Please Stand By Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.0
Overall		3.5

Please Stand By Blu-ray Movie Review

To Boldly Go

Reviewed by Michael Reuben May 2, 2018

Not all successful child actors grow up to be an effective adult presence onscreen. The qualities that made Tatum O'Neal, Macaulay Culkin and Haley Joel Osment magnetic as film kids somehow disappeared when they became grownups. Not so with Dakota Fanning, who was holding her own with the likes of Robert De Niro, Sean Penn and Denzel Washington before she was twelve. Now 24, Fanning is hard at work assembling an already-impressive résumé of mature roles, including her recent turn in TNT's adaptation of The Alienist, where she managed to stand out against an overwhelmingly male cast and a wardrobe of shoulder pads so extreme that even Joan Crawford might have hesitated to wear them.

Fanning is the main reason to see Please Stand By (or "PSB"), a character study that perches unsteadily between melodrama and fairy tale. PSB began as a one-act play by Michael Golamco, a writer on TV's Grimm, and its expansion into a film was backed by 2929 Productions, the company owned by internet billionaires Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban. PSB is now being released on Blu-ray through 2929's distribution subsidiary, Magnolia Home Entertainment.

Fanning plays Wendy, who is autistic but sufficiently functional to care for herself, hold a job at Cinnabon and maintain relationships with her co-workers. Since her mother's death, Wendy has lived in a loosely supervised group home run by Scottie (Toni Collette), because her sister, Audrey (Alice Eve), has a husband and a young child and cannot provide Wendy with the structured environment she needs.

Wendy's true passion is Star Trek, which she watches every day on TVLand, and of which her knowledge is so thorough that her Cinnabon colleagues routinely fail to stump her with even the most obscure trivia. (The name of Dr. McCoy's daughter? She knows it.) For weeks, Wendy has labored over an original script for submission to a contest sponsored by Paramount, with a $100,000 prize that Wendy believes will allow her to reunite with Audrey and her family under the same roof. Over 400 pages in length, Wendy's tale bridges multiple Trek series, and its hero is Mr. Spock, whose struggle to comprehend human emotions resonates with Wendy on a personal level. (The film's title comes from the calming mantra that Scottie repeats to her patient whenever feelings overwhelm her.)

When circumstances conspire to prevent Wendy from getting her script into the mail in time to meet the contest deadline, she slips out of Scottie's facility and embarks on a journey from the familiar environs of San Francisco to the unknown galaxy of Los Angeles, where she intends to deliver her magnum opus to Paramount in person. PSB quickly becomes a road movie featuring a Candide-like innocent who proves to be surprisingly resourceful when confronted with unfamiliar tasks like identifying bus routes, acquiring tickets and evading the pursuit that ensues when Scottie realizes one of her charges is missing. (Audrey, who is already suffering from agonizing guilt for abandoning her sister, quickly joins the chase.)

One of PSB's most effective elements is its heroine's ability to draw strength from a pop culture mythos that feels as real and immediate to her as the everyday world that, for Wendy, might as well be an alien planet. Wendy may be navigating an unfamiliar landscape filled with strange creatures, some hostile and dangerous, others friendly and helpful, but she has the accumulated wisdom of the Trek universe to guide her. Her absorption in a fictional world ends up being a conduit through which she is able to connect to others, as long as they share her interest. Scottie, who has to ask her son, Sam (River Alexander), to explain who Captain Kirk is, has to work much harder to communicate with Wendy than a cop played by Patton Oswalt, whose Trek knowledge allows him to establish an instant rapport. (It's one of the film's funniest moments, which the trailer gives away, but I will not.)

PSB has more than a few improbabilities that Golamco's script and Ben Lewin's (The Sessions) direction blithely ignore, but Fanning smooths them over with a performance of exceptional conviction and delicacy. She sidesteps the temptation to play Wendy as a collection of quirks and tics (see Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man). Instead, she creates a character who, despite her peculiarities, grows ever more relatable as the film progresses. Wendy may have trouble establishing relationships with those around her, but by the time PSB reaches its gently hopeful conclusion, Fanning's relationship with the viewer is unshakeable.

(Trek afficionados should enjoy the irony, whether intentional or not, in the casting of Alice Eve as Wendy's sister, given Eve's membership in the extendedStar Trek family. She played Dr. Carol Marcus in Star Trek Into Darkness, and her presence provides yet another reminder of how thoroughly Trek has permeated our world.)

Please Stand By Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Please Stand By was shot digitally by veteran Australian cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson (Kill Me Three Times), who previously photographed The Sessions for director Ben Lewin. Simpson and Lewin keep the focus on their star and her expressive face as much as possible, and the film's production surrounds her with bright colors and hyper-realistic clarity that subtly suggest the sensory overload against which Wendy's daily routines are a defense. Magnolia's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray sports a sharp, highly detailed and brightly colored image, in which even most night scenes are well-illuminated (e.g., in cars on freeways or under the flood lights of parking lots). Primaries, especially red and blue, are richly but not overly saturated, blacks are solid and contrast is excellent throughout. Magnolia has mastered the 93-minute film on a BD-25 with an average bitrate of 21.99 Mbps and a capable encode.

Please Stand By Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Please Stand By's 5.1 soundtrack, encoded in lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1, subtly uses the rear channels to convey the sense of Wendy's world as initially circumscribed, with sounds of distant traffic moving through the rear speakers outside the group home, then situates Wendy directly in the center of the various environments she encounters on her travels. A sequence in which she imagines herself in the world of her script provides a sonic glimpse inside her head, as multiple iterations of Wendy's voice echo throughout the speaker array. PSB doesn't place much demand on the lower frequencies, but the track's dynamic range is more than equal the story's modest needs. Dialogue is clearly rendered, and the jaunty score by Heitor Pereira (the Despicable Me series) has been deftly layered into the mix.

Please Stand By Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Deleted Scenes (1080p; 2.40:1; 3:56): The four scenes are not separately listed or selectable. A title card precedes each scene. All of them flesh out the character of Scottie's teenage son, Sam (River Alexander), and his relationship with his mother.
• Sam Steals Patient Medication
• Sam Is Caught Selling Drugs
• Scottie Watches Sam Sleep
• Sam Goes Out for the Evening



• Making of Please Stand By (1080p; 2.40:1; 6:27): Whenever a "making of" featurette devotes more time to clips from the film than interviews, it's intended as a promotional tool rather than an informative extra. This is a good example.



• Theatrical Trailer (1080p; 2.40:1; 2:31): The trailer is effective, but it gives away one of the film's best and most surprising moments of comedy.



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: Trailers for Permanent, 2:22 and The Final Year.



• BD-Live: "Check back for updates."

Please Stand By Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

PSB works on a small scale, but it does so effectively, thanks to Fanning's performance and Lewin's direction, of which the greatest strength is that he gets out of the way and lets his star bring Wendy to life. Magnolia's Blu-ray is light on extras but technically proficient. Recommended.