6.5 | / 10 |
Users | 4.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
When a blonde sorority queen is dumped by her boyfriend, she decides to follow him to law school to get him back and, once there, learns she has more legal savvy than she ever imagined.
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Luke Wilson, Selma Blair, Matthew Davis (I), Victor GarberComedy | 100% |
Romance | 74% |
Teen | 34% |
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 2.0
French: DTS 5.1
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 2.0
German: DTS 5.1
Italian: DTS 5.1
Spanish: DTS 5.1
Russian: DTS 5.1
Thai: Dolby Digital 2.0
Japanese: DTS 5.1
Japanese only available on Japanese menus setting.
English SDH, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, Cantonese, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Korean, Mandarin (Traditional), Norwegian, Russian, Swedish, Thai
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 4.0 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 4.0 | |
Overall | 4.0 |
Legally Blonde made Reese Witherspoon a star and deservedly so. In other hands, the story of Elle Woods, a spoiled L.A. kewpie doll who goes to Harvard Law School for all the wrong reasons, could have become just another "fish out of water" comedy. It would still have been funny watching Elle hand out her pink, scented resumé and pouring Evian for her beloved pooch, Bruiser, in the Law School quad, but it wouldn't have been the summer hit and enduring classic that Legally Blonde became. It took Witherspoon to make Elle a three-dimensional character, with feelings, depth and, yes, an interior life that people around her might not notice but the audience could see shining through her eyes. With rare exceptions, the best comedy comes from characters who take things seriously - and Witherspoon's Elle took shopping, manicures and Cosmopolitan (a/k/a "The Bible") as seriously as she would ultimately take criminal law. The only thing Elle doesn't take seriously, at least at the start of the film, is her own potential, and one can easily imagine an alternate version in which she stays that way and the dumb blonde blunders into a happy ending like a female Forrest Gump. That film might make us laugh, but it wouldn't be Legally Blonde. Some of the film's best moments result from Elle's decision to buckle down and apply the formidable talents she wielded in soap opera viewing, fashion and make-up to torts, contracts and civil procedure. The results are impressive, and it doesn't hurt that the first case assigned to Elle turns on fashion and hair care minutia that only someone with her background would notice. That's a staple of legal dramas. What, you thought it was a coincidence that Vinny Gambini's first case just happened to turn on the kind of automotive trivia that his fiancée knew cold?
Elle takes Cambridge.
Cinematographer Anthony Richmond, a frequent collaborator with Nicholas Roeg (e.g., The Man Who Fell to Earth), gave Legally Blonde a delicate, gently lit appearance where there's plenty of detail but a softness that prevents harsh edges from intruding themselves. Even at law school, this is always Elle's world, and she casts her spell wherever she goes. The early California scenes are golden and candy-colored. Once Elle moves east, the pallette turns darker with more brown and black, so that Elle's brighter colors always stand out. When Elle first reports for duty on the Windham case, the severity of her "official" outfit is striking, but by the time she's promoted to courtroom advocate, she has returned to her signature pink. The 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray reproduces all of these shades and color shifts with excellent fidelity, and detail is strong throughout. There is a minor amount of visible film grain, but it is well controlled without any evidence of DNR or other digital tampering. Black levels are excellent, as can be readily seen in the courtroom scenes, where the bulk of the attire is dark suits. Legally Blonde was released in 2001, before the motion picture industry had fully converted to digital intermediates, and according to the credits, the film was finalized by traditional photochemical means. The transfer betrays its analogue origin on occasion, if one is looking for it, mostly in the occasional flickering in the image from the shifting of the film element as it moves through the telecine scanner. These flaws are minor and infrequent, and I mention them only because watching so many recent productions sourced from DIs has made me more alert to the differences (and often charmed by them), when I view a more traditional image.
As with most comedies, the focus of the DTS 5.1 lossless track is the dialogue, but the surround channels are put to good use for environmental ambiance. Listen, for example, to the detailed presence of the restaurant surroundings where Warner tells Elle that it's over. You're very much aware that he's picked a public place to deliver the news (not that it saves him from Elle making a scene). Classrooms, courts, a spa and the law school quad get similar treatment. The charming original score by Rolfe Kent (who recently did Up in the Air) is nicely reproduced, along with the well-chosen pop songs, notably "Perfect Day" by Hoku.
One has to wonder why Fox keeps mastering MGM discs with BD-Java. It's not as if they're using the code to implement any of Blu-ray's advanced features, such ad BD-Live, Bonus View, or secondary audio. Indeed, the one feature from the 2001 Legally Blonde DVD that might have utilized BDJ, the so-called "Trivia Track", has been omitted. So Fox might as well have done what Warner does with nearly all of its catalogue titles: omit BDJ and leave the user free to stop and resume from the same place. But no. The uselss BDJ code gets inserted anyway. There's no main menu, which makes it difficult to browse the special features, and no ability to set bookmarks, a capability that no BDJ-encoded disc should ever be without. Has anyone involved in creating these discs ever actually played a Blu-ray? All of the special features have been ported over from the 2001 DVD release with the exception, as noted, of the "Trivia Track". When enabled, that option provided pop-up balloons with facts about the movie or useless information like what percent of women in America paint their nails. I'm not a fan of such tracks, which trace their origin to VH1's "Pop-Up Video", because they overlay and obscure the video image. But completists may want to retain their DVD.
Once you understand why Legally Blonde works so brilliantly, it becomes obvious why the sequel was doomed to failure. The original film is only nominally about Elle getting other people to take her seriously; it's true subject is how Elle sees herself. That's why test screening audiences clamored for an additional scene in which Elle, now a successful trial lawyer, tells off Warner for the cad he is, and the filmmakers wisely added such a scene; without it, the film would feel incomplete. By the end of Legally Blonde, Elle, who was never a dimwit, no longer acts like one, which is why she's chosen to give the commencement address at her law school graduation. The makers of the sequel (different writers; different director) didn't have the sense to recognize that they couldn't regress Elle back to being a dummy in order to replay the first film's arc in a new venue. That may work for an action hero. It won't fly for a newly empowered heroine. It was the height of injustice when the wretched sequel was released on Blu-ray earlier this year, while the great original remained confined to DVD. That injustice has now been remedied, with the unfortunate limitation that the original is a Wal-Mart exclusive for the moment. If there's a Wal-Mart near you, it's worth the trip. The film is a classic (or will be, when it's old enough), and the Blu-ray is highly recommended.
2003
20th Anniversary Limited Edition Packaging
2004
25th Anniversary Edition
1995
15th Anniversary Edition
2006
10th Anniversary Edition
2002
10th Anniversary Edition
1999
2004
2009
2008
2009
2000
2010
2009
2002
Extended Cut
2008
2009
2007
Unrated + Theatrical
2006
Rockin' Rydell Edition
1978
2011