Life or Something Like It (2002)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	None
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	99:23
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Stephen Herek
Studio Distributor	Twentieth Century Fox	Starring	Angelina Jolie Edward Burns Tony Shalhoub Christian Kane Melissa Errico James Gammon Stockard Channing
Case	?
RPI	?	Music	David Newman

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (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	English	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Life or Something Like It is a marvellous title — doesn't it just start you wondering what it's about?

    This is the story of an eventful week in the life of Lanie Kerrigan (Angelina Jolie, with platinum blonde hair — she's looks very different). Lanie is a self-absorbed TV presenter on Seattle TV (think Bill Murray at the start of Groundhog Day). So we don't hate her on sight, we're shown how she got that way (her childhood).

    Her life is, in her opinion, perfect — she's popular, she has a major league baseball player as a fianc้, and she's up for a national network job. She does variety spots on the news. One day she's doing a spot on a homeless guy who predicts future events for pocket change. He makes three predictions for her interview: that a particular football team will win 19 to 13, that it will hail tomorrow (even though the weather bureau predicts fine), and that she will die in a week. Oh. That night, the football team wins as predicted. The hail comes...

    What would you do? Try to live normally, telling yourself it won't happen? Try to avoid anything risky? Can you evade fate? Is the future pre-determined? For Lanie, who has planned her whole life for success, this is a major upheaval. She starts to re-evaluate what she thinks of her perfect life. She starts to do some things she'd never have done otherwise. It is a very eventful week...

    This is an excellent and unusual plot hook, and this film exploits it rather well. Although I can see why some people didn't like it, I really quite enjoyed it. Recommended.

Video

    This DVD transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It is 16x9 enhanced. This is a perfect match with the original theatrical aspect ratio.

    The image is gorgeous: sharp and clear, with awesome depth of field in some scenes that can use it, and lovely control over depth of field where it's useful. This film is one of the few that shows superior sharpness in middle-ground shots. Shadow detail is excellent, even in low-light scenes. Film grain is not visible. Low-level noise is never visible.

    Colour is exquisitely rendered; deep and rich. There are no colour-related artefacts.

    There are no film artefacts that are annoying, but I did see a tiny white spot at 55:25. There is a little bit of aliasing, but it didn't bother me. There is a touch of moire on a couple of Lanie's designer suits, but no MPEG artefacts.

    The only subtitles available are in English. They are well-timed, easy to read, and fairly accurate.

    The disc is single-sided and single-layered. The movie is short enough that the single layer doesn't require too much compression, so that's cool.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in English. It's a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, and quite a decent one at that.

    The dialogue is clear and readily understood, with no audio sync problems.

    David Newman's score does a good job of emphasising the events. There are some songs used to advantage in the soundtrack, but I'm not including the a capella version of Satisfaction, although it is rather funny.

    The surrounds basically deepen the soundfield without drawing especial attention to themselves — subtle, but good. The subwoofer mostly supports the score, and is well-integrated and not obvious.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are no extras on this rental disc.

Menu

    The menu is static and silent — a classic rental menu, with a single photo and very simple commands.

    The Region 1 disc was released in late 2002. It's another of those double-sided discs (widescreen one side, pan-and-scan on the other) that I don't particularly like because they are harder to handle cleanly.

    The Region 4 disc is missing:

• director's commentary
• pan-and-scan transfer
• French and Spanish soundtracks
• Spanish subtitles

    The Region 1 disc is missing:

• a high-quality video transfer

    According to reviews, the Region 1 transfer is reasonably good, but somewhat flawed — it's crammed into a single layer with several more soundtracks than the Region 4. The Region 4 video is really very good.

    Considering that this is a rental, we can probably hope to see (err, hear) the commentary and maybe some other extras on the retail disc when it arrives. I really hope the retail version offers a video transfer this good. Fingers crossed, eh?

    An entertaining movie based on a very interesting premise.

    The video quality is superb.

    The audio quality is good.

    There are no extras on this rental disc.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall