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  Directed by
  Starring
  Specs
  • Widescreen 2.35:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer (RSDL 41.24)
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • English: Dolby Digital Surround
  • French: Dolby Digital Surround
  • Japanese: Dolby Digital Surround
  Subtitles
    English, French, Spanish, Japanese, Portuguese
  Extras
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Cast/crew biographies
  • Featurette
  • Music video - "Sixteen Tons" - Eric Burdon

Joe Versus the Volcano

Warner Bros./Warner Home Video . R4 . COLOR . 102 mins . PG . NTSC

  Feature
Contract

It’s always fun to look back on some of the big-budget decisions that Hollywood has made over the years and ask the question “just what the hell were they thinking?” That question was certainly on the minds of many who paid their cash and went to see Joe Versus the Volcano at the cinema back in 1990. With Spielberg’s name on the credits as an executive producer and star Tom Hanks coming from a string of successful fluff comedies like Splash, Bachelor Party and Big, expectations for Joe Versus the Volcano were high from an audience point of view. And with the acclaimed writer of Moonstruck (John Patrick Shanley) making his directorial debut as well as penning the screenplay, how could it fail?

Actually, to be fair, the film did okay at the box office, and regularly turns up on TV to this day as its own little monument to why pan-and-scan is a Bad Thing. But at the time Joe Versus the Volcano seemed like a misfire for several reasons. Firstly, it seemed to shamelessly plunder the mood and character of Terry Gilliam’s brilliant Brazil during its opening 25 minutes (though apparently the filmmakers were aiming for Metropolis). Secondly, it simply wasn’t uproariously funny or feel-good fun like Hanks’ previous hits, which caught people off guard. But most damagingly, it threw up an ending which completely short-changed the entire story’s emotional content for the sake of a gag, leaving an already bewildered audience curiously dissatisfied.

Watching the film 12 years later is an odd experience. Convinced for years that it really wasn’t much cop as either entertainment or social satire, it comes as no small surprise to actually enjoy the thing from start to finish, silly ending and all. Why? Well, it could be that it plays better the second time around and it just took this reviewer a decade or so to find out. More likely, though, is that the movie’s rather unsubtle theme of redemption from drudgery and blind subservience is actually more relevant today than it was when the film originally came out. That, and the fact that it’s so rare to see a major-studio film that’s prepared to embrace the ugly, the unconventional and the dark even for a second that it seems like pure art-house in comparison to much of the multinational market-researched product that shows up in mainstream cinemas. Interestingly, this debut feature for John Patrick Shanley remains the only feature film the man has directed; since there’s no shortage of technical skill on display here we can only assume that he scared people.

The story, which is rife from top to tail with in-your-face metaphor and symbolism, introduced us to Joe (Hanks), formerly an heroic fire-fighter but now resigned to life as a drone-like factory worker in a soul-shatteringly dreary office for a company that prides its status as the “home of the rectal probe” (!). Feeling unwell, he visits the doctor and is informed that he’s got a few short months to live thanks to a terrible affliction - a “brain cloud”. He quits his job and, just as he’s determined to live life, the mysterious Mr Graynamore (Lloyd Bridges) appears to make him an offer he can’t refuse - live like a king, and then die like a man by leaping into a volcano on a Polynesian island, thus honouring an island superstition - and allowing Graynamore to mine the island for a rare raw material used in the semiconductors his company makes (that last bit, by the way, is straight out of real life - just call the people of the Democratic Republic Of Congo on your mobile phone and ask them). Along the way he keeps meeting a woman he’s sure he’s met before; they are in fact three different women, but they’re all played by Meg Ryan.

Along the way, Shanley constructs the film first like an art-house satire, then like a 1940s Hollywood romance complete with obvious soundstage shots and a hilariously fake hammerhead shark, and finally takes things into a kind of muted version of a Monty Python movie. It’s disconcerting, to say the least, but watching it without all the expectations that were held for the film at the time, it’s actually both hugely entertaining and rather good fun. No, there’s nothing truly cerebral here - Shanley’s trying to spin an old-fashioned fable complete with all the usual simplistic analogies and deliberate coincidences that are a key part of that format.

And hey, there’s no denying the charisma of its stars. This is the movie that kicked off the Hanks/Ryan double act that a few years later would set the box office on fire with Sleepless In Seattle, then come back for another go in You’ve Got Mail. Hanks, once the film gets under way, is an early version of the likeable, slightly goofy everyman that would later become his trademark when he became a Serious Actor, while Meg Ryan is enormously good fun in all three of her roles - two of her best comedic performances, and a solid conventional one to round things off.

Just what was going through Shanley’s mind when he created his island natives, though, we may never know nor understand. Suffice to say that until you’ve witnessed a bunch of islanders dressed up in costumes that could be rejects from Spielberg’s Hook, clutching cans of fizzy orange-flavoured soft drink and singing a tribal version of Hava Nagila... well, you just haven’t lived. Which, ironically, may be exactly the point Shanley was trying to make.

  Video
Contract

“All-new 2001 Digital Transfer”

“Soundtrack Remastered and Presented in Both Dolby Digital 5.1 & Dolby Surround 2.0”

Hang on a sec, you say to yourself when you see the above prominently printed on the back cover. They’ve done a new video transfer AND a full sound remix... for Joe Versus the Volcano? Surely not - after all, why would a movie like that score a complete remastering while the likes of Lost Highway remain unlavished and unloved?

