Arlington Road (Blu-ray)

 

Picture: B     Sound: B+     Extras: D     Film: D

 

 

Mark Pellington began his career doing memorable promos for the original MTV, then slowly moved into Music Videos, most notably for Pearl Jam’s Jeremy rightly regarded as a masterwork of the medium.  That is why there were high hopes for Pellington when he moved into feature films.  Could he work the same magic and show the same skills?  Absolutely not!

 

Joining duds like Going All The Way and the laughable Mothman Prophecies is his 1999 effort Arlington Road, now arriving on Blu-ray from Sony.  In this mess more obviously so since the events of 9/11, Jeff Bridges is a college professor who is an expert on terrorism, who gets dragged into something ugly and evil when his FBI wife is killed under strange circumstances.  Too soon after, a new couple (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) move across the street, but he suspects they are up to possible terrorist activities, or is it just his brain on overdrive?

 

More insulting now than ever, the screenplay by hack writer Ehren Kruger (one of the worst in the business, with idiocy like Reindeer Games, Skeleton Key and Blood & Chocolate demonstrating every pedestrian mistake any budding writer should avoid who wants to be taken seriously!) treats the audience like a bunch of idiots and when you add Pellington’s inability to make a narrative work beyond four minutes, you get one of the biggest high-profile turkeys of the 1990s luckily forgotten by most.  Even more annoying, the casting is very good, but all involved are clueless in how to make this work wasting some of the best actors in the business.  Oh, and the ending is predictable, obvious and the kind of rip-off that likely made most viewers want their money and two hours of their lives back.

 

Here is one road not to travel down, even in hi-def.

 

The 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image was shot in Super 35mm by Bobby Bukowski and looks generally good and better than a DVD-Video, yet has one too many flaws to say this is one of the better back-catalog Blu-rays.  The stylizing can be distracting and the look was not even impressive in the 35mm print I screened at the time.  Thanks to the PCM 16/48 5.1 mix, the sound fares better, especially more so than the Dolby Digital 5.1 versions.  The Angelo Badalamenti/tomanddandy score is not bad, but there is little they can do to save the film.  Extras include an equally pointless alternate ending, making of featurette and Pellington/Bridges feature length audio commentary.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo