6.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
An executive at a high-tech firm is passed over for a promotion, only to discover that his new boss is a woman with whom he'd had an affair 10 years earlier. When the woman immediately makes an aggressive sexual overture toward him, the man sues for sexual harassment, which uncovers a series of revelations about his own past and the future of his company.
Starring: Michael Douglas, Demi Moore, Donald Sutherland, Caroline Goodall, Roma MaffiaThriller | Insignificant |
Drama | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.40:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.39:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1 (640 kbps)
Czech: Dolby Digital 2.0
French (Canada): Dolby Digital 2.0
German: Dolby Digital 2.0
Japanese: Dolby Digital 2.0
Spanish: Dolby Digital 2.0
Portuguese: Dolby Digital Mono
All 2.0/1.0 are 192 kbps / Latin Spanish=2.0 / Japanese track is hidden
English SDH, French, German SDH, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.0 | |
Video | 3.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 0.5 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Disclosure is best known as the film in which Demi Moore sexually harassed Michael Douglas, and much of the male audience said, "Sounds good to me!" The late Michael Crichton, who wrote the novel and co-produced the movie, had an almost infallible instinct for hot-button issues. When he published his novel in early 1994, it was just a few years after the Clarence Thomas confirmation testimony of Anita Hill created national debate over he said/she said charges. Those hearings led to amendments in the law that have made sexual harassment cases a common fixture in courts and arbitrations. Crichton styled the novel of Disclosure as a Rorschach test based on role reversal. How would the reader react to the piggish behavior typically associated with a male boss when practiced by a woman against a male subordinate? But in the hands of Barry Levinson and his frequent collaborator, screenwriter Paul Attanasio, the story eventually morphed into something else. At this point, I should warn the reader that the following discussion assumes familiarity with the story. If you proceed further, you will encounter spoilers. To avoid them, skip down to the sections on video and audio.
The image on Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of Disclosure is something of a mixed bag. The colors, black levels and contrast range appear to accurately reproduce Tony Pierce-Robert's (Underworld) cinematography, which gives Seattle a picturesque haze and finds all the intriguing angles in the elaborate set built to represent DigiCom's Seattle office. Fleshtones often appear somewhat pinkish, but my recollection is that Disclosure has always looked that way. The film's grain appears to be natural and undisturbed by inappropriate digital manipulation such as high frequency filtering or artificial sharpening. The use of a BD-50, along with an absence of extras, has allowed the image to "breathe", ensuring a lack of compression artifacts. The disappointment is an intermittent lack of sharpness, especially in distant objects and faces in longer shots. While it is always possible that such softness is inherent in the source material, that was not a typical characteristic of films of the period, and I don't remember being struck by it when the film was in theaters. Nor is filtering or softening of the image noticeable in close-ups, where the image is just as likely to be sharp and detailed. Since Disclosure was shot with anamorphic lenses and utilized the entire expanse of the 35mm frame, there should be no loss of detail due to blow-ups or extractions. I can't explain the indistinctness; I can only report it.
The highlight of Disclosure's DTS-HD MA 5.1 tracks is Tom Sanders' journey into the virtual reality environment known as "The Corridor", which is the only way he can inspect the company's files after his privileges are revoked. An ILM creation, The Corridor may not look like much by today's gaming standard, but it sounds fantastic, as the film's mixers take advantage of its artificial world to surround the viewer with voices, echoes, footfalls and a kind of nightmare parody of the paranoid office environment in which Tom has been operating since his encounter with Meredith. One of the most interesting editorial choices in the film is to maintain this sonic environment even as the scene shifts to the evil Meredith back at DigiCom, as she sits down to her computer to begin erasing evidence of her misdeeds. At this point, there's no real difference between the real Meredith and the spooky avatar Tom will shortly encounter in VR. They're both cold-blooded, and they're both his enemy. Nothing else on the track offers the same opportunity for dramatically enveloping sound, though the mixers do take advantage of what was still, in 1994, the relatively new format of discrete 5.1 surround. In the opening sequence, seagulls and ferry horns are heard in the rear channels, and the scenes at DigiCom's office have a nice environmental ambiance. Ennio Morricone's urgently understated score, which, as always with Morricone, suits the action perfectly, weaves in and out of the action with beautiful tonality. I'd forgotten just how good it is. Dialogue is clear and, in the best scenes, intense.
Near the end of Disclosure, after Tom has vanquished Meredith, he goes to her soon-to-be-vacated office to pick up some files. He finds her there packing, where she brags about the headhunters calling her with offers. "Don't be surprised", she says, "if I'm back in ten years to buy this place". With the passage of time, we know exactly where someone of Meredith's talents and temperament will be in ten years. The tech boom and the dot.com bust would have made any interest in DigiCom irrelevant (assuming the company still existed). By 2004, a finance whiz like Meredith would have moved where the real action was: on Wall Street, bundling mortgage and consumer debt into bonds (otherwise known as "derivatives") and selling them to willing buyers with deceptively high ratings from compliant ratings agencies. Within a few years, she'd have mastered the lingo of credit default swaps, and if she were nimble enough, she'd either get out just in time in 2007, or position herself to be indispensable when the bailout came in 2008. "I thought we were buying this company because they could build things", says the head of Conley-White. How quaint that seems now. Highly recommended as a film, but see above regarding the Blu-ray image.
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