There's Something About Mary

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	Theatrical Trailer(s)	Yes, 1 - 4:3, Dolby Digital 2.0 surround-encoded
Rating		Other Trailer(s)	None
Year Released	1998	Commentary Tracks	Yes, 1 - Peter Farrelly (Co-Director/Co-Writer) & Bobby Farrelly (Co-Director/Co-Writer)
Running Time	114:15 minutes	Other Extras	Menu Animation & Audio Music Video - Build Me Up Buttercup - The Foundations Featurette - Behind The Zipper (4:40) Karaoke - Build Me Up Buttercup
RSDL/Flipper	RSDL (57:13)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region	2,4	Director	Bobby Farrelly Peter Farrelly
Studio Distributor	Fox Home Video	Starring	Cameron Diaz Matt Dillon Ben Stiller Lee Evans Chris Elliott
Case	Transparent Amaray
RRP	$39.95	Music	Jonathan Richman

    There's Something About Mary is 20th Century Fox's second international DVD release, following up on their earlier release of Titanic. The movie is directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly, who were responsible for movies such as Dumb & Dumber and Kingpin. This should give you some indication of what to expect about the comedy in this movie. It is gross, crass and politically incorrect. For the full house that I saw the movie theatrically with, it was hysterically funny. Personally, I thought it was just plain offensive. My opinion of this movie, however, is in the minority.

    Mary (Cameron Diaz) is the best-looking girl in school. Ted (Ben Stiller) is a nerd. One day, Ted intercedes in an incident between a fellow student and Warren (W. Earl Brown) who is intellectually disabled and who unbeknownst to Ted is Mary's brother. The nett result of this act of good samaritanism is that Ted gets a date with Mary to the Senior Prom.

    Unfortunately, at Mary's house to pick her up for the Prom, Ted has some difficulty with his zipper which left both halves of the audience I saw this movie with in tears; one half in tears of laughter, and the other half in tears of sympathy and pain.

    We fast-forward 13 years, and Ted is still thinking about Mary, and at the encouragement of his best friend, Dom (Chris Elliott), he hires a private investigator named Healy (Matt Dillon) to find her. Healy finds her in Miami, but decides that she is too attractive for Ted and wants her all to himself. Ted heads to Miami as well, where an assortment of characters awaits; Tucker (Lee Evans), a disabled architect; Magda (Lin Shaye), Mary's sun-loving roommate; and Puffy the dog.

Video

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. Unlike Titanic before it, this disc is 16x9 enhanced, and it shows.

    The transfer was razor sharp and crystal clear at all times, with tremendous amounts of clarity and detail in the image. Shadow detail was excellent and there was no low level noise.

    The colours were beautifully rendered, with deeply saturated and bright colours throughout. Large splashes of colour frequently abound with not even a hint of colour bleeding.

    No MPEG artefacts were seen. No film-to-video artefacts were seen. No film artefacts were seen.

    This disc is an RSDL disc with the layer change placed unobtrusively at 57:13, within Chapter 15.

Audio

    There are two audio tracks on this DVD; the default English Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack and an English Audio Commentary track in Dolby Digital 2.0. I listened to both soundtracks.

    Dialogue was clear and easy to understand.

    Audio sync was problematic on both players that I used for this review. On a Pioneer DV-505, the audio sync was just noticeably out at all times, and quite significantly out at times. On a Noriko DVD-390K, the audio sync was generally correct, but there were frequent times when it was marginally and annoyingly noticeably out of sync. The Farrelly Brothers make specific reference to the problems of audio sync in their commentary, and to quote them - "we don't care". I take it by these comments that insufficient attention was paid to this detail of the movie during post-production leaving us with a less-than-ideal soundtrack in this area.

    The somewhat quirky score was by Jonathan Richman. It suited the movie's overall tone nicely.

    The surround channels were basically silent. Fundamentally, this movie had dialogue emanating from the center speaker and music from the left and right front speakers. Very rarely, a small amount of music emanated from the rear speakers, but this is basically not much more than a mono soundtrack with stereo music.

    The .1 channel did nothing as far as I could tell.

Menu

Audio Commentary - Peter Farrelly (Co-Director/Co-Writer) & Bobby Farrelly (Co-Director/Co-Writer)

Theatrical Trailer

Music Video - Build Me Up Buttercup - The Foundations

Featurette - Behind The Zipper

Karaoke - Build Me Up Buttercup - The Foundations

• 16x9 enhancement

• Gag reel

    The video quality is excellent, and is of reference quality.

    The audio quality is very ordinary.

    The extras are very good.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Michael Demtschyna
4th November 1999