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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.
The Glass House: Collector's Edition (2001)

The Glass House: Collector's Edition (2001)

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Released 15-May-2002

Cover Art

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Details At A Glance

General Extras
Category Thriller Menu Audio
Dolby Digital Trailer-City
Audio Commentary
Deleted Scenes-+/- commentary
Filmographies-Cast & Crew
Interviews-Cast & Crew
Theatrical Trailer
Trailer-Urban Legend
Rating Rated MA
Year Of Production 2001
Running Time 101:56
RSDL / Flipper RSDL Cast & Crew
Start Up Menu
Region Coding 2,4 Directed By Daniel Sackheim
Studio
Distributor

Sony Pictures Home Entertain
Starring Leelee Sobieski
Diane Lane
Stellan Skarsgard
Bruce Dern
Case Amaray-Transparent
RPI $36.95 Music Christopher Young


Video Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame None English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s)
English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio 2.35:1
16x9 Enhancement
16x9 Enhanced
Video Format 576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio 2.35:1 Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures No
Subtitles English
Dutch
Hindi
Dutch Audio Commentary
English for the Hearing Impaired
Smoking Yes
Annoying Product Placement Yes, let's play Rattle Off The Car Makers!
Action In or After Credits No

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

Plot Synopsis

    There are a few things I will get out of the way first in order to make readers understand where I am coming from when assessing the merits of this film. First of all, I hate Leelee Sobieski and that thing she does in an effort to look like she is acting. Calling her a poor man's Denise Richards is a form of flattery, and it will come as no surprise to most viewers that her performance in this thriller is little different to her performance as Joan Of Arc in a historical fiction.

    I also found this film to be incompetently written, poorly directed, and the editing in some sequences gave me a headache, although one shot at 31:42 is quite funny because one would have to have the skin of an elephant to even consider trying to subcutaneously inject insulin with that kind of syringe. This plot detail is quite excellently handled, however, as it is one of the few subtle hints in the film about how two-faced the Glass family really is. Everything else is handled with about as much subtlety as a brick through a window.

    The Glass House begins when Ruby Baker (Leelee Sobieski) comes home to find two policemen in her home, who inform her that both of her parents have been killed in a car accident. After the funeral proceedings are taken care of, she and her brother, Rhett (Trevor Morgan) are taken into the care of the Glass family - Terry Glass (Stellan Skarsgård) and Doctor Erin Madre-Glass (Diane Lane). Ruby is told by her uncle, Jack Avery (Chris Noth) that she can contact him by phone or email any time she needs to talk, and boy does she begin to feel the need after a while.

    It's hard to describe the plot any further without ruining it, but suffice it to say that Terry and Erin have something of a scheme to get access to the Baker trust fund, which, according to one Alvin Begleiter (Bruce Dern), is worth about four million dollars. When the whole story unfolds, one may get a sense of indifference, but somehow, the tragedy of Ruby's plight shines through in spite of the horrid acting, thanks in part to Trevor Morgan's performance. However, the general chicanery of the plot and the contrived twists make it very difficult for me to give even the most qualified recommendation.

    As the featured IMDB comment says, this Glass House deserves to have stones thrown at it. How a script like this can get the green light in preference to so many others out there is either a shocking reflection of the standard of writing in Hollywood, or evidence that the executives who have their fingers over the approval button are all on some really heavy drugs.

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Transfer Quality

Video

    Well, as we all know, the rules state that when the film is a total piece of crap, its chances of receiving an excellent transfer to our beloved medium literally go through the roof.

    The Glass House is presented in its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and it is 16x9 Enhanced.

    This is a sharp transfer with plenty of clear, vibrant detail for the pleasure of all the detail junkies out there. If you ever need a disc with which to show people why DVD is the superior format, this is definitely one to consider, as it is as sharp as a scalpel, with excellent shadow detail to boot, and there is a complete absence of low-level noise.

    The colours in this film are mostly limited to various shades of blue, giving the Glass house set a steely, cold feel that was a vain attempt to inject some terror into the film. This transfer renders the colour scheme without any smearing or composite artefacting.

    MPEG artefacts were not noticed in this transfer, despite the bitrate being unusually low during a lot of the feature, which can be explained by the quality of the encoder Columbia Tristar are using. They are clearly well on top of this game, and it shows in every frame. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of some mild, or occasionally moderate, aliasing, with the steel-and-glass cupboards producing the most objectionable shimmering at 36:21, 51:28, and 87:35. The infrequency of these artefacts made them easier to tolerate, although I still personally found them annoying, having seen the film theatrically. Film artefacts were so minimal as to be non-existent.

    There are English for the Hearing Impaired subtitles present on this disc. Interestingly, they are identical in placement and font to the ones found on Evil Woman, which would suggest that Columbia Tristar Home Entertainment are using the same people to create these captions as do Roadshow. Now all we need is to make this typeface a little bolder, and we're set.

    This disc is RSDL formatted, but the layer change eluded me in spite of watching the film all the way through with both soundtracks.

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

Audio

    There are two soundtracks to be found on this DVD: the original English dialogue, encoded in Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448 kilobits per second, and an English Audio Commentary, encoded in Dolby Digital 2.0 with surround-encoding at 192 kilobits per second. I listened to both of these soundtracks.

    The dialogue is clear and easy to understand at all times. I have heard some whining from people in various places that Stellan Skarsgård's voice is hard to follow, but I had no such problems myself. Interestingly enough, most of that whining came from people who live in the USA, but being that I have a lot of friends who speak with variously heavy Western European accents, perhaps I am not the best judge of how intelligible such accents are to the common audience.

    There were no discernable problems with audio sync, save for the deliberately engineered kind that help to inject some much-needed atmosphere into some moments of the film.

    The score music in this film is credited to Christopher Young. It does put up a brave effort to inject some tension into the on-screen action, and it does lend the early parts of the film a good atmosphere, but it is quickly overwhelmed by the pedestrian, ordinary feel of the film itself.

    The surround channels are aggressively utilised in order to spread sound effects throughout the sound field, resulting in some truly creepy moments which came off as merely being ridiculous in the theatrical exhibition. The voices of the policemen at 5:27, a passing car at 42:11, and the sounds of a storm at 52:47 were my favourite examples of the creative surround usage on this disc, and there are numerous others to be found throughout the film. This is another example of how the DVD format can make a film that absolutely blew chunks at the theatre seem a bit more tolerable, but only just a bit in this case.

    The subwoofer was also aggressively utilised, but not quite as frequently, to support the sounds of cars crashing, among other things. Most of this film is driven by dialogue, so the subwoofer was not used as frequently as it would have been for action films, but it did a great job of supporting the effects it was called for without calling attention to itself.

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

Extras

Menu

    The menu is accompanied by Dolby Digital 2.0 audio, and it is 16x9 Enhanced. Navigation is rather straightforward.

Audio Commentary - Wesley Strick (Writer) & Daniel Sackheim (Director)

    Presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 with surround encoding, this is one commentary that utterly beggars belief. One of the "insights" these two share is that the film as scripted originally had a running length of about three hours, and that much of the story's detail was lost in the paring. Quite frankly, if they could have added another twenty minutes to build some kind of sympathy with any of the characters, it might have made the thing more watchable.

Deleted Scenes with commentary

    Actually, there is only the one deleted scene, titled Morning/Funeral, which is presented in Dolby Digital 2.0 (with optional commentary), in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1, and it is not 16x9 Enhanced.

Filmographies

    Filmographies for Leelee Sobieski, Diane Lane, Stellan Skarsgård, Trevor Morgan, director Daniel Sackheim, and producer Neal H. Moritz are presented under this submenu. They make for a good listing of films to avoid, given the strength of the performances on offer here.

Cast & Crew Interviews

    Presented as links in the filmographies are interviews with the cast and crew, presented in a aspect ratio of 1.33:1 with Dolby Digital 2.0 sound.

Theatrical Trailer

    Presented in an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio and 16x9 Enhancement, this two minute and fifteen second trailer makes the film seem like a taut thriller.

Trailer - Urban Legend

    This two minute and nineteen second trailer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.33:1 with Dolby Digital 5.1 audio.

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;

    Unless your need to see this film reframed to match the screen shape that is going the way of the gramophone (it was shot in Super 35) is that great, I would stick with the local version, since it is also easier to avoid getting fingerprints on a single-sided, dual-layered disc. The list price of the Region 1 version is also nearly twenty-eight US dollars, which is about ten times as much as I would normally consider paying to see this film. Stick with the local disc.

Summary

    You might be asking yourselves the question that if I hated the film so much theatrically, why would I have volunteered to review the DVD, which is fair enough. After watching Tomb Raider on DVD and finding that it improved in the home theatre environment, I would have hoped the same might have been true for The Glass House. Unfortunately, this is a film that actually gets worse with a subsequent viewing on our beloved medium, and the fact that this atrocious script was given the green light is a harsh indictment upon the Hollywood system.

    Somewhat ironically, the film that the IMDB recommends to the masochists who enjoyed this film, at least as of June 5, 2002, is Harry Potter And The Philosopher's Stone. In any case, the only circumstances I can recommend viewing this film under are if you are in need of a date flick and you've already seen the other available suitable material. Even the very occasional and timid glance of bare flesh cannot save this film - it is literally a cavalcade of missed opportunities and weak plot points.

    The video transfer is excellent.

    The audio transfer is excellent.

    The extras are almost as annoying and free of substance as the film.

Ratings (out of 5)

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Dean McIntosh (Don't talk about my bio. We don't wanna know.)
Thursday, June 06, 2002
Review Equipment
DVDToshiba 2109, using S-Video output
DisplaySamsung CS-823AMF (80cm). Calibrated with Ultimate DVD Platinum. This display device is 16x9 capable. This display device has a maximum native resolution of 576i (PAL).
Audio DecoderBuilt in to amplifier/receiver. Calibrated with Ultimate DVD Platinum.
AmplificationSony STR DE-835
SpeakersYamaha NS-45 Front Speakers, Yamaha NS-90 Rear Speakers, Yamaha NSC-120 Centre Speaker, JBL Digital 10 Active Subwoofer

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