Jimmy Zip (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Main Menu Audio Biographies-Cast & Crew Notes-Storyline Notes-Art Theatrical Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	112:35 (Case: 115)
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Robert McGinley
Studio Distributor	Magna Home Entertainment	Starring	Brendan Fletcher Robert Gossett Chris Mulkey Adrienne Frantz Karen Landry Ike Gingrich Zia Kim Dawson Christos John Snyder James Russo
Case	Click
RPI	$29.95	Music	Geoff Levin

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	Yes, under-age smoking
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Jimmy (Brendan Fletcher) is a foster kid, and a teenager with an interest in fireworks. After he blows up a neighbour's mail box, his unpleasant foster father tells him that he is nothing, nil, zip. He adopts the name Jimmy Zip when he runs away. He arrives in a city with a bag, a bike, and no idea of how to survive. He's lucky to meet a sweet girl called Sheila (Adrienne Frantz), who looks after him when he has a run-in with some of the local street-life.

    Jimmy is desperate for work, so after being turned down by a taco joint he takes a job with a local wannabe crime-lord, Rick Conesco (Chris Mulkey). Jimmy delivers drugs and collects money from the street walkers Rick runs. Jimmy gets himself into big trouble with Rick when he loses a large sum of money - he loses it when he loses his jacket running from a "troll" - the "troll" is a black man with Tourette's Syndrome, who turns out to be Horace Metcalf (Robert Gossett), a sculptor who works in scrap metal.

    Horace sees something of himself in Jimmy (perhaps a touch of pyromania?), and makes an effort to get to know him. He initiates Jimmy into his art - working with steel, using oxy-acetylene gear. They get the crazed notion of swiping some of Rick's drug money and using it to buy materials to build sculptures that they will then sell, and then they'll return the money.

    Did I mention that Jimmy's not over-bright? The idea of stealing money from a drug dealer...

    It looks as if this is an extended adaptation of a short Robert McGinley (the writer and director) wrote and directed three years earlier. The short starred, amongst others, Alyssa Milano. There are no names that big in this version.

    This story is not a fairy-tale, but its pretensions to gritty realism are just that. It's way too nice to compete in that field. It is not awful, but it just doesn't have much to recommend it. It may have won an award at the Hollywood Film Festival, but I can't see why.

Video

    The DVD is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, but is not 16x9 enhanced. That's a shame, but at least it is presented widescreen.

    The picture is not bad. It is reasonably sharp, with adequate shadow detail and no low-level noise.

    The colours are fine. Bright colours can achieve full saturation, but there are few bright colours around. We're talking rusty metal and overalls - these don't lend themselves to rainbow colouration.

    There are a variety of film artefacts, but they are mostly untroubling. There's quite a bit of aliasing - the lack of 16x9 enhancement can take some of the blame. There's a little bit of MPEG shimmer, and some moire, but not to the extent of the aliasing. It's not a terrible transfer, but you have seen better.

    There are subtitles in zero languages (I counted them several times). That's a shame, as some of the dialogue could have done with subtitling.

    The disc is single sided and single layered. That means no layer change, but it also means that they might have cranked up the compression a bit further to fit it onto one layer, which might be the cause of some of the artefacts.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The soundtrack is presented in English, in Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded. No other soundtracks are provided.

    The dialogue is mostly comprehensible, but there are a few words that get swallowed. There are no real audio sync problems.

    The score from Geoff Levin is not distracting. It is nothing special, but it does the job just fine.

    The soundtrack is surround-encoded, and there are a couple of moments that show some rear presence, but mostly the surrounds do nothing but extend the score from the fronts. The subwoofer gets nothing to do.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

    There's music (the closing theme, sung by Adrienne Frantz) behind the menu, but no animation.

Cast and Crew

    A brief single page for each of the main players in this movie.

Story Line 

    Three pages of text - a somewhat pretentious view of the story.

Art

    Two pages about the making of the sculptures for this movie.

Trailer (2:31)

    A straightforward trailer, presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, not 16x9 enhanced.

    There is scant information on the Region 1 version of this DVD available. Based on very sketchy and somewhat unreliable reports, it would appear that;

    The Region 1 version of this DVD misses out on;

• Widescreen presentation

    The Region 4 version of this DVD misses out on;

• Director's introduction
• Isolated music score

    Based on this information, the Region 4 version of this DVD is the version of choice as it is presented in the correct aspect ratio.

    Jimmy Zip is an ordinary film, on a reasonably good DVD.

    The video quality is fairly good for a disc lacking 16x9 enhancement.

    The audio quality is reasonable.

    The extras are basic.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall