Out Of Sight (HD-DVD)
Picture:
B+ Sound: B- Extras: B- Film: B-
As a move
to be a more commercial filmmaker, Steven Soderbergh left his challenging,
experimental, narratively challenging films behind to direct Out Of Sight, a 1998 adaptation of the
Elmore Leonard novel about the conflict and attraction between a slick criminal
(George Clooney) and federal marshal (Jennifer Lopez in a breakthrough role) as
they juggle all the cons, tricks and games of the underworld in a film that
wants to capitalize on the success of Barry Sonnenfeld’s Get Shorty and is much better than its highly disastrous, belated
sequel Be Cool.
In it,
Soderbergh wants to play with conventions and that includes gender and race in
subtle ways that play against the street aesthetic of the Leonard books and
“man’s world” of such happenings. It
offers a series of situations for his heroine (Lopez) to take advantage of and
show off. Don Cheadle, Ving Rhames,
Albert Brooks, Dennis Farina, Luis Guzman, Catherine Keener, Isaiah Washington,
Steve Zahn, Nancy Allen and (briefly) Samuel L. Jackson round out the usually
solid cast we get in Soderbergh’s better films.
Though the film sags in parts, it is a solid work overall worth seeing
or revisiting, especially since some of its cast found their stars on the rise,
including Soderbergh himself.
The 1080p
1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image is one of the best looking transfers we
have seen from Universal to date, up there with Ray and The Bourne Supremacy. Like those films, the image has been darkened
and degraded a bit, but not ridiculously so.
It is a bit older, but Soderbergh was more thorough than most early on
in the film-to-tape transfer process as fans will remember from a particular
supplement on the DVD (and hopefully Blu-ray soon) in which he runs down the
various ways his remarkable The Limey
(a year later in 1999) was handled. It
looks better than the more-stylized HD-DVDs of Traffic and the Soderbergh-produced Syriana, both reviewed elsewhere on this site. Elliot Davis (Soderbergh’s cinematographer of
the time, lensing films like King Of The Hill and the recent Lords Of Dogtown. This is
one of Universal’s better releases in the format for picture to date.
Though
this film did get a stand-alone full-bitrate DTS DVD release when DTS and Dolby
could not fit on the same DVD (20bit/1509kbps was too thick, so it was cut down)
at the time (a last minute replacement for a DTS-devoted The Flintstones that was never rescheduled) when so many more
sonically competent films existed in the Universal catalog, this was chosen and
it did not make much of a difference then or now in its Dolby Digital Plus 5.1
mix. This is mostly a dialogue-based
film with some character and moments of punchy sound. David Holmes music is not bad either. Remarkably, the film was issued as an
8-channel Sony Dynamic Digital Sound theatrical release, but you would not know
that from this mix.
Extras
include interesting deleted scenes, a making of program and good audio
commentary by Soderbergh and Frank.
All in
all, Soderbergh’s bid to become commercial succeeded, culminating in turning
the Rat Pack film Ocean’s 11 into a
trilogy of hits, though the first sequel (Ocean’s
12) is one of the worst films I have ever seen. It is films like that have critics wishing
for at least a film this good, though more would prefer The Limey or King Of The
Hill, the latter of which Universal ought to issue on HD-DVD soon. If this one does well, that would be a good
move.
- Nicholas Sheffo
