humour. The location footage filmed in Kolkata, Mumbai and especially Varanasi looks stunning, and while the Bollywood song and dance ending has been criticised it is impossible to dislike a Bollywood routine to the music of 10cc’s Dreadlock Holiday!

     Sure there are other issues with Save Your Legs!. The romantic subplot featuring Pallavi Sharda as the daughter of Sanjeet who takes a fancy to Ted is weak and the end of the film deviates markedly from the events of the real tour, bringing in a feel good final contest. Indeed, the Anglers in the film did rather better in India than the real tourists, as the documentary shows, but this film of Save Your Legs! is not a documentary and, hey, this is India and Bollywood, and any fantasy is possible.

     Don’t be put off by people who disparage Save Your Legs!. It not a film where women feature to any extent, being about mateship, about growing up and taking responsibility for your life and actions. It is light-hearted, infectious good fun, criticising no-one. If you enjoy or have played cricket, or indeed have been part of any struggling sporting team, the comradeship and tensions within the Anglers will definitely strike a chord of recognition. And an added bonus is a cameo by the great Sir Richard Hadlee as an umpire!

Video

     Save Your Legs! is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, the original ratio, in 1080p using the MPEG-4 AVC code.

     The print is sharp with excellent close-up detail. Colours are good, with the greens of Melbourne contrasting with the bleached out colours of India. The Ghats and river at Varanasi look a treat, and the colourful and teeming streets of India are finely captured – indeed, the film occasionally looks a bit like a travelogue. Using digital cameras, the night scenes have a flatter yellow tinge but blacks are excellent and shadow detail fine. Skin tones are natural, brightness and contrast consistent.

     Other than some slight ghosting with movement, and a touch of digital noise reduction in a couple of darker shots, artefacts are absent.

     There are subtitles available in English for the hearing impaired. Automatic subtitles come on to translate a couple of sentences in Hindi.

     The video is very good and without issues.

Video Ratings Summary

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Audio

     The feature audio is English DTS-MA HD 5.1, and there is an audio commentary track plus English descriptive audio for the vision impaired by a nice female Australian voice, both Dolby Digital 2.0 at 224 Kbps.

     Dialogue is always easy to hear and understand, even from the Indian actors. The surrounds are used for music, crowd noises, and fireworks and there is a nice depth, with bat hitting ball resoundingly. There are some directional effects with voices, the crowd and engines and the subwoofer was mostly silent except for adding serious bass to the Bollywood songs on the soundtrack and supporting the fireworks.

     The original score by Cornel Thomas Wilczek was supported by a number of Bollywood songs, uses of the Nine Network Wide World of Sports theme and of course a version of Dreadlock Holiday. The score added greatly to the fun.

     I did not notice any lip synchronisation problems.

     The audio track was fine and did what was needed.

Audio Ratings Summary

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Cast and Crew Audio Commentary

     Director Boyd Hicklin, producers Robyn Kershaw and Nick Batzias and stars Stephen Curry, Brendan Cowell and Damon Gameau sit together and chat about the film. This is a classic case of too many people laughing and talking without saying a lot and while they obviously had mostly a good time making the film in India, except for the illnesses about which there is a lot of talk, there is little information about the logistics or challenges of shooting in India except for the identification of locations.

Save Your Legs: The Documentary (54:11)

     Directed by Boyd Hicklin and released in 2005, this is the documentary of the real tour to India by the Abbotsford Anglers cricket team in 2001. The documentary is amateurish in places but is also often fascinating showing the team of Australian blokes out of their depth culturally and in cricketing terms! In their first match in Madras the home team were 4-356 after 45 overs; the Anglers’ reply 147 all out! One comment made was that the bowlers were entertaining the local batsmen, yet as the footage shows the team also did their share of entertaining the Indians generally. And any Australian cricketer complaining about the pitches here should have a look at some of the Indian pitches, official and unofficial, the team played on. This is a wonderful documentary and a great adjunct to the film. Video is in the aspect ratio of 1.78:1, in 720p using the MPEG-4 AVC code; audio LPCM 2.0, surround encoded at 1536 Mbps.

Bound 4 India with Ted & Col (5:56)

     Stephen Curry and Darren Gilshenan in character, shop at a pharmacy for medical essentials for the Indian tour.

Theatrical Trailer (2:06)

Madman Propaganda (9:25)

     Trailers for Storm Surfers 3D, Fire in Babylon, Paul Kelly – Stories of Me and Kenny.

     Save Your Legs! is not currently available in any other region in any format.

     Save Your Legs! is a film about mateship, growing up and taking responsibility. It is often amusing, only occasionally crass, and always colourful with infectious good humour. If you have been part of any struggling sporting team, the comradeship and tensions within the Anglers will definitely strike a chord of recognition.

     The video and audio are good and the extras are genuine and include the original 2005 documentary that almost by itself is worth the price of the Blu-ray package.

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