Something to Talk About

Set in the South Carolina region of America, this story revolves around Grace and her family. Grace is the stable manager of the family horse business as well as the community chairperson of the local women's charity league. Her generally happy and busy life are turned upside down when she sees her husband Eddie with another woman while stopped at a red traffic light. This causes some tension in the family as her father is involved in a business transaction with Eddie and his father's business and doesn't want things to go wrong. Grace is of course devastated by the discovery and her emotional roller coaster is to have an effect on many of her family and friends with some quite humorous results. Will she and Eddie get back together? Watch and find out!

"What has he thinking of? Probably the same thing he was thinking with!"

I liked this film. While some would consider it a 'Chick Flick' it does have some quite funny moments as Grace tries to sort out her feelings toward Eddie and her situation. All of the cast are excellent. I particularly enjoyed the performance of Kyra Sedgwick as Julia Robert's straight talking sister, Emma Rae. This film reminds me somewhat of Steel Magnolias.

Ok here's the technical stuff on the video transfer. The aspect ratio is approximately 1.85:1 and the transfer is 16x9 enhanced.

Nice is a good word to describe this transfer. A lot of detail can be seen. The weave of clothing is easy to see, the fine, fly away hairs of the actors can be easily distinguished and the grain of timber is clearly revealed. Yup, this is one sharp transfer. The level of detail revealed in night scenes seems perfectly natural and the blacks are nice and deep. The colour palette is quite natural looking, perhaps a little subdued when compared to some more recent films. Skin tones were also good although they tended to be a tiny bit pink in some scenes.

Film grain is visible but is fine and not at all distracting. Film Artefacts do occur at various points throughout the film but they are mostly small and infrequent. In other words not a problem! Film-To-Video artefacts are present and take the form of aliasing and moiré effects. The most common of the two is aliasing which can be seen in several scenes, particularly on motor vehicles. It is noticeable but I didn't find it distracting as most occurrences are minor and in portions of the screen that are not the main focus of your attention. I also noticed some minor telecine wobble at the very start of the movie, during the display of the Warner Brothers logo. I didn't notice it after this point.

The layer change for this disc takes place at 65:32. The change is very fast and occurs during a scene change. So well placed is the change that I missed it on first viewing!

This disc features three audio tracks. All are Dolby Digital 5.1, one in English, one in French and the other in Italian. All are encoded at 384 Kb/s.

I listened to the English 5.1 track and liked what I heard.

The dialogue of the actors is always clear and remained in sync throughout. The fidelity of this track is good with differing sounds easy to distinguish. Despite the slower pace of the movie split channel effects do occur, mainly across the front. The rears are often active carrying ambient sounds as well as the score. The subwoofer is subtly used to support the score and some of the soundtrack as well. The score itself features many mainstream country tracks most notably 'Something To Talk About' performed by Bonnie Raitt as well as some older popular songs.

Someone appears to have lassoed the extras and galloped off into the distance leaving only a good quality theatrical trailer behind. The trailer runs for about 1:57 and features the same aspect ratio as the film and is 16x9 enhanced. The audio for this trailer is Dolby Digital 2.0 surround encoded at 192 Kb/s.

A good movie although one that will probably suit the fairer sex. It has a nice steady pace and a good balance of humour and drama. Both the video and audio transfers are very good.