DVD DETAILS:
Vision
The 16:9 enhanced widescreen transfer has a look of polished 1980s gloss at first and despite some minor background issues settles down to reveal Deschanel’s intriguing visual style. It has a fine sense of a young boy’s movement through potentially constricting and / or limiting adult spaces, helped by the detailed production design. What is most intriguing is the use of colour and set design, which has a slightly cartoonish sense although never as overtly stylized as the children-playing-adults world of Bugsy Malone. It is slightly heightened, as realistic urban realms are co-mingled with comic bookish exaggeration to demonstrate the clash between adult and child perceptions and to dramatize their spill over. As a visualization of the perceptual evolution of a young boy who forces his outlook upon the adult world, the film is remarkable. Thus, it is at its most stylized and even cathartic in the subdued colour in the scene concerning the truth of his father’s death, which functions as a telling reconstruction in a child’s mind of a moment which is at the root of his self-definition and which he can finally confront by doing what his father could not. He seeks to transcend the father and it is in that moment that a caper movie becomes a probing look into developmental psychology, neatly expressed in a quietly inventive film style. However, the transfer may seem murky at times, and moments appear overly hot whilst others are vivid and bright.
Sound
The sound transfer is available in Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo and is mostly a serviceable job at best whilst being mercifully free from any major defects. Although there are clear ambient sounds, the transfer is more subtly effective at suggesting a cumulative pattern to their use although its deliberate effects thus seem mostly functional and of the moment. Indeed, apart from a very judicious score the sound details are always kept very realistic and there is a fine crispness to almost every stereo effect thus emerging from this transfer. Whilst the sound design does establish a convincing audio authenticity and continues it throughout, it lets the visual style dominate. However, deliberation emerges in moments when it is able to heighten specific details for an almost expressionistic effect: hence, the sounds of locks being broken and cards being shuffled adds to the intense pleasure the boy finds in these activities, driven to them psychologically though he may be. Thus, there is also a sense of the spill-over of perceptions in the aural design too. Yet, despite the apparent ease of tricks and his pleasure in them, the boy rarely smiles and his voice carries an earnest quality behind its charm – it is boyhood beyond innocence. All voices are crisp and effective, the adults capturing a slight comedic exaggeration, especially Julia and the hilarious Arnaz – making their scene together very funny indeed. read more
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