6.1 | / 10 |
Users | 0.0 | |
Reviewer | 2.5 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
An extremely rare bottle of wine (bottled during the appearance of the Great Comet of 1811) is discovered. Margaret Harwood is sent to retrieve it so it can be sold at auction. Oliver Plexico is assigned as her travel guide/bodyguard for the trip. However, other people desperately want the bottle and will stop at nothing to get it. A simple little trip becomes an international chase.
Starring: Penelope Ann Miller, Tim Daly, Louis Jourdan, Art Malik, Ian RichardsonAdventure | Insignificant |
Romance | Insignificant |
Action | Insignificant |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 2.35:1
Original aspect ratio: 2.35:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0
English SDH
Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A (C untested)
Movie | 1.5 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 3.5 | |
Extras | 0.0 | |
Overall | 2.5 |
Utterly destroyed by critics (it still holds a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) and a massive bomb at the box office, director Peter Yates delivered a veritable stinker of a romantic adventure that has, by and large, disappeared from the cultural conscious. And good riddance. Tiresome, grating and unfunny, it longs to be Romancing the Stone but burns out and crashes into the sea somewhere over the Atlantic. Tim Daly and Penelope Ann Miller give it their all, poor kids, but Daly's mustache is about the only thing you'll remember about their brief on-screen fling. (Quoth Daly: "I thought [my mustache] was kind of dope.") Even the film's previews were atrocious, which writer William Goldman attributed to, seriously, the audience's lack of enthusiasm for red wine. Sigh. Perhaps loading audiences up with red wine would improve matters, because drunk and teetering is about the only state of being that could allow one to enjoy such a maligned, exhausting misadventure in antiquing.
There is a saving grace to the Blu-ray release of Year of the Comet, though: its excellent 1080p/AVC-encoded video transfer, which looks as if whoever loves the 1992 dud got himself hired remastering the film for high definition. Colors are warm, rich and altogether lovely, with exceedingly well-saturated skintones that only grow reddish when stress rises or the heat is on. Black levels are deep and satisfying, contrast is dialed in with vivid precision, and detail? Detail delivers thanks to ever-so-sharp edge definition (largely free of any artificial nonsense like halos) and fine textures are so exacting that they swim to tangible life at times. Close-ups are especially striking, though wider establishing shots are softer (par for the course in the early '90s). Still, needles have never looked so dangerous. And silly. But I digress. Blocking, banding... all MIA. The only thing that spoils the proceedings is slight but frequent print marks and truly awful looking composited-fx shots. (Daly on a cliff near film's end fares very poorly in high definition.) Year of the Comet couldn't feasibly look any better unless it came to 4K. And best not hold your breath for that one.
Alas, Year of the Comet sports little more than a solid DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix. It's decidedly decent, with no issues to report. ADR is a bit of a nuisance, but again... 1992. Otherwise dialogue is clean and clear, prioritization is quite good, and music doesn't interfere with the soundscape. Which is rather ordinary, but oh well. Nothing more stands out here. Move along.
Nothing to report.
How Year of the Comet survived long enough to find its way to Blu-ray is beyond me. Most likely an offloading of films courtesy of New Line, MGM or another studio that owned the rights and the master. It's a quarter-hearted bomb that barely made it out of the early '90s. Skip, skip, skip. That said, if you insist on proceeding, Sandpiper's Blu-ray could certainly be much worse. With a fantastic video presentation, there is something here to love. Everything else ranges from solid (its DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mix) to groan-worthy (its barebones supplemental package).
(Still not reliable for this title)
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