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Lots of stuff is still broken, but at least reviews can now be looked up and read.
PLEASE NOTE: Michael D's is currently in READ ONLY MODE. Anything submitted will simply not be written to the database.
Lots of stuff is still broken, but at least reviews can now be looked up and read.
Frantic (1988)

Frantic (1988)

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Released 7-Feb-2000

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Thriller None
Rating Rated M
Year Of Production 1988
Running Time 114:50
RSDL / Flipper RSDL (74:34) Cast & Crew
Start Up Programme
Region Coding 2,4 Directed By Roman Polanski
Studio
Distributor

Warner Home Video
Starring Harrison Ford
Betty Buckley
John Mahoney
Emmanuelle Seigner
Case Snapper
RPI $24.95 Music Ennio Morricone


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame None English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio 1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
16x9 Enhanced
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 1.66:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles English
French
Italian
Dutch
Arabic
Spanish
Portuguese
German
Romanian
Bulgarian
English for the Hearing Impaired
Italian for the Hearing Impaired
Smoking No
Annoying Product Placement No
Action In or After Credits Yes, during

NOTE: The Profanity Filter is ON. Turn it off here.

Plot Synopsis

    Dr Richard Walker (Harrison Ford) and his wife Sondra (Betty Buckley) have just arrived in Paris to attend a medical seminar. We first see them in the back of a cab on their way to the hotel from the airport. Once checked into their room, they start to unpack and Sondra finds that her bag will not open. After further investigation, Richard works out it is not her bag and organizes for it to be returned to the airline. Richard takes a shower. When he emerges, Sondra is gone.

    Richard is unable to locate his wife and starts to suspect that something is amiss. He then reports his wife as missing/kidnapped to the police and the embassy but no one seems to be really taking it seriously, so Richard starts to follow the clues for himself. This leads him to Michelle (Emmanuelle Seigner) and they form an awkward partnership. There is a small but I thought great scene, where Michelle dances with Richard in the suspected bad guy's disco. In a reasonably climactic ending to the film one of our main characters is killed. Another highlight of the film for me was the music during the credits, which suited the movie beautifully, capturing the movie's mood rather nicely.

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Transfer Quality

Video

    Where to start? Hmmm. I think this is the best transfer we can expect to see unless the film is restored or remastered. The video quality of this movie can be split into two sections, the first 62 minutes and thereafter. The first part suffers badly from graininess and the shakes - consequently the smaller the screen, the better the picture looks. When viewed on a 68cm TV a lot of the problems mentioned are barely noticeable, so I am going to give two separate ratings.
  1. For high quality projectors with a screen size of around 250cm using component or S-Video the video quality during the first 62 minutes is acceptable, but only just. The grain and the shaking are very noticeable and distracting. After the 62 minute mark, the video becomes remarkably good with only the odd lapse.
  2. For TVs using S-Video, the video quality is good. After the 62 minute mark it becomes remarkably good. If you are using composite video connections, the graininess is non-existent and you can basically disregard the grain problems described.
    If you are a fan of this movie and you aren’t using a projector then the video quality should be quite acceptable.

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

    The sharpness of the transfer is pretty good, with only one scene where I though the picture sharpness was lacking. Shadow detail was very good. One bad case of low level noise was noticed, which can be attributed more to excessive graininess than anything else.

    The colour was very good and true to the original film's content, which is to say that it is ever so slightly muted. This is in no way a concern or a criticism and has solely to with the way the original film was shot.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen and only occasional and minor aliasing appears.

    As previously mentioned, the first 62 minutes of this film has a serious issue with grain in the image which is really distracting at times. After the 62 minute mark the grain just disappeared, as if someone had flicked a switch - poof, gone!  Thereafter, the picture really looked good, only occasionally going back to being grainy during individual scenes. The effect was so striking that it was almost like two different types of film stock were used during the making of this movie.

    Overall, film artefacts were not too disruptive, but could have been much better. There was a generous sprinkling of minor non-disruptive film artefacts, but there were also a good amount of large really noticeable and distracting film artefacts. I lovingly named these artefacts ‘Bob’ and I’m sure it will be quite a while before Bob is outdone, as he is rather large. Bob makes noteworthy appearances at 3:59, 18:04, 60:42, 84:51, 87:32 and 104:28.

    A terrible up-and-down shake affects many of the earlier scenes, which was very disconcerting when watching on a 250cm screen. Thankfully, only the worst of these occurrences are really noticeable on a TV set. It should be noted here that this is a filming stuff-up rather than a transfer problem.

    This disc is RSDL, with the layer change in Chapter 19, at 74:34. I did not even notice the slight pause when watching the movie, thus I must say the layer change is well placed on this disc and is not disruptive to the flow of the movie. I had to go back after the movie was finished and use the layer display feature to find it, which is an invaluable tool when trying to locate these wonderfully transparent layer changes.

    Special Note: The Bulgarian and Romanian subtitles present on the DVD are not mentioned on the back cover.

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

Audio

    There are no serious problems with the English audio soundtrack, and it is about as good as you can expect from this type of film using a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded soundtrack. Call me spoilt, but I missed the channel separation and the full bandwith surround channels that come with a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack.

    There are three 192 Kb/second Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded tracks on this DVD, English, French and Italian. The default is English and this is the one I listened to.

    The dialogue was usually clear and understandable, but there were a couple of occasions where it became swamped by ambient noise.

    No audio sync problems were noticed with this transfer.

    The musical score was by Ennio Morricone, and I felt the closing music score summed up the overall mood of the movie beautifully.

    The surround channel was used mostly for music, with the odd sound effect tossed in here and there.

    The subwoofer is continually being used to subtly add bass to most scenes, and is highly active during action or dramatic sequences. I learnt a valuable lesson while reviewing this disc which may or may not be of interest to you depending on your audio set up. If you own a Sony 725 DVD player and are forced to use its Dolby Digital decoder to drive your amplifiers as I am, you will not get any subwoofer output from a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded disc. Thus, I recommend that you use the optical or mix down outputs of your DVD player and let your Pro Logic decoder do the work. This problem may also affect other brands of DVD players that have a Dolby Digital 5.1 decoder built in.

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

Extras

    Absolutely none at all, not even Cast & Crew biographies/filmographies.

Menu

    The Main Menu appears to be 16x9 enhanced and has a picture from the movie with the following menu selections; Scene Selection, Select Languages, and Play Movie.

R4 vs R1

NOTE: To view non-R4 releases, your equipment needs to be multi-zone compatible and usually also NTSC compatible.

    The Region 4 version of this disc misses out on;     The Region 1 version of this disc misses out on;     Since both versions appear to suffer from the same problems, I would recommend the R4 version as it has four major advantages over the R1 version;
  1. correct aspect ratio
  2. 16x9 enhanced
  3. PAL's innate superiority over NTSC
  4. will boost sales in our region.

Summary

    I think this is the best transfer we can expect to see unless the film is restored or remastered.

    There are some reasonably serious problems with the picture quality if you have a high quality projector with a screen size of around 250cm and I would strongly suggest you hire the movie and check the picture quality for yourself before purchasing. If you are using a TV set the problems are much less noticeable and the picture quality would be considered acceptable by most people.

    There are no serious problems with the English audio soundtrack, and it is about as good as you can expect from this type of film using a Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded soundtrack.

    There are no extras.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Paul Williams (read Paul's biography)
Friday, February 25, 2000
Review Equipment
DVDSony DVP-725, using Component output
DisplaySony Projector VPH-G70 (No Line Doubler), Technics Da-Lite matt screen with gain of 1.0 (229cm). This display device is 16x9 capable.
Audio DecoderBuilt in to DVD player. Calibrated with Video Essentials.
AmplificationOnkyo TX-SV919THX
SpeakersFronts: Energy RVS-1 (3), Rears: Energy RVSS-1 (2), Subwoofer: Energy EPS-150 (1)

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