Two reasons, actually. They both involve the word “Spielberg”. Joe Versus the Volcano was a production of Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment and it’s got the man’s name right there in the opening credits, and we’re guessing he didn’t want to see any film he was involved in getting sub-standard treatment on DVD in the picture and sound departments (unlike his pal George Lucas, Spielberg’s prime concern when it comes to DVD has been the presentation quality of the main feature, not the gee-whiz factor of the disc). And secondly, the Hanks/Ryan pairing is still big business, so the expense could easily be justified by sticking a big head-shot picture of them on the cover, replacing the old static Warner Bros logo at the start of the film with the funky new 3D-animated one that credits AOL Time Warner for bringing you the film even though the company didn’t actually exist when it was made, and making the whole thing look like it was released yesterday instead of 12 years ago.

And damn, it looks good. This transfer has quite obviously involved a trip to the vault where the negatives are kept, and the results are quite remarkable. Shot with anamorphic lenses for a 2.35:1 aspect ratio, the wide Panavision frame is faithfully reproduced here - a necessity with this film, which takes full advantage of the extra screen width for shot composition. Naturally it’s 16:9 enhanced.

There’s simply nothing to complain about, except maybe a shot or two where an ultra-bright light source reveals a little too much of the film’s grainy texture. But you’d have to be ignoring the movie and looking for defects to actually see anything wrong here - colour resolution is spot-on (just check Joe’s coloured lamp against the all-green background of his office early on), detail is abundant and faultless, there’s barely a blemish on the film and shadow detail is perfect. It really does look that good.

The compression team hasn’t let the side down either; there are no compression problems at all. None. Not a bean. The film’s stored at a fairly hefty bitrate across most of a dual-layered disc, with the layer change at the 41 minute mark perfectly placed and expertly handled.

The only potential drawback in the video department is that this is an NTSC disc - if your equipment (either your DVD player or your TV) can’t handle NTSC, then you won’t be able to properly view this disc. However, the NTSC format is hardly a hindrance to picture quality; far from it.

The disc’s enforced startup delay is 30 seconds, during which time only the eject button is enabled.

  Audio
Contract

The new Dolby Digital 5.1 remix may not be spectacular, but it blows the original matrixed surround track out of the water, not least because the latter seems to have been mastered slightly off-centre and as a result Dolby’s Pro-Logic channel steering goes a bit awry at times.

But there’s no reason for even those listening in stereo not to go for the new 5.1 track, which offers better fidelity, better volume, more subtle and intelligent surrounds (the overuse of the rear channel for music in the matrixed mix is verging on the annoying) and, to complement that volcano, a suitably rumbling LFE track.

This is not a flashy mix, but it’s nicely controlled and, aside from some rather badly-recorded dialogue at times (a limitation of the location techniques used in those days before digital became the cinema default) it serves the film well.

You also score a French dub track and, surprisingly, a Japanese one with a corresponding “narrative” subtitle stream as well (the “narrative” turns out to be a Japanese translation for on-screen titles and signs). It’s unusual to find a Japanese audio track even on a region 1 disc; a quick inspection reveals that this disc has been mastered for regions 1, 2, 3 and 4, and is probably also intended for sale in Japan (the disc also presents Japanese menus if your player is set to that language).

  Extras
Contract

What, a lovely new transfer and remixed audio isn’t enough for you and you want extras? Err, sorry, there’s not much here - but then, at this price, you expected a one hour retrospective? Thought not.

As it’s been mastered by the same people that do a lovely job on Warner’s US DVDs (this basically is a Warner US DVD), this disc is encoded with a (nicely done) jacket picture for those with players that support that feature, and is also encoded with DVD Text.

Behind The Scenes: Four minutes of fluff. But strange fluff, oddly low-key and with writer-director Shanley explaining the film as though he was reading the blurb from the back cover of a novel. Worthwhile only as a reminder, thanks to a couple of clips, of how seriously awful the old pan and scan transfer of this film looked.

Music Video: The awful cover version of old standard Sixteen Tons done by Animals singer Eric Burdon for the opening titles of the film was actually graced with a music video. This is that video. Be afraid...

Trailer: The theatrical trailer, obviously freshly transferred from a vault print in 16:9 with Dolby Surround audio (flagged). Not bad as trailers go, but it makes the film look a lot more kooky than it actually is. It also gives away almost the entire plot.

Cast and Crew: Unless Warner is going to bother including filmographies for more than just the two lead actors (no, not even the director!) we’d suggest they just drop this non-feature and be done with it. The IMDB is far more helpful.

  Overall  
Contract

An unusual film both for Amblin and for its stars for its day, Joe Versus the Volcano has actually stood the test of time well and may even be more suited to the prevailing mood of its audience today than it was when first released. It’s very much a writer’s film (not surprisingly) and in hindsight it’s the occasionally too-literal direction that hurt it the first time around. Ultimately when you’re trying to walk a tightrope between darkness and light in the visual shorthand of a feature film, you’re playing with fire. And we don’t mean the volcano. Seen 12 years later, its flaws seem to evaporate and the film turns out to have merely been slightly ahead of its time.

Warner’s DVD is another entrant in their $19.95 bargain new-release batch (this one arriving only a couple of months after its US release), but despite the price fans of the film have had their patience rewarded with a high quality DVD. A superlative video transfer, a freshly remixed audio track and a disc that is bit-for-bit identical to the one that US customers are also paying $19.95 for - except they’re paying in US dollars, and only get a cardboard snapper case instead of the keep-case on the Australian version - makes this one highly recommendable regardless of the lack of extras. If you’re fond of the movie, go grab yourself a bargain.


  • LINK: http://www.dvd.net.au/review.cgi?review_id=1598
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      And I quote...
    "A superlative video transfer... a bargain"
    - Anthony Horan
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          Panasonic - The One
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    • Centre Speaker:
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    • Surrounds:
          Jamo
    • Audio Cables:
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    • Video Cables:
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