Singles Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		2.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		3.0

Singles Blu-ray Movie Review

In the Land of Coffee, Rain and Self-Doubt

Reviewed by Michael Reuben April 7, 2015

After making an offbeat classic about teenage romance with Say Anything, writer/director Cameron Crowe ventured into the even more treacherous terrain of twenty-somethings juggling romance, career and the search for somebody special in Singles, a film that so mystified the marketing department at Warner Bros. that it sat on a shelf for over a year before finally being released in September 1992 to modest success and a long life on video. The catalyst for release was the explosion of the music scene in the film's setting of Seattle, which was Crowe's home town. The soundtrack featured such local bands as Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, and it quickly became a bestseller. Warner's TV department even tried to turn the film into a series, without success (although Crowe has claimed that Friends was inspired by Singles).

After releasing Singles on laserdisc and DVD with limited extras, Warner has dug into its vaults for new supplements to complement the film's release on Blu-ray. Unfortunately for fans who have waited a long time to get Singles in high definition, all of the new extras are in standard def. The Blu-ray presentation of the film itself is already a subject of controversy. Several early reviews have been complimentary. I'd like to join them, but I can't.

One of the many charms of Singles is the loose and improvised feel with which the story—or rather, stories—unfold, as the characters discover themselves and each other, pausing every so often to address the audience in soliloquies, like characters in a play. The apparently casual surface is a beautifully engineered illusion, constructed by Crowe and his editor, Richard Chew (The Runaways), who keep pushing the narrative forward, even when they appear to be digressing.

Four major characters dominate Singles; three of them live in the same small apartment complex, which literally advertises apartments for "singles". Steve Dunne (Campbell Scott) is a city planner who dreams of solving Seattle's traffic problems with a super-train so enticing that it will make people give up their cars. Having just ended a frustrating relationship, he finds himself circling around Linda Powell (Kyra Sedgwick), an environmentalist, after they meet at a music club and again the same night at a newsstand—a coincidence that both of them take as some sort of sign. Linda has just been burned by a foreign exchange student (Camilo Gallardo). The on-again, off-again travails of Linda and Steve, to which Scott and Sedgwick bring great warmth and humor, are the epitome of a classic well-meaning pair who belong together but routinely get their signals crossed, because both are afraid of getting hurt again.

Steve's neighbor, former girlfriend and now friend is Janet Livermore (Bridget Fonda), a free spirit and hopeless romantic, who works at a coffee bar and is deeply in love with another resident, Cliff Poncier (Matt Dillon), lead guitarist for a struggling grunge band called Citizen Dick (and yes, the name is deliberately suggestive). The band can't gain traction on the local scene, but they're big in Belgium, as Cliff constantly reminds everyone. Even though Cliff works multiple jobs to support himself, in his own mind, he's a rock star who's entitled to treat Janet like a groupie.

Orbiting around these main characters are others who function as sounding boards, givers of advice (some good, some bad) and fellow observers of the world's strangeness. They are played by a remarkable supporting cast, of which members were already familiar and others would soon be. Steve's frequent companion is David Bailey (Jim True-Frost, billed as "Jim True", who would later become part of the groundbreaking ensemble on The Wire), a hardened cynic—or so he'd have everyone believe—who treats romance as a sucker's game. Janet can often be found in the company of Debbie Hunt (Sheila Kelley, L.A. Law), who pursues finding Mr. Right with such ferocity that she barely notices the men she dates, because she's too busy planning their future together. Andy (James LeGros) is a former boyfriend of Janet's, who represents a safe harbor, and Dr. Jamison (Bill Pullman) is a doctor she consults for cosmetic surgery to make herself more appealing to Cliff. Eric Stoltz appears briefly as a mime; Jeremy Piven appears even more briefly as an old high school acquaintance of Steve's; and Tom Skerritt, Peter Horton and Tim Burton have the briefest appearances of all as, respectively, the Mayor of Seattle, a prospective date for Debbie and a video director.

A distinctive quality of Singles is how light Crowe manages to keep the tone, even as he confronts the most serious of issues. Pregnancy, miscarriage, betrayal, professional disaster, even a nervous breakdown (though no one ever calls it that) all occur during the course of the film, and they're not laughed off, but they're also not treated as tragic or insurmountable. People pull themselves together, usually with wit and self-deprecating humor, and they move on. Not until Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous would Crowe begin putting his characters at dramatic crossroads where it felt like their choices risked leading them off a cliff from which there might be no recovery.

Singles Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The credited cinematographer on Singles is Swiss DP Ueli Steiger (Rock Star), with additional work by Tak Fujimoto (That Thing You Do!). The quality of Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray has been praised in several early reviews, as well as by fans of the film in the Blu-ray.com forum, where I posted several screenshots that were pronounced "film-like".

Over the course of many years of reviewing discs, both at Blu-ray.com and elsewhere, I have often been struck by the degree to which common terms of discussion mean different things to different people. What is considered "film-like" to one is "soft" and "grainy" to another. What is "detailed" to one is "blurry" to another. What has "good contrast" to one is "blown out" to another. Variations in viewing equipment and conditions may account for some of these divergences, but expectations and age also play a major part. A moviegoer who was 40 years old when Singles was released, as I was, will have a very different sense of what 35mm film should look when projected than one who was 20 years old, or 10 (or, perhaps, wasn't yet born).

As confirmed by a few screencaps supplied by a helpful member of Blu-ray.com, Warner's Blu-ray certainly improves on its 1999 DVD of Singles, but that is setting the bar very low. The Blu-ray's colors are stronger, especially reds and blues, and contrast has been improved, although this sometimes comes at the expense of the blacks by skewing them toward dark gray. But these are the kinds of manipulations that are relatively quick and easy to perform on an existing transfer (a/k/a "scan", "image capture" or "data harvest") with today's video software. What such software cannot do is add detail that wasn't there in the first place, and the image on the Singles Blu-ray lacks the kind of fine detail that one would expect on a 35mm negative shot in 1992. In shot after shot, hair, clothing, skin textures, props and sets lack definition and fine detail, even when fully illuminated. The larger you project the image, the more obvious this becomes. On my computer screen when taking screenshots, the image was tolerable. On my 72" viewing screen (at a viewing distance of about 9 feet), the shortcomings were obvious.

In an apparent attempt to compensate for the lack of detail, some light sharpening has been applied in a handful of shots. It's a minor intrusion, and many viewers probably will not notice.

Consistent with the wan image, Singles has been mastered with a low average bitrate of 19.94 Mbps. With so little detail to work with in the first place, Warner seems to have gotten away with it. Then again, it's also possible that they rolled off high frequencies to facilitate compression (which would be an alternative explanation for the lack of fine detail).

Singles Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's original stereo soundtrack has been encoded as lossless DTS-HD MA 2.0, and it sounds just fine. The bantering conversations are clear and intelligible, and the all-important musical track composed and overseen by Paul Westerberg (former lead singer and songwriter for the Replacements) has good fidelity and clear stereo separation. The club sequences, with their tricky balance of deafening live performance and just audible shouted exchanges of dialogue are perfectly balanced. When played back through a good surround decoder, the stereo expands into the surround array with a nicely enveloping sense of presence.

Singles Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Warner's 1999 DVD had only two deleted scenes and a trailer. For Blu-ray, Warner has provided a wealth of new extras, but all of them are in standard definition. Note that the Blu-ray's back cover lists "Two complete-take extras with Bill Pullman and Tad", but no such item appears in the Special Features.

• Gag Reel (480i; 1.85:1; 3:17): My personal favorites are Paul Giamatti's various iterations of "What?"



• Unedited Music Performances (480i; 1.85:1): These are the full performances of bands featured during club scenes. The video appears to have been taken from work prints, possibly VHS. The audio, which was reportedly pulled from master tapes, is encoded as DD 2.0 at 192 kbps.
• Soundgarden "Birth Ritual" (5:26).
• Alice in Chains "It's Ain't Like That Anymore" (4:45).
• Alice in Chains "Would?" (4:01).



• Deleted/Extended Scenes (480i; 1.85:1): Although there are 25 scenes, there is no "play all" function, and each scene must be separately selected. The longest is an omitted compilation involving Bridget Fonda's Janet and Bill Pullman's Dr. Jamison. It's an entire subplot of which only hints remain in the completed film.
  
  Besides being funny in their own right, the deleted scenes provide valuable insight into the editing process. Scenes that provide character insight in the extended version are more effective in context when shortened (a good example is the argument between Debbie and her roommate, Pam, entitled "Am I Really Plastic?"). "Accent" characters like Eric Stoltz's mime work best in small doses; his additional scenes would have made his existing scenes less effective. Other scenes, such as "Bailey's French Club Fantasy", simply didn't fit into the narrative.


• Singles—18 Units (1:16).
• Underground (1:03).
• Mime Club Fight (1:21).
• I Hate the Mime (1:03).
• What Would the King Do? (2:02).
• Water Date Redux (1:01).
• The Java Stop (0:47).
• Rock the House (1:49).
• The Ballad of Janet and Dr. Jeff (16:12).
• They're Playing Our Record in Belgium (0:33).
• Twelve Day Theory (0:53).
• This Oyster Is Dead (1:07).
• The Male Bathroom Contains All Secrets (2:12).
• Am I Really Plastic? (1:29).
• If You Could Pay My Phone Bill (0:41).
• Bailey's Check-Up (2:37).
• Bailey's French Club Fantasy (3:02).
• Advice to a Lovelorn Steve (3:11).
• Romancing Janet (0:22).
• I'll Replace the Windows (1:47).
• I Was Just Nowhere Near Your Neighborhood, Extended (1:12).
• No Games (1:49).
• Eddie Haskell Redux (1:32).
• Sexy Time (0:50).
• The Mudman Cometh (1:09).



• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 2.35:1; 1:59).

Singles Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Singles already seems like a relic of a bygone era. The digital age had already arrived in 1992, but it hadn't yet penetrated daily life as it would during the course of the next two decades. Social interactions were still conducted face-to-face; they hadn't yet been begun the transformation wrought by the internet, cell phones, texting and social media. The delicate tip-toe of flirtation and seduction that marks the gentle comedy in Singles is a far cry from the crashing dissonance of desperation that characterizes the similarly themed HBO series Girls—and not just because the temperaments of the creators are different. The early Nineties was a more optimistic time, when so much seemed possible. Crowe captured that spirit in Singles, and the film still wraps the viewer in its warmth. Fans who are satisfied with this video presentation should be pleased.