6 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Celebrity NYC homicide detective Eddie Flemming partners with young arson investigator Jordy Warsaw to track down a pair of Eastern European killers, who are videotaping their rampage through the city. Unpredictable and ferocious, the immigrants quickly learn how to use celebrity to their advantage, creating a storm of media and judicial madness.
Starring: Robert De Niro, Edward Burns, Kelsey Grammer, Avery Brooks, Melina KanakaredesCrime | 100% |
Thriller | 20% |
Drama | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Czech: Dolby Digital 2.0
Polish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Spanish DD 2.0=Latin; Japanese is hidden
English SDH, French, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Polish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 2.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 3.5 | |
Overall | 3.5 |
Filmed in 1999 and released in 2001, 15 Minutes features one of Robert De Niro's best performances since Heat, but the film was poorly received and isn't well known today. The writer/director, John Herzfeld, has been more successful in television, especially with docudramas like The Preppie Murder and HBO's Don King: Only in America, where the factual underpinnings helped constrain Herzfeld's tendency toward narrative sprawl. But one area in which Herzfeld excels is casting. In his first feature film, 2 Days in the Valley, he assembled an ensemble that included James Spader, Eric Stolz, Teri Hatcher, Keith Carradine and Danny Aiello, only to have the movie stolen by an unknown blonde who radiated danger in all of her scenes until she turned heart-breaking on a dime. "Wherever did you find her?" Herzfeld recalled being asked repeatedly. The actress was South African native Charlize Theron, now an Oscar winner for Monster and most recently seen as Imperator Furiosa in Mad Max: Fury Road. Theron appears briefly in 15 Minutes, playing the head of an escort service (and speaking in her native Afrikaans) to thank Herzfeld for jump-starting her career. She's just part of the rich supporting cast surrounding De Niro and Edward Burns in a nasty satire on how crime has been sensationalized in modern America. Both thematically and stylistically, 15 Minutes traces its lineage back to Network, Sidney Lumet's prescient satire of media corruption, except that Herzfeld approached his story in the form of a police procedural. If he had managed to maintain the laser-like focus of Paddy Chayevsky's Network script, 15 Minutes might have turned out better, but unfortunately the film loses its way in the second hour, relaxing and slowing down just as it should be tightening and speeding up. The weak finish hobbles what could have been an effective film, but the first hour and a half of 15 Minutes is worth revisiting for the impressive work by De Niro, Burns and several relative newcomers, including Vera Farmiga, who got the part by pretending to be, like her character, a Czech immigrant. Only when shooting began did she drop her accent and admit to Herzfeld that she'd been born and raised in New Jersey.
15 Minutes was shot by the late Jean-Yves Escoffier (Good Will Hunting), and it has a peculiar look that is specific to the era in which it was filmed. As Herzfeld explains in his commentary, he always intended to cut back and forth between the movie camera and Oleg's video footage, and he asked both Escoffier and his other department heads to design the filmed portions so that they would intercut easily with imagery from a consumer-grade camcorder, circa 1999. Today that would be a simple matter, because consumer digital HD cameras can record high-quality images, and any inconsistencies can be resolved in post-production via digital intermediate. But when 15 Minutes was made, DIs did not exist, and camcorders were not only SD but also analog. As noted in the commentary, the key point of commonality between the film and video portions of 15 Minutes is color. Because camcorders of that era often exaggerated bright colors, Herzfeld chose to do so deliberately wherever possible, so that the colors of the filmed and video segments would match. The most commonly saturated color is red, but green is frequent as well (see screenshot 13 for an example of both.) Even blues are often overstated (screenshot 25), and night lighting takes on a yellowish cast (screenshot 24). This distinctive use of color helps provide consistency, as Herzfeld and editor Steven Cohen (Don King: Only in America) cut back and forth between their shots and Oleg's, although the difference between the two formats is always obvious, because the resolution of Oleg's video is so much lower than film. Warner's MPI has newly transferred 15 Minutes at 2k from an IP for this 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray, and the results are an extremely accurate presentation of the hyper-real, tabloid TV style that Herzfeld wanted. Leaving aside Oleg's video, the image is sharp and detailed, even though both the camera and the people are frequently in motion; credit the use of spherical lenses with their ability to retain focus over a greater distance. Blacks are solid, and shades of black are finely rendered; the scene where Eddie and Jordy separately return to the site of the fire set by Emil and Oleg is a good example. The grain pattern is extremely fine, which, contrary to popular opinion, is entirely possible with Super35 photography. Warner has mastered the disc with an average bitrate of 30.57 Mbps; the compression has been carefully done.
The 5.1 soundtrack for 15 Minutes, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA, has a number of dynamic sequences, including the pursuit of Emil and Oleg on foot through midday Madison Avenue traffic, complete with shots fired. The audio mix effectively creates the chaos all around and the sudden shock of various impacts as people and objects come flying from unexpected directions. A scene involving an unexpected fire (I can't be more specific) is shockingly loud, and another sequence of personal combat (for lack of a better term) is both visually and sonically gut-wrenching. The mix's dynamic range is broad, although the bass extension is not deep enough to compete with a major action film. Despite the plethora of accents, the dialogue is always clear. Much of the film's score was written by Anthony Marinelli (Internal Affairs), but some of it was contributed by J. Peter Robinson (Wayne's World), after New Line Cinema decided it was unhappy with Marinelli's work.
The extras have been ported over the New Line Home Video's 2004 InfiniFilm DVD. Omitted are a subtitle "trivia" track and the DVD-ROM features, which included the script.
15 Minutes is a flawed work, but it has worthwhile elements, and one can discern the film it might have been. If one can accept its flaws, there is much to appreciate, and the package of extras assembled by New Line Film for its DVD (and mostly repeated here) offers valuable insights into the collaboration behind a film, what goes right—and what can go wrong. The Blu-ray presentation is strong enough to recommend the disc, as long as the buyer understands that the film itself has problems.
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