Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Seventeen year-old Caroline Wexler (Kat Dennings) has just moved to a tiny, nowhere town where an industrial fire burns ceaselessly and a serial killer is claiming young victims. When Caroline realizes she has nothing in common with the permanently stoned kids that populate her new school, she pursues the one person she connects with - her handsome young teacher, Mr. Anderson (Josh Lucas). A bizarre love triangle ensues between Caroline, Mr. Anderson, and a stoner classmate (Reece Thompson).

Like some many of the indie films we’re seeing released lately, Daydream Nation was captured with digital high definition cameras. The result is a very clean and polished looking HD image that only sacrifices a small amount of fine object detail. The transfer is very crisp though some light occasional banding creeps into the image from time to time. The soundtrack is airy enough but I couldn’t get past the rather awkward song selections littered throughout the film. It was a bit distracting in tone but the rest of the mix worked well. Ambiance was natural enough and the surround mix wasn’t overly anemic.

Extras are limited to a brief behind the scenes feature and some trailers.

Despite pretty solid performances from Dennings and Lucas, Daydream Nation didn’t really do much if anything for me. The story was a bit slow and like so many movies revolving around teens, the kids are much too clever for their age (which is rarely the case in real world experiences). A rental at best.