As Good as It Gets (1997)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	Audio Commentary-James L Brooks, Jack Nicholson, Helen Hunt, et al Theatrical Trailer Filmographies-Cast & Crew Dolby Digital Trailer-City
Rating
Year Of Production	1997
Running Time	133
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (66:22)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	James L. Brooks
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Jack Nicholson Helen Hunt Greg Kinnear Cuba Gooding, Jr. Skeet Ulrich Shirley Knight
Case	Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI	$36.95	Music	Hans Zimmer

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) English Audio Commentary Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/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 French Dutch Arabic	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    The second time around, I rather liked the movie. I found it much more believable, even though I started watching it with quite a closed mind, expecting to dislike it as much as I did the first time around. Jack Nicholson plays an obsessive compulsive romance novel writer named Melvin Udall. Amongst his obsessions is the fact that he eats breakfast at the same eatery every day, at the same table, with the same waitress, Carol Connelly (Helen Hunt). He also has a cleanliness obsession, and brings his own plastic cutlery with him to eat breakfast with.

    Melvin has a gay neighbour, Simon Bishop (Greg Kinnear) who has a dog, Verdell (Jill). Melvin hates both his neighbour and his dog, and treats them both abominably.

    Carol has a son, who has asthma. One day, Carol is not at work because she is sick and worried about her son. This discomfits Melvin greatly, who arranges to have a private paediatrician visit them to take personal care of her son, at Melvin's expense, as long as she returns to work to wait on him.

    Here, the movie takes a turn towards romantic comedy, where Melvin, Carol and Simon take a road trip to Baltimore so that Simon can cajole his folks for money. Along the way, they all discover something about each other.

    I still think this movie is somewhat flawed as a romantic comedy because Melvin and Carol don't strike me as being suited to each other, but I will concede that this is a piece about the development of all three characters away from their initially severely dysfunctional selves.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was razor sharp and crystal clear throughout, with the only trivial quibble being a small amount of grain in the initial few scenes, which disappeared forevermore after these scenes. Shadow detail was excellent, and no low level noise was apparent.

    The colours were perfectly rendered at all times, with never a hint of over or undersaturation.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of a fraction of a second of minimal aliasing late in the movie on some venetian blinds in Melvin's apartment. Film artefacts were virtually non-existent.

    This disc is an RSDL disc. The layer change is placed at 66:22, between Chapters 16 and 17. It is moderately disruptive to the on-screen action, but not particularly so.

Audio

    Dialogue was almost always clear and easy to understand, with only the odd word here and there hard to make out.

    There were no audio sync problems.

    The score by Hans Zimmer was appropriate but quite light on at times. Frequently, there is nothing but dialogue going on during this movie. This is not a problem, given the nature of this movie, being a dialogue and character driven piece of work.

     The surround channels were used lightly for music. Ambience was basically limited to rare occasions in the front channels only.

    The .1 channel didn't make a peep as far as I could tell.

Menu

Audio Commentary

    As a result, there are significant periods of silence within the audio commentary track, and there are some odd-sounding cuts between conversations. There is a section of the audio commentary track which sounds extremely distorted, from 28:30 to 29:00, and there is an audio dropout at 50:07. Jack Nicholson tends to mumble, as well.

    However, there is a significant amount of good information to be found in this commentary track, despite its somewhat disjointed feel. Because so many people contribute at one stage or another to the commentary track, there are a lot of different perspectives being offered on the movie. This is interesting in itself.

    Overall, this is not one of the best commentaries I have ever listened to, but neither is it one of the worst. It is certainly infinitely superior to having no commentary track at all.

Theatrical Trailer

Filmographies

    The Region 1 version of this DVD misses out on;

• Theatrical Trailer

• Filmographies

    The Region 4 version of this DVD misses out on;

• Pan & Scan version

    There is nothing compelling here to favour one version over the other.

    The video quality is reference quality.

    The audio quality is acceptable.

    The extras are highlighted by a reasonably good audio commentary track.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall