This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Music	Menu Audio and Animation  Music Video - When The Heartache Is Over Music Video - Whatever You Want Biography - Cast Gallery - Photo
Rating
Year Released	2000
Running Time	86:31 minutes  (Not 93 minutes as stated on the packaging)
RSDL/Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Soundtrack Selection, then Menu
Region	1,2,3,4,5,6	Director	David Mallet
Studio Distributor	Eagle Rock Entertainment  Warner Vision Australia	Starring	Tina Turner Bryan Adams
Case	Black Amaray
RPI	$39.95	Music	Tina Turner

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	No	English (Dolby Digital 5.1, 448 Kb/s) English (Dolby Digital 2.0 , 192 Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Macrovision	?Yes	Smoking	No
Subtitles	None	Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	Yes, during credits

    One of the very few performers deemed worthy enough for me to see three times, I have great memories of some wonderful nights of entertainment to add to some great albums over the years - although a lot of her earlier stuff with Ike Turner in the 1960s is very difficult to get hold of. There was always something distinctive about her performances and this continued right the way up to her recently announced retirement. During that period she has produced some iconic songs, some that border on not only being classics but also readily identifiable as her songs (that is, songs that no one else is going to do any better). I really don't think that songs like River Deep, Mountain High and Nutbush City Limits are ever going to be associated with anyone else but Tina Turner. Even when doing songs better known to other performers - Proud Mary for instance, more associated with Creedence Clearwater Revival - she brought a uniqueness of style to them that made them almost her own. So any time I get the chance to sit down and review a DVD of her, it is always looked forward to with relish. Or to put that into perspective - this DVD was my review reward for getting through the excellent The Sopranos marathon. Enough said really.

    Recorded on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, this show sees Tina Turner wandering across the entire length of her career. The songs themselves are interspersed with messages and insights from a whole bunch of rock and roll luminaries as well as some archival performance material.

    The choice of songs for the show came down to:
 

    Whilst one could argue as to whether this truly represents the best of the output of Tina Turner, one could not argue over the quality of the show. The lady enjoys what she does and makes damned sure that the audience does too. I would doubt that too many have gone to a Tina Turner concert and not come away happy. Perhaps some of the messages and insights go a little over-the-top and marginally disrupt the flow of the concert (why not just do the concert then have all the messages and interviews as a separate and integral program in its own right?), but when people such as Phil Spector, Al Green, Bill Wyman, Mark Knopfler, Cher and more start saying good things about the lady, then there are fair grounds for suggesting that she holds a lot of respect from her peers. Ella Fitzgerald may be the queen of jazz, Aretha Franklin may be the queen of soul but for my money Tina Turner is the queen of rock. The fact that she looks as good as she does and could still rock better than the rest at the age of sixty must be really annoying a heck of a lot of women!

    Whilst this is by no means a classic concert, and the presentation may be a little disruptive, this nonetheless remains another fine example of the lady and her work and is well worth considering as an addition to your music DVD collection.

Video

    The transfer is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 and it is 16x9 enhanced.

    Whilst there are the odd lapses here and there in focus, the bulk of the concert is actually quite sharp. It certainly is not super-sharp, having just a slight edge of softness at times that I did not have much of an issue with. Detail is very good throughout, despite the lack of ultimate sharpness, and there really is not much here that does not come up very well. Even the background video screen images are quite well detailed. There is nothing much wrong with the clarity here and the transfer is quite free from any serious grain issues. Shadow detail is not much of an issue here, but for what it is worth there are no real problems with it. There did not appear to be any indications of low level noise in the transfer.

    The colour palette here is good, but not spectacular. Certainly generally very vibrant, the usual problems of stage lighting introduce their little effects of occasionally washing out the colours a little. Perhaps there could have been a little more depth to the colours at times, but in general the whole show had a nice saturation to it. Oversaturation was only mildly present in a couple of scenes where either red or blue stage lighting was dominant, but this is something that I at least tend to expect in concert videos. There are no readily apparent problems with colour bleed in the transfer.

    There does not appear to be any significant MPEG artefacts in the transfer, other than a loss of resolution in a pan shot in some of the archival film around 10:10 - which I would suggest has more to do with the source material rather than any mastering problem. However, that old bugbear of concert videos was present again in the form of those little aliasing problems. This is especially noticeable in the balustrading of each level of the venue, which is metallic and has close, straight lines galore that shimmer every time the camera moves. It never gets really gross but it does get a little bit difficult to ignore at times. It starts at 2:06 and is noticeable in just about every wide angle shot of the stage or crowd thereafter. There did not appear to be any film artefacts in the transfer.
 
 

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain
Film-to-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    There did not appear to be any serious audio sync problems in either of the soundtracks, and the vocals and the music came up pretty well throughout.

    The Dolby Digital 2.0 soundtrack is a very good effort, with a clean sound that is just ever so slightly recessed. It has a nice balance to it and there is nothing wrong with it at all. There did not seem to be much in the way of surround encoding based upon my sampling, but I stress that it was only a brief sample. If you don't have 5.1 capability then this should prove more than adequate for the sound job.

    The Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack is a little different to what we normally get and in this instance I am glad. One of my big complaints about sound engineering is the fact that the bass channel gets far too much notice in the overall mix and the result is something that sounds unnatural. Not here, for the simple reason that the bass channel may in fact be a little underdone in the overall mix! Whilst I had no complaints about this, for it allowed the music and vocals to really come over very well and in a totally believable manner, if you like copious amounts of bass you will perhaps be underwhelmed by this effort. The overall mix is very good though, with some good use of the surround channels, front and rear, to give just the right sort of presence for the smaller venue in which the concert was held. Maybe there could have been a little more ambience from the rear channels, but I am happy enough with what we have got here. The sound is quite open with no hint of congestion, even in the songs where there are both backing singers and a choir.
 
 

Audio Ratings Summary

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

Menu

Music Video - When The Heartache Is Over (3:43)

Music Video - Whatever You Want (4:37)

Biography - Cast

Gallery - Photo

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall

© Ian Morris (have a laugh, check out the bio)
19th May, 2001