Blu-ray Movie Reviews

Wow. I'm generally more into Will Ferrell than Colin Farrell, and still haven't forgiven Joel Schumacher for Batman and Robin, so Phone Booth wasn't even close to being on my radar until it showed up on Blu-ray. Happy to say, this was a surpirse as both a movie and BD transfer.

Farrell plays Stu, a slimeball publicist who gets pinned down in a Phone Booth by caller who's a psychotic sniper with a high powered rifle (and good aim) who knows everything about him and attempts to make him confess his sins. When the caller doesn't get what he wants he threatens to shoot the innocents around the phone booth as well as Stu himself.

The movie runs a crackling 81-minutes, and daringly just about everything happens in single locale, with a real-time, cinema verite feel to it. We don't learn anything before the characters do, and it's a helluva ride. Good enough that I didn't spend too much time thinking about the plot holes- so it passed my own suspension of disbelief test. Without giving up too much, how the movie handles the killer's motives and the ending of the movie were among the movie's most compelling traits to me, but will either endear the movie to you further or make you want to throw something at the screen at the end. Either way it will provoke a response!

Courtesy of Fox's informative packaging, Phone Booth is encoded at 1080p using MPEG-2 at an average data rate of 26Mbps. And with an 81-minute run time and skimpy extras all that fits onto a single-layer 25GB disc.

The transfer is simply wonderful. The picture is sharp, but with natural edges and a fine layer of film-like grain. As is commonplace with the next-gen formats compression artifacts, edge enehancement and all the other detritus we've put up with for years on DVD and, to a lesser extent, broadcast HD, are notably absent. The colors are a little processed or filtered, but flesh tones mostly looked good. There are some blown whites, but this looks like an artistic choice in filming, not anything to do with this excellent transfer.

The sound design is as daring as the other elements of filmmaking. I listened to the "core" 1.5Mbps stream of the DTS-HD Master Audio track. The sound was enveloping and aggressively directional, even with dialog. Schumacher uses a Picture-in Picture style in many of the phone conversations, and in one instance, a caller's PIP position moves from right to left, and her dialog moves right along with it. Nifty, and while it could have been distracting it worked for me. The dialog is always intelligible, and the caller's voice sort of floats in an indistinct space that palces him around and above the action rather than being localized. Kinda like you know who, from upstairs. This is a terrific soundtrack.

Not much in the way of extras here, just a Phone Booth trailer in HD and an audio commentray by the director, which is as engaging as anything Schumacher has ever done on nscreen if not more so.

This movie was a nice find for me. I enjoyed it and I'll be recommending it to friends and family.

Picture: 9 out of 10

Sound: 8 out of 10

Video reviewed on Sharp LC-52D92U LCD flat panel and Pioneer Elite BDP-HD1 Blu-ray Disc player via HDMI to Anthem AVM 50. Audio sent as DTS bitstream over HDMI to Anthem AVM 50. Ayre MX-R monoblocks and Theta Dreadnaught power amps, and Vandersteen loudspeakers. All video cables by Bettercables, all audio cables by AudioQuest