Blue Valley Songbird (1999)

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Main Menu Audio
Rating
Year Of Production	1999
Running Time	90:30
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Richard A. Colla
Studio Distributor	Warner Vision	Starring	Dolly Parton John Terry Billy Dean
Case	Soft Brackley-Transp
RPI	$39.95	Music	Velton Ray Bunch Dolly Parton

    As a starting point, I am going to assume that you are a fan of Dolly Parton, because if you are not, chances are you won't enjoy this movie. It is a country and western story, with country and western music, filmed in Nashville, Tennessee - can you see a pattern emerging here?

    If you are a Dolly Parton fan, then you are in for an enjoyable ride. The storyline is a Country and Western standard where a young girl, Leana Taylor (Dolly Parton), growing up in 'Blue Valley' with an abusive father, runs away from home to become a small time C&W singer. Leana fails to make it into the big time because of emotional problems stemming from her childhood. We enter the story at a critical time in Leana's life. She has a stable relationship with her boyfriend (John Terry), who is also her manager and has been a stabilising influence over the last 15 years. Leana has started to become dissatisfied with her current life and wants to try to break out of the rut she believes she is in. Her boyfriend tries to stifle these ambitions because he fears that she will leave him if she becomes famous. Further complications arise as Leana starts to fall in love with the young guitarist (Billy Dean) in her band. As Leana tries to sort out her problems, the story unfolds with a series of flashbacks intermixed with quite a few C&W numbers featuring our star.

    I found it an enjoyable story, if a little lacking in depth. The performances are quite good and the music is great if you enjoy American C&W.

Video

    Sharpness is acceptable, but is influenced by the fact that this transfer suffers from interlacing, which does blur moving objects somewhat. This can be seen by single stepping though any scene. Shadow detail is lacking throughout and there is some low level noise on occasion, such as in the background at 66:28. There is also some strobing visible in horizontal lines. The lane markers on the road at 58:27 strobe quite badly during the pan across the road.

    Colours are reasonable saturated but exhibit some noise and chroma artefacts such as strobing in the guitar strap worn at 89:28 and a tiny amount of colour bleed at 8:02.

    There were some MPEG artefacts throughout, but they did not distract too much. If you look closely, there is some blocking evident in Leana's face at 13:55 and another example in the background at 14:52. Aliasing can also be found occasionally, such as the bridge at 66:28.

    There are surprisingly few film artefacts with only the very occasional black or white fleck showing on screen.

    There are no English subtitles on this disc. French, Italian, German and Spanish subtitles are present and accounted for, but I cannot testify as to their accuracy.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are two audio tracks on this disc. I listened to the Dolby Digital 5.1 throughout and sampled the 2.0 track. The 5.1 track is quite good, but offers mostly a front-heavy sound stage with little surround information. The 2.0 track is very poor. The voices are all right but the music is mixed too low and there is almost no bass at all.

    The dialogue quality is excellent and I had no problems understanding any of what was said. The audio during the songs was also excellent.

    The dialogue sync was good, with the only problem noticed being a very small error in one of the songs where the miming was not quite perfect. To give credit though, you had to be looking very closely.

     The music is pure American Country and Western as espoused by one of the greatest performers of this type of music, Dolly Parton. If this is to your taste then you will not be disappointed.

     The surround channels only carried a low level copy of the music from the front channels. They brought the sound stage out a bit, but never drew attention to themselves.

    Now here is a surprise, the subwoofer had a ball with this disc. While there were no explosions, there was a very tight and enjoyable bass presence consisting of the kick drum in the band along with the lower notes from the bass guitar, along with the occasional purr from one of the 'good ol boys' V8 trucks. The music, and in particular the bass, reproduced the experience of being in one of the small clubs that the band plays in very well.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    There are no extras. This is a shame, as there was an opportunity to give fans of Dolly Parton something extra to go along with the movie.

Menu

    The menus consist of a series of stills with a short clip from the title song playing in the background.   

    I enjoyed Blue Valley Songbird, especially the music. While this could have been just a vehicle to showcase Dolly Parton's songs on stage, it actually goes quite a bit further than this. It is interesting to note that it scores a very respectable 7.7/10 on the Internet Movie Database.

    The video is reasonable.

    The audio is good.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall