About Last Night... (1986)

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General		Extras
Category	Romantic Comedy	Biographies-Cast & Crew Theatrical Trailer-non-16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo Trailer-Mortal Thoughts-non-16x9, Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo
Rating
Year Of Production	1986
Running Time	108:38
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Edward Zwick
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Rob Lowe Demi Moore James Belushi Elizabeth Perkins
Case	Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI	$36.95	Music	Miles Goodman

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 mono (192Kb/s) Italian 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 French German Italian Spanish Dutch Arabic Czech Danish Finnish Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Norwegian Polish Portuguese Swedish Turkish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, throughout credits

    Boy, Danny (Rob Lowe) meets girl, Debbie (Demi Moore), and some serious chemistry occurs which leads to a relationship. Unfortunately, both Debbie and Danny don't get much support from their respective best friends - Joan (Elizabeth Perkins) and Bernie (James Belushi). In fact, these two do their darndest to break up the happy couple.

    Warning: slight plot spoiler ahead, so if you haven't seen the movie then I suggest you don't read any further.

    Debbie moves in with Danny. It all starts off wonderfully, with some little adjustments having to be made by both parties, but all is initially rosy. After a while, things start to go wrong and eventually the day comes where Danny pulls the pin and they split up. Debbie is devastated, but knows it is really over and moves out. That's where I think I'll leave it, just in case you haven't seen this movie before and didn't stop reading after the spoiler warning!

Video

    Overall the picture sharpness and detail is very good, with a couple of scenes being excellent. There is plenty of shadow detail and the black level balance is excellent, leaving the film looking natural and visually pleasing.

    The colour is great, and beautifully saturated. Deep reds and greens are often present, whilst leaving the skin tones looking natural. No edge enhancement or colour bleeding was seen.

    Projector owners beware. The picture quality has been spoiled by some bad background grain, which occasionally spills over into the foreground. The background graininess is present throughout most of the film and only disappears during a couple of the more brightly-lit scenes, such as the softball game in Chapter 2. Chapters 3, 10 & 13 are probably the worst, but if you pick almost any other Chapter you will still see what I am talking about. If you are using composite input with your projector, then you will find the pixelization a little less noticeable but it is still too prominent. The image via the S-video input is almost as bad as that via the component input.

    TV owners fear not. I could not believe the difference in picture quality when I viewed this disc on my 68cm TV using the composite input. The pixelization is only barely noticeable during the worst chapters and totally disappears during the other chapters. I found that the pixelization was only noticeable if you were actually looking for it.

    The Region 1 transfer of this film also suffers from this background grain problem.

    There are quite a few small film artefacts, but they are not overly bothersome or intrusive. Unfortunately, during the end credits, there are a ton of small film artefacts that continually litter the screen. This would not be so bad if it was just a black screen with the credits whizzing by, but this is not the case as the camera is still rolling. Two other film artefacts were noticed. One was a large but light white scratch at 47:43 which basically runs from the top of the picture to the bottom, and the other is where the picture brightness changes slightly mid scene, during one of the steamy sequences (!).

    No MPEG artefacts or aliasing was noticed.

Video Ratings Summary

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

Audio

    The dialogue was always clear and easy to understand. At 92:00 Demi Moore's voice sounded a little unusual, but it is the same on my VHS version, so this is not a transfer problem.

    No audio sync problems were noticed.

    Miles Goodman's musical score suits the movie well.

    For this type of movie I thought the surround channel use was good.  There are a couple of scenes where the surround presence is quite noticeable and enveloping. During some of the more dialogue-driven sequences the sound stage does collapse into just the centre speaker. Strangely enough, this did not really detract from the overall movie experience, as I felt that many of these scenes would naturally have a low background or ambient noise level anyway. This movie was originally recorded with a Dolby Stereo (SR) soundtrack, so there is no real need for a Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack, but a 320Kb/s audio stream would have been nice touch, instead of the usual 192Kb/s.

    The subwoofer was used well to add extra punch to the music and to the on-screen action.

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Theatrical Trailer – About Last Night... (1:56 minutes)

Theatrical Trailer – Mortal Thoughts (1:50 minutes)

Talent Profiles

• Additional Pan & Scan version

    For people with TVs, the picture is of very good quality, with some minor background graininess. For people with Projectors, the picture quality is badly spoiled by the background graininess.

    The soundtrack is of good quality.

    The extras are limited.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall