Cruel Game Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		0.5
Audio		1.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		0.5

Cruel Game Blu-ray Movie Review

Watching this Disc Is Cruel to Your Eyes, Your Brain and Your A/V System

Reviewed by Michael Reuben November 20, 2011

Every so often at Blu-ray.com, we sample a new publisher who appears on the scene with a bunch of obscure titles no one has heard of. We do this so you don't have to. The latest of these outfits is the Seedsman Group, whose logo is "SG Entertainment". They are reissuing titles previously released under the banner of "Smooth Pictures".

Let's make this short and to the point. This film would be barely tolerable on DVD or late night cable. On Blu-ray, it's a scandal. The publisher should be banned from further use of the format.

The menu is the best-looking image on the disc.

Brad (Adam Baratta) is a handsome, shallow womanizer who gets plenty of opportunities, because he produces commercials. Currently he's dating Yuki (Jennifer Tung) and, secretly, her roommate, Jenny (Carrie Stevens), while also carrying on with Emerald (Bonnie-Jill Laflin), who's married. On the advice of a colleague, Brad is also seeing a therapist, Dr. Valdes (Jennifer Rubin), about his trust issues. We know that's his problem, because the director, Masashi Nagadoi, makes sure we get a look at Dr. Valdes' notes, which are written in a big, childish hand on a pad that might as well be labeled "Essential Exposition". The doctor herself looks like one of Brad's conquests, except for that essential accessory used in movies to turn beautiful women into intellectuals: glasses.

Yuki turns out to be The One. Brad realizes this because (a) she doesn't immediately hop into bed with him, and (b) she gives him odd presents like a watch made of stones from her village (or something). Yuki also seems to bring out a protective streak in the new handyman at her apartment village, a Miyagi-like figure played by Mako (and what in the world is an Oscar-nominated actor doing in this dreck?). The handyman shows up spouting banal but profound-sounding wisdom whenever Yuki is in conversation with a local hound dog named Pedro (Damian Valencia). But Yuki's roommate, Jenny, sees another side of her. She warns Brad that Yuki is just out for his money, a multi-million dollar inheritance from his father.

Jenny proposes a convoluted scheme for Brad to test Yuki's loyalty, and Brad obviously has never seen a con film, because he goes right along with it. The rest of us, who have seen con films from The Sting going forward, can predict everything that happens from then on, including the last five minutes, where Nagadoi is in such a hurry to wind up the film that major events happen one after another as if by magic. What no one can do is make sense of the purported resolution. (And if you're thinking to yourself, "Who cares? It's a soft-core skin flick!", then you too have been conned. It's all tease.)

Cruel Game Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

In the early days of Blu-ray and HDTV, some were concerned about a new version of pan 'n' scan in which 1.33:1 material would be cropped at top and bottom to fill the 1.78:1 HD screen. Well, the Seedsman Group has come up with an interesting variant: stretching the 1.33:1 (or 1.37:1; it's hard to tell) image to create a faux 1.78:1 image for Blu-ray. Watching Cruel Game took me back to the early days of DVD, when 4:3 TVs still dominated showroom floors at Best Buy and Circuit City and the single DVD player feeding the entire floor was set to downconvert anamorphic DVDs to letterbox so that, on the few widescreen displays, the image was always stretched and distorted. That's the kind of image provided on the Blu-ray of Cruel Game; everyone looks wider and fatter than they really are. Did they really think no one would notice?

Bad news, part two: It has become common in condemning a Blu-ray to describe it as a "DVD transfer" mastered (or "slapped onto") Blu-ray. Well, this really is a standard-definition DVD transfer, and one of the reasons reviewers hesitate to use such characterizations is that, after you've seen the real thing, the difference from Blu-ray is obvious. Cruel Game may be nominally 1080i and encoded with AVC, but the phrase "garbage in, garbage out" was never more apropos. Colors are weak, blacks are crushed, video noise is plentiful and detail is non-existent. There is nothing about this disc -- not one thing -- that takes any advantage of the Blu-ray format.

Cruel Game Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The soundtrack is PCM 2.0, but again: garbage in, garbage out. There is no tonality, no subtlety and limited dynamic range. The audio quality is on a par with what one would expect from a TV broadcast, which is no doubt what the mix was prepared for.

Cruel Game Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Commentary with Writer-Director Masashi Nagadoi, Producer Francis Mohajerin and Editor John Coniglio: The ironic virtue of the commentary is to demonstrate how seriously even a terrible movie is taken by the people who make it. How else can one interpret comments like the producer's observation that the director inserted a lot of "symbolism" into the film (of exactly what is unclear), or the disclosure that the editing process lasted 22 weeks (exactly why is unclear)? All I can say is that the commentary was more entertaining than the movie, but that's setting the bar so low that it may as well be on the ground.


• Outtakes (SD; 1.85:1, non-enhanced; 1:02): More like "outtake" (singular). During a scene in which two characters are, uh, engaged on a revolving chair, the actors fall off. Hilarity ensues. The real significance, though, is the aspect ratio. Apparently, a true widescreen version of this film exists somewhere, but the Seedsman Group was too lazy or too cheap to find it.


• Trailer (SD; 1.33:1; 1:03): The virtue of the trailer is that it clearly demonstrates how misshapen the characters are in the main feature as presented on the Blu-ray.

Cruel Game Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Avoid this disc. Avoid the Seedsman Group. The end.