BLU-RAY
REVIEW: FALLING DOWN
05/25/09
In 1993, Director Joel
Schumacher created what is in my opinion the best movie of
his career: Falling Down. To complement Schumacher’s
achievement Michael Douglas gives one of his best
performances. Together they managed to create a satirical
dark comedic, which is the effective atmosphere needed for
this movie to work. This is a movie that is worth multiple
viewings and which viewers more often than not cannot resist
quoting, but the true soul of Falling Down lies in it’s
satirical commentary on contemporary culture.
In Falling Down, William 'D-Fens' Foster (Michael Douglas)
is a recently fired defense employee who had enough. The
events of the day are trigger when Foster gets stuck in
traffic on a hot day without a working air conditioner.
Foster is so frustrated that he leaves his car in the middle
of the traffic jam and begins his journey into a world where
he isn’t going to take it anymore. Foster’s journey begins
at a convenience stores where he and I quote “I'm rolling
back prices to 1965”, he next does battle with a Hispanic
gang and in what is probably one of the best scenes to be
recorded on film he fights for consumer rights at a Whammy
Burger restaurant.
As I said before this is probably Joel Schumacher best movie
and he gets the look of the movie just right. The casting of
Michael Douglas as William Foster is perfect and his
performance is a natural fit. Robert Duvall as Detective
Martin Prendergast also adds a whole other element to the
story and his performance is just as natural.
This is probably one of my top ten movies of all time and
now that Warner Bros is releasing it on Blu-ray another
critical piece of my Blu-ray essentials is completed. How
does the movie look in Blu-ray: stupendous. The picture here
looks flaws and it is as though the look and feel of the
film is a third character. The only bad part of this release
is that this disk does not have many features expect for a
commentary track with Joel Schumacher and Michael Douglas
and a conversation with Michael Douglas. The packing of the
movie, which looks like a hardcover book, is very nice and
since this is a Digibook release the film contains a
beautiful book featuring over 30 pages of filmmaker and
talent bios, a discussion of the film, an examination of the
“bad guy,” photos, and more.
Review
By Brad Peterson
brad@smartcine.com
VIDEO:
Anamorphic Widescreen (2.40:1 aspect ratio) 1080P
AUDIO:
Dolby TrueHD: English 2.0, Dolby Digital: English 2.0 French
2.0 (Both Parisian and Dubbed in Quebec) Spanish (Both
Castilian 2.0 and Latin 1.0) Italian 2.0, Portuguese 2.0
Subtitles: English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Danish,
Dutch, Finnish, Italian, Norwegian, and Swedish
SPECIAL FEATURES:
Commentary by
Michael Douglas and Director Joel Schumacher
Deconstructing D-FENS: A Conversation with Michael
Douglas.- Michael Douglas discuses his character (William
Foster) and why the studios didn’t want to do this movie.
(10:11)
RATING BREAK DOWN:
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