Blu-ray Movie Reviews

In New York City's modern whirl of fashion and publishing, Mary Haines seems to have it all until she finds out that her husband is cheating on her with the perfume girl from Saks Fifth Avenue. Now all hell breaks loose as Mary contemplates the fate of her marriage and her circle of tight-knit friends question their own friendships and relationships.

They really meant it when they said this one was about women. In fact, you won’t find a single male actor in the film, even in the background!! I don’t even know if I would qualify to comment on a film about the female perspective and honestly I thought I would probably hate this film. Ultimately it was entertaining though a tad over dramatic at times. The cast is great and it was funnier than I was expecting but this is definitely a movie for girl’s night.

The HD presentation was a bit of a disappointment. The image has a rather flat appearance and lacks dimension. Depth of image is okay, but not near the level of the better presentations out there. Fine object detail is good in close ups and color rendition is excellent. I just expected more from such a new film. While a clear step up from a DVD image, it wasn’t near the caliber of the better HD presentations on the market today.

Warner goes the lossy route again with this Dolby Digital 5.1 mix. I never get it when it is the day and date titles getting the legacy soundtracks and the majority of their catalog being released with TrueHD soundtracks lately. This one is a drama so the sound design is fairly straight forward. Dialogue takes center stage and for the most part it sounds fine. There are some times when the ADR work doesn’t blend in with the environment very well, but this wasn’t a common occurrence. The film’s soundtrack livens things up now and then and the score does a nice job with mood. Nothing too fancy, but it gets the job done.

Some deleted scenes are included along with a piece on the cast and crew and their involvement in the film. This one had a lot of great female actors from the past 20 years and you get their perspective on making the film. Since this is a remake of a very old film you also get a look at how the story has progressed over the years in its many forms.

The A/V presentation on this one was pretty lacking. While I don’t think this is the type of film you seek reference performance from I think we should still expect studios to put their best foot forward with all HD presentations.