Clueless (1995)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Theatrical Trailer Teaser Trailer
Rating
Year Of Production	1995
Running Time	93:11
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (58:29)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Programme
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Amy Heckerling
Studio Distributor	Paramount Home Entertainment	Starring	Alicia Silverstone
Case	Soft Brackley-Transp
RPI	$39.95	Music	David Kitay

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Czech Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Hungarian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish 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 English for the Hearing Impaired French German Swedish Danish Norwegian Finnish Dutch Portuguese Hebrew Greek Croatian Arabic Turkish Polish Italian Spanish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	Yes, Hertz occurs prominently in at least two scenes
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, end titles on brightly coloured backgrounds

    Clueless is a delightful teen comedy that launched the career of Alicia Silverstone (who unfortunately has not quite capitalised on the opportunity and is now dangerously skirting on "Former Celebrities: Where Are They Now?" territory). Fans of Jane Austen novels love pointing out that the plot borrows quite heavily (read: outright modern-day adaptation) from her novel Emma, but I think it is enjoyable as a film in its own right even if you are not aware of the literary reference.

    The highlights of the film are undoubtedly the many one-liners and boom-boom punchlines that permeate the dialogue and the voice-overs. We see everything from the perspective of Cher (Alicia Silverstone), a 15-just-turning-on-16 year old high school student of Beverly Highs High. She is everything a teenage schoolgirl would want to be: pretty, rich, charming, popular, and intelligent (although she tries her best to hide this last trait). Her father (Dan Hedaya) is a litigation lawyer (the "scariest" kind of lawyer around, he gets paid US$500/hour just to "argue"), her mother died from a freak accident during a "routine liposuction", and her best friend is called Dionne (Stacey Dash) - Cher wryly remarks that she and Dionne "were both named after great singers of the past that now do infomercials".

    Cher's charm, popularity and social status (not to mention having a lawyer Dad as a role model) have given Cher a penchant for meddling in the affairs of others and manipulating people to her advantage, which she justifies by thinking she is doing a favour for them by "helping" them. When she is given low grades on her report card, Cher and Dionne concoct a fantastic plan to match-make two schoolteachers on the premise that if a schoolteacher is in love he/she may be more inclined to be generous in assigning/revising grades (yes, I know this is a somewhat dubious proposition).

    When that plan miraculously succeeds (to the amazement and admiration of Cher's father), Cher decides to tackle her next "project": to take new, "clueless" arrival Tai (Brittany Murphy) under her wing and do a makeover on her to transform Tai from a dag to part of the hip circle. In the meantime, Cher's half brother Josh (Paul Rudd), a college student, decides to visit Cher. Josh is sceptical of Cher's true motives and there are some brilliant verbal spars between the two of them. What follows is a brilliant succession of misunderstandings, mishaps and confusion that kind of sort themselves out at the very end.

    Watching this film again after more than five years, I was surprised at the number of things I picked up that I hadn't quite noticed the first time around. For example, one of the characters turns out to be gay (I won't spoil the surprise by revealing who). I must have been completely clueless when I first watched the film because I missed all the clues that the director had sprinkled throughout the film regarding the character's sexual orientation which are now so obvious on the second viewing. Now that I am noticing all the clues, they are quite funny and gave me a real laugh.

    The film is still refreshingly relevant and fun to watch, although the outfits worn by Cher and Dionne are hopelessly dated (I mean, even back in 1995 I don't think the tartan look ever quite caught on).

Video

    This is a pleasing 16x9 enhanced transfer in 1.78:1 (original aspect ratio 1.85:1). Sharpness and detail levels are more than acceptable, though not perfect, and colour saturation is pleasing, though slightly on the faded side.

    The film source is fairly clean, but a touch on the grainy side. Fortunately, this never gets to the point of being annoying. The transfer is devoid of film-to-video artefacts apart from some slight telecine wobble at the beginning and ending and very minor instances of Gibb's effect ringing around the opening titles (which is commonly found on many DVD transfers).

    There are a large number of subtitle tracks available on the disc. I did not turn on any of them.

    Finally, I was a bit surprised to find a 93 minute film spread across two layers of an RSDL disc. I think this is probably because of the large number of audio tracks supported. The layer change occurs at 58:29 and is quite noticeable as the player pauses for nearly a full second (I can never figure out why some layer changes occur almost instantaneously and others, such as this one, seem to take forever).

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    There are quite a large number of audio tracks present on this disc. The English track is in Dolby Digital 5.1 (384 Kb/s). In addition, we also get French, German, Italian, Czech, Hungarian, and Spanish audio tracks, all in Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded (192 Kb/s). I listened to the English audio track.

    I did not notice any dialogue synchronisation issues and the dialogue quality was probably about average.

    The music soundtrack fits the film quite well but sounds rather dated.

    Maybe it's because of the low encoding bitrate, or the age of the film, but I wasn't particularly impressed with the audio track, which sounds kind of insubstantial and "distant". About 99% of the film is front centre focused as the sound track is very dialogue focused. The front left and right speakers are used occasionally for background music, and the rear speakers had an easy life.

    However, in two particular spots, we actually do get aggressive panning and usage of front and rear speakers: the sound of a helicopter (not shown on film) panning from rear right all the way to front right in a clockwise direction around 36:40-37:00 and during the freeway scene. The subwoofer also was triggered briefly during the freeway scene, but is otherwise not engaged.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

    The extras on this disc are limited to two trailers.

Menu

    The menus are static but are 16x9 enhanced. We seem to get an incredible choice of menu languages to select from.

Theatrical Trailer (2:23)

    This is an expanded version of the the teaser trailer, presented in 1.33:1 (pan & scan?) and Dolby Digital 2.0.

Teaser Trailer (1:44)

    This is presented in 1.33:1 and Dolby Digital 2.0.

    As far as I can tell, the Region 1 and Region 4 versions of this film have an identical set of extra features (i.e. not much) apart from foreign language audio tracks and subtitles.

    Clueless is a great teen comedy to watch, even if you are not a teen and don't normally like teen comedies. It is presented on a disc with acceptable video and audio transfers but that does not include many extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall