The Love Letter (Universal) (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Main Menu Audio Deleted Scenes Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	83:47 (Case: 88)
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (54:09)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Peter Ho-Sun Chan
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Kate Capshaw Blythe Danner Ellen DeGeneres Geraldine McEwan Julianne Nicholson Tom Everett Scott Tom Selleck Gloria Stuart
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	$36.95	Music	Luis Bacalov

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired Dutch Swedish Norwegian Danish Finnish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The story is mostly told from Helen's (Kate Capshaw's) perspective, and it goes something like this: The seemingly lonely Helen comes across a love letter in her book store, and she starts to wonder who left it for her. Its words invoke such passion in Helen's heart that she allows herself to be seduced by a boy named Johnny (Tom Everett Scott), who works at the book store, thinking the letter was from him.

    Much later on, Janet (Ellen DeGeneres) also accidentally comes across the letter, just after talking to George (Tom Selleck) and she believes that it was from him to her. Janet has been keen on George for quite some time, but Helen immediately tells Janet that the letter was not for her. This causes some friction between these once best friends. Eventually, the writer of the love letter is revealed as is its intended recipient.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and is 16x9 enhanced.

    Foreground detail is excellent, but grain does disrupt it on many occasions. Background detail is pretty good, but also gets disrupted by grain a lot. Any shots that contain blue sky are just riddled with noticeable grain. Unfortunately, the grain isn't restricted to just the sky scenes - it pops up frequently in pretty much any type of scene (indoors, outdoors, light, dark) so there's just no escaping it. Don't get me wrong - this is still a very good transfer, but it is really spoiled by this noticeable grain. There isn't much shadow detail, but the picture still looks natural and balanced. There are several dark scenes, so if you want to get the most out of the picture I would suggest you block out any ambient outside light. No low-level noise, edge enhancement or edge bleeding was noticed.

    The colour is very good. Everything is well-saturated and the skin tones are realistic and natural-looking. I have seen better colour, but there isn't anything to complain about here.

    No definite MPEG artefacts were noticed and there are only a couple of trivial instances of aliasing. At 81:15, a small strange line moves part-way across the screen and then disappears. It is as if the affected area had been mis-aligned. There is a really big film editing blunder at 27:26, where the film appears to jump backwards by 2 seconds and then continue on, as if someone had pressed the repeat button on a two second section of the film. This is very distracting. There is no audio disruption during this jump and the dialogue that is being spoken at the time continues to flow throughout the jump. The video otherwise remains perfectly intact. To me, this indicates that this is a film editing fault and not a transfer fault, but I could be wrong. Another minor fault occurs at 69:22 where either the camera shakes left-to-right or the fault could have been introduced during the telecine transfer stage. Either way it is minor and is a one-off occurrence.

    Film artefacts are extremely rare and small, with only two small ones being noticeable enough to get a mention here; 73:02 and 78:43.

    This disc is an RSDL disc, with the layer change placed between Chapters 12 and 13, at 54:09. The layer change is well-placed and is not disruptive to the flow of the movie, even though I had no trouble spotting it.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The dialogue was extremely clear and easy to understand throughout the entire movie. No audio sync problems were noticed. Some low-level hiss was noticed, but it is at a very low level so it never becomes distracting.

    The musical score is by Luis Bacalov.

    There is very little surround channel use, and what is there is extremely subtle. Not once was I actually aware that there was any sound coming from the surround speakers. The soundfield is all up-front, but this is not a totally disastrous thing as this is a completely dialogue-driven movie.

    There is little for the subwoofer to do in this movie as you can imagine, but it does get some nice use at 24:56 for some fireworks.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Deleted Scenes (11 - 18:45 minutes)

Theatrical Trailer (2:22 minutes)

• Cast & Crew Biographies

• Nothing

    Easy choice; R4. Reasons: both suffer from grain, but the PAL version has no 3:2 pull-down artefacts and better picture resolution.

    Overall the picture quality is good, with only the presence of some rather noticeable grain reducing its rating.

    The audio is of good quality, with no transfer-induced faults. All limitations are from the film's original sound mix, which has little surround use.

    The extras are very limited, but they are of very good quality.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall