Two Weeks Notice Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		3.0
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.5
Overall		3.5

Two Weeks Notice Blu-ray Movie Review

Cutie and the Billionaire

Reviewed by Michael Reuben January 28, 2014

Screenwriter Marc Lawrence wrote two scripts for Sandra Bullock before Two Weeks Notice. One, Forces of Nature, was a box office failure, but the other, Miss Congeniality, was a certifiable hit (and spawned a sequel), which is no doubt a big part of the reason why Lawrence was allowed to direct his third script, with Bullock producing. All three films capitalized on the perky, eccentric rom-com personality that had enchanted audiences in Bullock's early feature, While You Were Sleeping. For Two Weeks Notice, Lawrence and Bullock hedged their bets by securing a certified romantic lead in Hugh Grant, whose credentials were established in Four Weddings and a Funeral and further burnished by Notting Hill, Sense and Sensibility and even Bridget Jones's Diary, although he ultimately lost the girl there (but it took Colin Firth to pull her away).

The movie was poorly reviewed, but fans of Bullock and Grant didn't care. The box office may have benefitted from Bullock's insistence, in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, that production be relocated from Toronto to New York, so that the film became one of the first to be shot entirely on location in the wounded city, thereby providing a boost to the local economy, as well as a cinematic reassurance that the city was bearing up. An extended sequence depicts a leisurely helicopter ride over Manhattan in which Bullock and Grant admire some of its signature buildings—still standing.

Such immediate factors have receded today, but the film has improved with age, simply because, whatever its shortcomings, it so vastly exceeds the sludge that studios have tried to pass off as rom-coms during the succeeding years. Compared to such joyless outings as The Bounty Hunter, One for the Money and the witless Killers—to which can be added just about any other attempt at romantic comedy starring Katherine Heigl, Jennifer Anniston, Ashton Kutcher or Gerard Butler—Two Weeks Notice now looks positively fizzy.

The star-crossed lovers who spend most of Two Weeks Notice in cute but mortal conflict, only to fly into each other's arms in the film's last minutes, are Lucy Kelson (Bullock) and George Wade (Grant). Lucy is an idealistic attorney, a top graduate of Harvard Law School with a passion for lost causes that she inherited from her socially committed Brooklyn parents (Robert Klein and Dana Ivey, who are perfect together), with whom Lucy still resides. George is a billionaire, who, along with his brother, Howard (David Haig), operates a real estate and construction empire on a scale that rivals Donald Trump (who has a cameo in the film). Currently the Wade Corporation is planning a massive development in Lucy's home neighborhood of Coney Island, where the plans call for leveling a historic community center that Lucy is desperate to save—which is how the couple meet.

As it happens, George needs a new general counsel, because he's an incorrigible womanizer who hires barely qualified women solely so that he can sleep with them. Howard has just fired the current G.C. for blowing a crucial deal. ("You need someone who can write a brief instead of removing yours", he tells George.) Impressed with Lucy's acumen, George offers her the job, and after searching her conscience, Lucy persuades herself that she can "do some good" from within the system. The same good intention has often paved the road to selling out, but here it leads to true love.

Now, all of this bears as much resemblance to the real world of corporate law and high-end property deals as Pretty Woman did to the realities of prostitution and corporate takeovers. Verisimilitude isn't the point in romantic comedy. It's all about two leads who can charm an audience into wanting them to wind up together. Bullock and Grant both have charm to spare, and Lawrence's script is just good enough to let them display it. First, though, there must be obstacles.

The gimmick expressed by the title is that Lucy eventually gets fed up with George's constant demands on her time, especially when those demands turn out to be as much about taking care of him as the company. When George interrupts her for fashion advice during the wedding of her best friend, Meryl (Heather Burns), Lucy has enough and gives her two weeks' notice. (To the clucking of grammarians everywhere, the apostrophe in "weeks'" was dropped from the title, presumably because it looked better in ads without punctuation.) George initially tries to keep her by poisoning her prospects for alternate employment ("You called everyone but Slurpee Heaven!" Lucy protests), but he changes his mind when a comely replacement named June Carver (Alicia Witt) arrives, who, though she too graduated from Harvard, lacks both Lucy's ideals and her scruples about sleeping with the boss. Lucy is free to go—if she still wants to.

For the most part, Lawrence's comedy relies on familiar situations (like Mr. Kelson's cholesterol) and second-rate word play (Lucy: "I think you're the most selfish human being on the planet." George: "Well that's just silly. Have you met everybody on the planet?"), but he relies on Bullock and Grant to toss off such exchanges with enough energy to make them amusing and create the sense of a relationship, if not exactly sexual tension. (Grant has always seemed more like the ideal best friend than a perfect mate.) Every so often, though, an inspired moment of comedy occurs. Dana Ivey's Mrs. Kelson freezes George's blood with her disapproving look, and Lawrence has the good sense to linger on Ivey's comically stern expression as if she were a gargoyle. "I thought she was going to kill me and feed me to the poor", George later confides to Lucy. The most questionable routine in the film concerns Lucy's intestinal emergency when the couple is stuck in traffic on the 59th Street Bridge, and George chivalrously bribes the owner of an RV (Becky Ann Baker, currently Hannah's mom on Girls) to gain access to their bathroom, where Lucy's intense groans frighten the accommodating lady's children. Critics condemned the sequence as degrading at the time, but in the era after Bridesmaids, it seems positively tame.

Two Weeks Notice Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Two Weeks Notice appeared in the same year that its cinematographer, the late László Kovács, was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASC. With a career that included Easy Rider, Ghostbusters, Say Anything and the Bullock-produced Miss Congeniality , Kovács had shot in every style there was. Two Weeks Notice was simply and elegantly lit to accentuate the seductive glamor of George Wade's lifestyle and put a sheen of nostalgia on Lucy Kelson's Coney Island neighborhood. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray does an acceptable, if unremarkable, job of reproducing Kovács' imagery. The picture has good detail, with solid blacks and a color palette that emphasizes cool tones in George's world and warmer values in Lucy's. Although the credits do not indicate that post-production was completed on a digital intermediate (which was not standard at the time), the grain pattern is sufficiently faint to suggest some light degraining, though of the sophisticated variety that leaves detail unreduced. There is no indication that any artificial sharpening was applied as a compensating factor.

The 101-minute film has been squeezed, with extras, onto a BD-25, resulting in an average bitrate of 18.86 Mbps, which is lower than one would like to see but passable (just barely so) for a comedy without major action.

Two Weeks Notice Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The film's opening sequence, in which Lucy and her friends try to stop a wrecking crew from demolishing an old theater, provide a few effective rumbles, but in general the focus of the lossless DTS-HD MA 5.1 track is on dialogue, especially the repartee between Lucy and George. General environmental ambiance can often be heard, but even when the plot takes the film to Coney Island, the sound designers don't risk distracting viewers from the romantic complications by putting the sounds of the amusement park into the surrounds. John Powell has provided the serviceable soundtrack, but the most memorable musical selections are pop tunes like Aretha Franklin's rendition of "Respect", James Brown's "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag", Bachman-Turner Overdrive's "Takin' Care of Business" and Counting Crows' cover of the Joni Mitchell classic, "Big Yellow Taxi".

Two Weeks Notice Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The extras have been ported over from Warner's DVDs released in 2003 and 2004.

• Commentary with Writer/Director Marc Lawrence. Actor Hugh Grant and Actor/Producer Sandra Bullock: This is a chatty and amusing, but not very informative, commentary, in which the director and his two stars trade jokes and a few stories, but mostly mock themselves and each other. Don't expect any insight into the plot or the technical aspects of filming a comedy.



• The Making of Two Weeks Notice (HBO First Look) (480i; 1.33:1; 13:04): A standard-issue promo piece on the making of the film, featuring interviews with the director and principal cast.



• Additional Scenes (480i; 1.85:1; 6:34): There are two scenes, which cannot be selected individually. One is a lengthy wedding scene set at the community center that Lucy is fighting to save. The other is a jogging scene during which Lucy and Meryl share confidences.



• Two Bleeps Notice (480i; 1.85:1; 2:25): A gag reel that consists largely of Bullock and Grant blowing lines and dissolving into laughter.



• Theatrical Trailer (480i; 1.78:1, enhanced; 2:29): The trailer contains many lines that do not appear in the final film, which indicates that even more deleted (or "additional") scenes are available.

Two Weeks Notice Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Hugh Grant must have enjoyed working with director Lawrence, because they proceeded to make two more films together, one successful (Music and Lyrics ), the other a bomb (Did You Hear About the Morgans?). Bullock, while never abandoning comedy, moved steadily toward dramatic roles, leading to her Oscar-winning performance The Blind Side and her Oscar-nominated turn in the recent Gravity. Both actors are probably now too old to bring off a trifle of this nature, which makes this Blu-ray release something of an exercise in nostalgia. Though not among Warner's first rank, it's an acceptable presentation for fans of the two leads. Recommended.