Now this is a drawcard chick flick if ever I saw one! The combination of Meg Ryan, Lisa Kudrow, Diane Keaton and the cheeky Walter Mathau is fantastic. This works marvellously through every minute.

Even after the first five minutes the significance of the title "Hanging Up" becomes evident. Eve is battling to look after her ageing father who has suffered a stroke and is constantly on the phone, be it her mobile or home phone it never seems to stop ringing.

Eve is the middle sister of the three and she seems to cope a lot better with her life and her fathers, as her both her sisters are so self indulged that they seem to think he looks after himself.

The film is constantly bringing flashbacks of their life as children together and growing up with their father as their main parent. Eventually though Eve comes to realise that she needs to disconnect from everyone and stop running messages for everyone and supporting everyone but herself.

The ending of course is extremely predictable but sad nonetheless. I won’t expand too much more on the film, as it seems to be really some thing you should experience, not read about before you see it.

So how does the transfer hold up?

...

VIDEO
I am really quite disappointed in this anamorphic wide screen transfer. I can’t pinpoint any one factor that takes down the quality of the transfer. It seems to be a combination of a lot of minor faults rather than anything glaringly obvious.

The transfer is somewhat dull and lifeless; while it is still relatively sharp it does lack some lushness to really make it stand out.

Shadow detail is great but seems that this would have been lost had there been an improvement in contrast and some good deep blacks included in the colour palette. Which brings me to a substandard colour scheme as well. I found the colours to somewhat muted, which compromised some of the realistic feeling that could have been gained with some increase in contrast and saturation.

I am pleased to say though that there is no aliasing, film artefacts or MPEG artefacts to complain about. J

...

AUDIO
The Dolby 5.1 soundtrack sounds surprisingly like a 2.0 mix! Funny that. It’s not that bad, I guess there isn’t much room to make it anything spectacular anyway. The audio track is very heavy with dialogue and therefore the few little surround effects really don’t make this a stand out audio transfer in itself.

There is little use of the surrounds and basically no use of the base channel at all.

The Musical score from David Hirschfelder (shine) is a heavily Piano based composition with a couple of songs thrown in which are from some pretty recent films. (see if you can pick them). Really the score has a nice flow to it but it is also lacking some lustre, which is eagerly sought in the video transfer as well.

EXTRAS

Dolby City Trailer (sweeeeet)

Theatrical Trailer

Cast and Crew Bio’s

Making of Featurette: A nice little feature of Diane Keaton in directing action and some corny footage of the Ephron sisters to boot,.

Isolated Musical Score: Are you one of those people who like having music to go to sleep with? If so, enjoy this!

Deleted Scene: An interesting scene which obviously wasn’t an improvement on the film overall.

Outtakes: Some great bits and pieces here, Meg Ryan is hilarious as usual.

In all I really did enjoy the film for it’s story and not the transfer. Best thing I’ve learned about this film is that when the 3 girls find their father in bed the reaction on their faces when they open the door was actually captured so well because Walter Mathau was naked. We don’t see that of course but that’s how they got the best expressions!

Danish Finnish

Review Equipment
TV: GE 68cm (16:9 selectable)
DVD: Samsung DVD909 (via S-Video)
Receiver: Yamaha DTS RX-V595a (Sweeeeet)
Speakers:-
Fronts: Wharfdale Diamond R6 (on a pair of custom made stands you'd KILL for)
Centre: Venturi
Rears: Sony bookshelf

- Reviewed 21st November 2000

* Haning Up  jpeg files for internet promotion use only. Copyright© exists on all aspects of these files by Columbia Tristar Home Video