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  Directed by
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  Specs
  • Widescreen 1.85:1
  • 16:9 Enhanced
  • Dual Layer ( )
  Languages
  • English: Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround
  • English: DTS 5.1 Surround EX
  • English: Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
  Subtitles
    English
  Extras
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Dolby Digital trailer
  • DTS trailer
The Sleeping Dictionary (Rental)
Roadshow Entertainment/Roadshow Entertainment . R4 . COLOR . 104 mins . M15+ . PAL

  Feature
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At first glance this film is incredibly beautiful, full of magnificent jungle vistas and smiling natives. Unfortunately, at second glance, there’s little else to grab you. The story is familiar to begin with: Young Englishman full of bright ideas and stiff upper lip meets the jungle head on and is soon out of his depth. Enter a young lady as his ‘Sleeping Dictionary’, a girl to sleep with him until he picks up the local lingo. He’s not supposed to fall in love with her, but oops, stuff happens, right? So, to combat this, the Governor and his wife foist their English daughter on him, though he still pines for his ‘Dictionary’. Sigh. Whatever will become of them?

Hugh Dancy (whoever he is) plays the lead chappie entering Malaysia’s Sarawak in 1936. Jessica Alba (of Dark Angel fame) is the love interest who spends a lot of the film posing for the camera, while Brenda Blethyn and Bob Hoskins play the English overlords and parents to Emily Mortimer, the proper English daughter. Noah Taylor shows up as a nasty, incompetent officer with almost too little screen time to warrant a credit. Shame. We all know he’s great. But in this, he’s just nowhere near greasy enough for the role he plays. Oh well.

So, the story’s an old one. There are a couple of new twists, but nothing we can’t see coming. The movie really lives up to its name in terms of being way too long and sending everyone who can speak a language to sleep. The studio blurb states it’s "Passion that could not be tamed" That’s surely a cliché older than the setting of the movie. And rather innaccurate.

  Video
  Audio
  Extras
Contract

Visually, as mentioned above, this film is stunning. Magnificent vistas of Malaysian jungle grace nearly every scene. The natives of the region all appear to be actual locals complete with tattoos and everything, which adds necessary authenticity to this simmering storyline. (You’ll note I didn’t say ‘smouldering’). With the anamorphic 16:9 transfer, and 1.85:1 widescreen, the film gets to show us all the jungle stuff it wants, (and we’re happy to let it) which helps carry the lacking story. I detected no film artefacts, no jitters and barely any aliasing at all, which shows the excellent cinematography in the best possible way. All the colour levels are fantastic, the shadows are nice and black and the grey rainy days of monsoon season are all shown perfectly. I spent several years in the tropics and they look just like they should with rich, vibrant greens and buoyant muddy browns and multi-grey storm clouds. There are also about 50 different shades of ‘flesh tone’ (for want of a better term) in this film, but every character's skin looks perfect. There are characters whose storyline depends on their colour being truly represented by the photography, and it never once leaves the viewer confused. (Which also attests to clever casting.)

The sound comes in multiple formats, which is a nice change. Why they need so many, I’m unsure, but regardless, there’s a big selection from which to choose. Dolby Digital 5.1 surround, in which everything is clean, neat and perfect, Dolby DTS 5.1 and Dolby Digital 2.0 are the three picks and my weapon of choice was the DTS. Who can go past it? Jungle birds everywhere, laughing natives swarming around you and rain falling all over your lounge room. Fantastic! Super clean and super pure sound which can’t be faulted. The sound it conveys, however, can be. There is one particular little panpipe piece that I swear must have been in the first half of the film every four to six minutes. On the animated menu as well. They must have had a sale on or something, I dunno, but I soon got sick of the sound of it. The dialogue is nice and clear though, which is incredibly important to the plot, being all about speaking. There's impressive sound engineering on this disc, I just wish they’d had a little more worth saying to make the most of it.

As far as extras go, there's just the Theatrical Trailer here, though I must say I don’t recall ever seeing the trailer at a theatre - or the movie for that matter. There are also Dolby and DTS trailers, and they come up at the film’s beginning according to your choice of sound. I don’t really think that qualifies in my mind as a Bonus Feature and although there are Animated Menus, they only feature generic film footage and that infernal panpipe riff. Ugh!

If you want a movie that looks and sounds spectacular, but it won’t matter if you duck to the kitchen and miss a bit, then this is for you. It weighs in at a hefty hour and 45 minutes, with about 30 minutes of actual plot. The rest is Alba’s pouting and Malaysia’s breathtaking panoramas with a couple of classic ‘pan up to the action from an unrelated lizard in a tree’ shots. A long-winded romance telling you nothing you didn’t already know about first love, English Colonials and sleeping; especially sleeping.


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  •   And I quote...
    "A movie that looks and sounds spectacular, but it won’t matter if you duck to the kitchen and miss a bit."
    - Jules Faber
      Review Equipment
    • DVD Player:
          Nintaus DVD-N9901
    • TV:
          Sony 51cm
    • Receiver:
          Diamond
    • Speakers:
          Diamond
    • Surrounds:
          No Name
    • Audio Cables:
          Standard Optical
    • Video Cables:
          Standard Component RCA
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