Good Luck Chuck (Blu-ray) (2007)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	Main Menu Audio & Animation Audio Commentary-Cast and Crew Featurette-7 Outtakes-Gag Reel Outtakes-Ad Libs Deleted Scenes Gallery-Sex Matrix Trailer-5 Bookmark
Rating
Year Of Production	2007
Running Time	101:18
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Mark Helfrich
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Dane Cook Jessica Alba Dan Fogler Connor Price Troy Gentile Mackenzie Mowat Sasha Pieterse Caroline Ford Chelan Simmons
Case	?
RPI	$42.95	Music	Aaron Zigman

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby TrueHD 5.1 (1536Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) Portuguese Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) Czech Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) Hungarian Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) Thai Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) Turkish Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s) Polish Dolby Digital 5.1 (640Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	1080p
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Spanish Portuguese Czech Hungarian Thai Turkish Polish Chinese Korean Arabic Bulgarian Croatian English for the Hearing Impaired Hebrew Hindi Icelandic Romanian Serbian Slovak Slovenian	Smoking	Yes, marijuana use
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, sex tape during closing credits

Dentist Charlie Logan (Dane Cook) was hexed as a boy so that any girl he "dates" finds the man of her dreams immediately afterwards. This makes him the good luck charm to any woman desperate to marry, and there certainly doesn't appear to be any shortage of attractive women desperate enough to sleep with a stranger just so they can get married to someone else.

At a wedding of one of his ex-girlfriends he almost literally bumps into the terminally klutzy penguin-fancying Cam (Jessica Alba), who appears to be the woman of his dreams. But how can he form a relationship with her if the hex means that she will marry the next man she dates after him?

I was intrigued enough by my fellow reviewers' reluctance to review this Blu-ray Disc release to pick it up from the pile of unallocated discs. I should have listened to them.

If you accept the central concept of the hex and accept that this movie is going to be sexist, offensive to obese people and an almost terminally unfunny, unromantic romantic comedy then for the first hour or so it is at least consistent in its aims and execution. But then there is a plot twist in which the central character behaves so unlike the way he behaved in the first hour that it quickly becomes unlikeable and tedious in the extreme, so much so that I was dying for it to wrap up and be over with. 101 minutes never seemed so long.

The performances by this unfamiliar cast (to me at least; I was aware of the existence of Jessica Alba but had never seen any of her movies, the other actors I had never heard of) are mostly pedestrian. There is some chemistry between the leads and the likeable Alba seems to have some flair for comedy, but the few more dramatic scenes don't work. Dan Fogler (Charlie's overweight and misogynist friend Stu who also happens to do breast implants) is simply irritating. The rest of the cast is made up of many nubile young women who don't mind taking their tops off in front of the camera - for purely artistic reasons of course - and a couple of very large women (including the ubiquitous token black character) who are simply there for gross comedy relief.

The film is supposed to be a romantic comedy and could have been an average effort in the genre if not for the relentless sexism and bad taste comedy. While the Hollywood films of old usually lacked the last of these two features and sometimes the former, out of the past 90 or so years of romantic comedies I have seen many worse than this one. That's hardly a recommendation. I can't imagine this would qualify as a date movie but then it has been many years since I was part of the teenage/young adult audience that this is obviously aimed at. I can't honestly recommend this movie at all, even on high definition, because of its attitude towards women and the copious unfunny jokes about bodily functions. And it doesn't even have the distinction of being the first high definition release in this country to feature a three-breasted female!

Video

I do not have the equipment necessary to get all of the technical specifications for this disc, but judging from the appearance on screen the transfer is in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, which seems to be close to the original aspect ratio. I was able to watch the disc at full resolution but due to having an older receiver I am limited to a 60hz refresh rate, which means that I saw some judder that probably would not be there when viewing at 24hz or a multiple thereof.

There is not much to complain about with the video transfer. Those of you who do not like your films to have grain will be disappointed, as there is noticeable grain which gives the transfer a film-like appearance. Some of the darker scenes look a little noisy, but there are few such scenes.

The transfer is nice and sharp in a realistic way, with plenty of fine detail visible. Colours are vibrant and clean, with some nice reds and good flesh tones, although sometimes these are a little too warm. You can see small imperfections such as spots of makeup and pimple scars as well as razor burns. I did not see any problems with black crush or blooming whites.

I did not notice any layer transition, so if this is a BD-50 disc the break is handled seamlessly.

Optional subtitles are available in a myriad of languages, and can be selected from the menu on the fly. The English subtitles are easy to read in white text and seem faithful to the dialogue. There are also subtitles for the special features and audio commentary.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

The main English track is Dolby Digital TrueHD 5.1 with a variable bitrate around the 1.5 Mbps mark. There are seven other surround tracks in different languages. The Polish track is a voice over.

This is not the sort of film you would use as a demonstration of the new audio formats. While the sound is excellent, dialogue being mostly clear and crisp and music sounding full and uncompromised, use of the surround aspect to create an enveloping sound mix is limited. The music comes from the rear speakers as well as the fronts and there was one effect that was positioned in the rear sound field, but apart from that the audio is generally located in the three front speakers.

The subwoofer could be heard rumbling during some of the music, but the only time it really came to life was in a sequence with a jet thundering overhead from behind the listener to the front. This also gave the rear speakers a workout.

Audio sync was perfect. I found a few portions of the dialogue, mostly spoken by Dan Fogler, to be a little indistinct and had to check the subtitles to discern what he had said. I think that this was due to a combination of the recording, Fogler's delivery and the reviewer's hearing and is not an issue with the audio transfer.

Most of the music appears to be older (1980s) or more recent popular songs, and are reasonable well integrated into the soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

A plethora of extras, all of which are surprisingly in high definition. And most of which are unsurprisingly just filler.

Main Menu Audio and Animation

On firing up the main menu is displayed, which has some vision and audio from the movie. There is an option to switch the annoying menu sounds off (the sounds you hear when you click on the remote, not the menu audio itself).

Audio Commentary-Dane Cook, Mark Helfrich (director), Mike Karz (producer), Josh Stolberg (writer)

Despite there being four people credited on the commentary most of it seems to be the star and director. It is not a good commentary. While there are snippets about the production they are related to what we are seeing at the time, and most of the commentary is devoted to describing what is happening on screen.

Production Featurettes (28:58)

The featurettes have a play all option or can be selected individually. These short pieces each concentrate on an aspect of the production. They are Eleanor Skepple (4:57) which tells of the casting of the morbidly obese character with a Texan who sent in a humorous audition tape (and seems nothing like her character, apart from her size); Kama Sutra (2:39)-the inspiration for the sex montage coming from a 1970s star-signs poster; Polymastia (4:12) is about the digital enhancement of one actress so that she has an extra mammary; The Real Life "Good Luck Chuck" (2:57) tells about Steve Glenn, who inspired the film and gets a cameo; All About Penguins (7:39) is, um, all about the penguins in the film; Frank the Penguin Actor (2:45) is a piece of tedious drivel, a one-joke idea as everyone says how much they hated the digital character; and Good Luck Chuckles (3:49) doesn't seem to be about anything.

Gag Reel (9:28)

The usual array of fluffed lines, accidental collisions and so on, few of which would raise a smile.

Ad Libs (8:28)

The usual array of extemporised dialogue sequences, only a couple of which are actually amusing.

Deleted/Extended Scenes (9:32)

Shots that were excised from the final release print, mainly because of pacing one would think.

Sex Matrix

There is a sequence in the film where Logan is shown in various sexual positions with different women and at one point there is a multiple screen sequence. This feature displays all of these sequences on screen and allows the viewer to select any one and view the sequence full screen. Some of these are censored by airbrushing as the piece of equipment designed to cover the performers', er, equipment came loose. Annoyingly every one of these is followed by a copyright notice.

Trailers (10:41)

Trailers in high definition for Superbad, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, The Jane Austen Book Club, Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Ultimate Edition and Saawariya.

Bookmarks

The ability to add several custom bookmarks is provided.

You would think in this new high definition era where PAL/NTSC differences are no longer an issue that we would get the same content as the US release. But there are some differences. The major one is that the Region A (I'll refer to it as that although it appears to be all regions) gets an uncompressed PCM 7.1 track. I had read the specs of the Region A disc and had spent some time setting a 7.1 configuration up on my system only to plonk the disc in the player and find out it wasn't there. Although I must say, having listened to the 5.1 track, that there really weren't many occasions where the extra speakers would have added much to the audio.

On the video side the reviews I have read of the Region A transfer don't mention the grain, but at least one mentions what sounds like excessive noise reduction artefacts. I did not notice any such artefacts on the review disc so I wonder whether this is equipment-related or whether we have received a different transfer of the film.

Other than that we appear to have the same extra material (apart from different trailers) and transfer as the Region A. A slight win for the Yanks but not by much.

A dismal comedy that fails in just about every aspect except the technical ones.

The video quality is excellent.

The audio quality is excellent.

A bunch of extras, few of which are worth spending your time on.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall