Get Well Soon (2002)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	Menu Animation & Audio Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	2002
Running Time	90:56
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Justin McCarthy
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Vincent Gallo Courtney Cox
Case	?
RPI	$19.95	Music	Ric Markmann

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English Dolby Digital 2.0 (224Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    I usually begin my review process by doing a little research about the film that I am about to view. This simply gives me a little more background info on the movie in addition to the usually meaningless blurb on the back of the case. I try and avoid watching the theatrical trailer until after I have viewed the film, as more often than not these give away a significant amount of the plot. This research is all the more important when I have never heard of the film and have absolutely no idea of whether it is a comedy, drama, or thriller. So why is this important? Well, with Get Well Soon, I was pretty much unable to find any information at all. The usually mostly reliable Internet Movie Database lists this film as being "In Production" and its entry there hasn't been updated for near on five months. Searching on just the film title and key actors, all I can find is the brief blurb from the production company website. I thought this was a little unusual, and in fact it is the first time that I have ever seen the IMDB not up-to-date. As a result, I had no idea at all of what to expect when I stuck this in the player for a quiet Friday night's viewing.

    Vincent Gallo is Bobby Bishop, a foul-mouthed Los Angeles talk show host who has a reasonably successful show called Midnight with Bobby Bishop. Despite all of his success, he is having some troubles in his life. When he manages to insult a beautiful female guest by suggesting what he'd like to do to her whilst live on-air, the general consensus is that he seems to possibly be losing his mind. He decides to take a break from the show. He is actually missing his old girlfriend, whom he gave the flick to (it takes a while to work out this key plot point). Courtney Cox (yes - the one from Friends) plays Lily, the ex-flame. She is now in New York spending her nights at home in bed watching Bobby's show with her boyfriend. She secretly pines for Bobby, wishing he would come back into her life, and when she discovers that he may be in New York gets her hopes up that he is there to search her out. With the help of her crazy brother Keith (Reg Rogers) who is holed up in a mental hospital, they manage to contact Bobby and then the ex-lovers spend the rest of the film working out whether they really should have split up in the first place and rolling from one crisis to another.

    I can't say I enjoyed this at all. In fact, it was so tedious and uninspiring that I'm sure I nodded off sometime towards the end. Or maybe it wasn't me and the story just doesn't make much sense. The fact that it took me the better part of half the film to work out that Bobby wanted Lily back and this was the crux of his personal problems didn't help.

Video

    This is a very decent effort in video transfer terms, with few problems to report.

    We are greeted with a transfer in the aspect ratio of 1.78:1. It is 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer is finely detailed with generally sharp edges and no hint of edge enhancement. Shadow detail is acceptable, though there are only a few scenes that stretch the boundaries here. Grain is kept to a minimum and there is no low level noise.

    The colour palette is certainly not what I would call vibrant. It does the job with no problems in terms of bleeding, oversaturation, or unnatural looking skin tones.

    I noticed no MPEG artefacts. Film-to-video artefacts were extremely well controlled, and film artefacts were limited to a handful of extremely small spots.

    There are no subtitles available.

    This is a single sided, single layered disc and there is no layer change to worry about as a result.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are two audio tracks available; English Dolby Digital 5.1 and English Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded. I listened to the Dolby Digital 5.1 track in its entirety and briefly sampled the Dolby Digital 2.0 effort. The 5.1 track is well mixed, though very much focused on the centre channel.

    The dialogue is mostly clear and concise. There is a great deal of shouting in the script and this is always understandable. There are no problems with audio sync, though some of the ADR work seems a trifle obvious at times.

    The music is nothing remarkable. The score is credited to Ric Markmann. It has a sort of Indie feel to it. It began to get on my nerves after a while.

    There is little surround use. With most of the audio track dedicated to dialogue, this is not surprising.

    The subwoofer also sees little use, mainly supporting the musical score.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu Animation and Audio

    The animation consists of a heart beat monitor. The audio is the voice-over introduction to the Midnight with Bobby Bishop talk show.

Theatrical Trailer

    Running for 1:37 minutes, this is a Pan & Scan 1.33:1 video effort, with audio provided by a Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack. Watch the trailer and then watch the movie. The trailer is almost previewing a different film, they are that different. The trailer actually promises some quirky humour and a decent romantic comedy.

    As stated in the plot synopsis, I can't find any references to this film anywhere let alone a Region 1 DVD disc. I cannot determine the best version as a result.

    Do you often find yourself watching a movie, and find yourself constantly glancing at the time counter? You know what I mean, 30 minutes has gone, only 65 minutes to go, and so on. Get Well Soon was one of those for me. Tedious, not all that funny, and a real mish-mash of a plot see me recommend this only if you have absolutely nothing else to do.

    The video quality is very good with almost no visible flaws.

    The audio is workmanlike, if a little uninspiring for a 5.1 soundtrack.

    The extras. Thank goodness there weren't many.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall