Anywhere But Here (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Theatrical Trailer Featurette
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	109:12
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (64:38)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Wayne Wang
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Susan Sarandon Natalie Portman
Case	?
RPI	$31.95	Music	Danny Elfman Lisa Loeb Diane Warren

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.0 (384Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	Croatian Czech Danish English for the Hearing Impaired Finnish Hebrew Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish Turkish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    From the director who brought us The Joy Luck Club (Wayne Wang) comes another film about a mother-daughter relationship. Anywhere But Here stars Susan Sarandon as Adele August and Natalie Portman (fresh from Star Wars The Phantom Menace) as the daughter Ann.

    Adele is frustrated by the small town life in Bay City, Wisconsin and escapes to Beverly Hills, California, in a second-hand Mercedes accompanied by her very unwilling and pensive daughter. Ann does not want to leave her family and friends behind, and can barely stand her mother, who is flaky, irresponsible and crass, although she means well.

    Both mother and daughter tries to start a new life in California - finding a place to stay, going to school, finding a job, getting involved with men (willingly and unwillingly). Along the way, they find themselves in a love-hate relationship with each other and gradually realise they need each other even though they find each other frustrating.

    I think this film has a number of good points and well crafted scenes, but overall I found it a bit slow. Certainly it did not grab my attention and focus as The Joy Luck Club, but still this is worth watching.

Video

    I was somewhat surprised to discover that this film is in Scope (2.35:1 aspect ratio) based on a Super 35 print. Fortunately, the transfer is in the intended aspect ratio and is 16x9 enhanced.

    Overall, this is an above average transfer, looking a bit on the soft side but with reasonable detail levels. Likewise, colours are slightly under-saturated, but nothing to complain about.

    I did not see any objectionable instances of grain, and the film source is fairly clean with hardly any marks at all.

    Given that the two hour film is spread over two layers, there are no instances of compression artefacts.

    There are a number of European languages subtitle tracks on this disc. I sampled the "English for the Hearing Impaired" track. This did not seem like much of a "hearing impaired" track to me, since the bits that I sampled didn't contain dialogue attribution nor transcriptions of non-dialogue sounds.

    This is a single sided dual layered disc (RSDL). The layer change is at 64:38, and is well placed, for it occurs during a natural pause with no background audio.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There is only one audio track on the disc: English Dolby Digital 5.0 (384kb/s).

    This is a very dialogue focused film, and might as well have been in mono for most of the sound is coming from front centre. I had difficulty noticing front stereo pans, let alone rear channel activity.

    The sound track is slightly crackly, almost as if the dialogue is on the verge of distortion due to clipping, which is surprising since the audio track is not recorded at a high level. On one occasion near the beginning of the film (2:47) I did experience over-clipping distortion in the dialogue. I did not notice any audio synchronization issues.

    The background music is not memorable and features original music by Danny Elfman.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    Extras are pretty minimal and limited to a trailer and a very short promotional featurette.

Menu

    The menus are 16x9 enhanced but static.

Theatrical Trailer (2:23)

    This is presented in 1.85:1 with 16x9 enhancement and Dolby Digital 2.0 (192kb/s).

Featurette (5:26)

    This is a short promotional featurette that has excerpts from the film, and short interviews with:

• Natalie Portman (Adele)
• Susan Sarandon (Ann)
• Wayne Wang (director)
• Laurence Mark (producer)
• Mona Simpson (author, Anywhere But Here)

    It is presented in full screen. Film excerpts are presented in 1.85:1 without 16x9 enhancement. The audio track is Dolby Digital 2.0 (192kb/s).

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on:

• English and French Dolby Digital 2.0 surround encoded audio tracks

    The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on:

• RSDL dual layer disc
• additional foreign language subtitle tracks

    The two versions are similar, apart from audio and subtitle tracks.

    Anywhere But Here is a drama about a mother and daughter relocating from Bay City, Wisconsin to Beverly Hills, California and learning to live with and tolerate each other.

    The video quality is above average.

    The audio quality seems to be on the verge of clipping distortion.

    Extras are minimal.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall