Runaway Bride

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General		Extras
Category	Drama	Theatrical Trailer(s)	None
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1999	Commentary Tracks	None
Running Time	111:33 minutes	Other Extras	None
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (65:54)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Garry Marshall
Studio Distributor	Warner Home Video	Starring	Julia Roberts Richard Gere Joan Cusack Hector Elizondo Rita Wilson Paul Dooley
Case	Transparent Amaray
RRP	$34.95	Music	James Newton Howard

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	MPEG	None
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Dolby Digital	5.0
16x9 Enhancement		Soundtrack Languages	English (Dolby Digital 5.0, 384Kb/s) French (Dolby Digital 5.0, 384Kb/s) German (Dolby Digital 5.0, 384Kb/s) Spanish (Dolby Digital 5.0, 384Kb/s)
Theatrical Aspect Ratio	2.35:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?	Smoking	No
Subtitles	German Swedish Danish Norwegian French Spanish Dutch Icelandic Portuguese Finnish English for the Hearing Impaired	Annoying Product Placement	Yes, a series of extremely annoying product placements.
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, after (but it's not worth watching)

    I'll give you the premise for Runaway Bride. You can fill in the story from the premise, since it's so predictable. Richard Gere plays Ike Graham, a columnist for USA Today (who obviously offered the most money for product placement). Ike hears a story about a woman in some country town called Maggie Carpenter (Julia Roberts) who has run away at the alter three times so far and is about to try to get married for the fourth time. He writes a scathing column about her, calling her a "man-eater". Maggie reads the article and is incensed, writing to the newspaper and getting Ike fired since Ike didn't bother to check his facts. Ike chases up Maggie to find out a little more about her and to write a more in-depth article about her. They start off loathing each other...

    Now that you have heard the premise, do I really need to fill in the rest of the plot? I didn't think so. Runaway Bride didn't do all that well at the box office in Australia because it has nothing new to offer other than a more bloated budget than Pretty Woman. Even my wife, who nagged me to get this DVD because she had missed it at the box office was extremely disappointed, and she has seen Pretty Woman more than almost any person alive on the earth today.

Video

    This transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 2.35:1. It is 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer is uniformly sharp and clear throughout, with the perfect balance having been struck between image clarity and oversharpening. An enormous amount of fine detail is on offer here, with subtle image nuances clearly defined. Shadow detail is excellent, with superb gradations within the darker areas of the transfer allowing lots of image detail to come through. There was no low level noise.

    The colours were beautifully rendered, with superb greens and browns contrasting with vibrant and eye popping red and oranges at times.

    There were no MPEG artefacts seen. Aliasing was trivial at its worst, and will go unnoticed unless you are specifically looking for it. This is despite a number of horizontal pans across sharply delineated objects which would be expected to cause significant aliasing - the fact that they do not is a credit to whoever transferred this movie to DVD. Film artefacts went unnoticed.

    This disc is an RSDL formatted DVD, with the layer change occurring at 65:54. It is as good a place as any to have a layer change, and is minimally disruptive.

Audio

    Dialogue was generally clear and easy to understand except for a few words here and there which were lost beneath the musical score. There were no audio sync problems with this DVD.

    The score by James Newton Howard is the best part of the movie and is up to his usual standard. It is suitably subtle in creating and enhancing the on-screen mood in conjunction with a number of classic songs.

    The surround channels were used subtly for music and not much else. Being a dialogue driven movie, nothing was really missed.

    The .1 channel was not encoded, and a certain amount of bottom end was missing from this soundtrack as a result, particularly early on. The gorgeous music, in particular, suffered a little for not having the added oomph of a .1 track. This did improve as the movie went on, though.

Menu

• Audio Commentary
• Music Video - Ready To Run-Dixie Chicks
• Theatrical Trailer

    The video is of reference quality.

    The audio quality is unremarkable.

    There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna (read my bio)
17th April 2000