7.4 | / 10 |
Users | 3.7 | |
Reviewer | 3.0 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Navin Johnson is the adopted son of a poor black sharecropper family, whose crazy inventions lead him from rags to riches and right back to rags. Along the way, he's smitten with a lady motorcycle racer, survives a series of screwball attacks by a deranged killer, becomes a millionaire by inventing the "Opti-grab" handle for eyeglasses - and shows why he's one of the hottest comic performers in the world.
Starring: Steve Martin, Bernadette Peters, Catlin Adams, Mabel King, Richard WardComedy | 100% |
Coming of age | 21% |
Video codec: VC-1
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: DTS 2.0
English SDH, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
UV digital copy
Slipcover in original pressing
Region free
Movie | 3.0 | |
Video | 2.0 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 3.0 |
Are you old enough to remember one of the relics of antiquity, namely the phone book? These vestiges of a bygone era were soft cover compendia of names, addresses, and, yes, phone numbers of any given community and those of us who grew up before the advent of cell phones, Google and the internet used to refer to them regularly to divine important information. Will younger audiences still erupt into uproarious laughter when Steve Martin’s simpleton character Navin R. Johnson gets a bit hysterical during The Jerk, jumping with joy over the arrival of the new phone book, one that has his name listed in it, therefore giving him (in his own mind at least) a certain level of respectability and renown? (Years ago, in a previous life, when an office I managed got its yearly delivery of new phone books, I burst out into a raucous “The new phone books are here! The new phone books are here!” I was met with withering stares of befuddlement by my employees.) The Jerk was Steve Martin’s first big screen entry. Some Martin fans love the film inordinately, claiming it's one of the actor's best. Other fans deride it as just plain silly, not worthy of Martin's often hilarious combination of lowbrow humor with overweening intellectualism. The truth is probably somewhere in between. The Jerk is an unapologetically silly (and often scabrous and politically incorrect) homage to the brainless amongst us, as personified by the dunderheaded Navin, a character who drifts through life like a Tarot deck Fool, wandering from adventure to adventure without ever really grasping what’s going on. One might compare Navin’s trek to an idiot's version of The Rake’s Progress, although in this case, Navin would most likely be stepping on the rake and bashing himself in the head, a la that running gag with Sideshow Bob on old episodes of The Simpsons. The Jerk is relentless in its self-proclaimed stupidity, and that may make it a bit of a haul for some viewers who are less inclined to go along with the film’s basic premise, but for those who delight in childish crudity and just downright idiocy, The Jerk can be hysterically funny (if also hit and miss), at least if one sets aside any proclivities to be offended by off-putting behavior.
The Jerk is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Universal Studios with a VC-1 encoded 1080p transfer in 1.85:1. My hunch is this is a pretty old master, as it is often times pretty fuzzy and ill defined. It's not quite as bad as an upscale, but it rarely rises to anything approaching high definition splendor. Part of this is no doubt due to the source elements, for The Jerk was never an overly "pretty" film to begin with. But some of the midrange shots here are surprisingly soft looking and even some close-ups lack appreciable fine detail. Colors are decent, if a bit pallid at times. Contrast is actually fairly good and consistent throughout the film. The good news, at least for Universal catalog release watchers, is there's more than abundant grain in evidence—Universal either didn't care or want to spend the money on "improving" this outing by digitally scrubbing it.
The Jerk features a lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix which wisely doesn't try to reinvent the wheel in terms of the film's original mono sound mix. While that means there isn't a whale of a lot of immersion here, it also means the original sound design doesn't sound overly artificial in this repurposed track. Dialogue is resolutely front and center and discrete channelization is limited mostly to the music as well as some of the foley effects (notably in the sniper sequence as well as some of the carnival segments). Fidelity is very good and dynamic range is fairly wide for a comedy. It does seem a little odd that Universal would want to offer a surround mix on this small scale film, and some might have wished the original mono track had been included as an option.
I frankly remembered The Jerk to be a lot funnier than I found it this time in revisiting it after many years in preparation for this review. There's no doubt about it—the film has quite a few great bits, but I just wasn't laughing consistently the way I remember having done decades ago when I first saw the film (I think probably on VHS, as I don't recall having seen this theatrically). Martin fans will no doubt get a kick out of this, even with the lame bits, but others may find this less consistently entertaining than some of Martin's later pieces. This Blu-ray has fairly spotty video quality, but the repurposed audio is actually pretty good.
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