October 1999

Shakespeare in Love
Reviewed by Doug Blackburn
DVD Format

Overall Enjoyment:
Picture Quality:
Sound Quality:
Packaged Extras:

Starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Joseph Fiennes, Ben Affleck, Judi Dench, Geoffrey Rush

Directed by John Madden

Theatrical Release: 1998
DVD Release: 1999
Dolby Digital 5.1
Widescreen (Anamorphic)

Playwright is blocked. Playwright must be in love to write otherwise Romeo would have been a pirate. Playwright’s destiny places him in the path of a wannabe-thespian with overly and overtly romantic notions about playwrights and poets. Our playwright also fancies himself a poet. The game is afoot. Wannabe-thespian is smitten. Playwright can write again and together they give birth to a bouncing baby play. The thespian, who just happens to have been promised by the Queen (not a queen, THE Queen) to an indebted Lord looking for a fortune-by-marriage to prop his lifestyle back up to where he is accustomed, is just right for one of the male parts. She dons an entirely unconvincing moustache and lower lip patch and successfully infiltrates the cast of the playwright’s new play. Street urchin views playwright and actor/maiden doing it back stage and reports the misdeed to the improper authorities. Scandal eventually arises as thespianism among wimmin folk in those days was, oh I don’t know, a violation of the MAofLE/CIO (labor union to the max) work rules or something. Everyone loves the wannabe-thespian in the play but she is nevertheless banned from future thespianic adventures.

So goes the plot of the 1998 Academy Award Winner Shakespeare in Love. It was seven times a winner actually--Best Picture and Best Actress along with five other awards. Was the movie really that good? I don’t think so. I mean there wasn’t anything wrong with it really, but the performances, other than the stuttering thespian who was magnificent, were merely perfectly good ones, but not award-worthy ones. No one who is anything less than an idiot would mistake Gwyneth Paltrow in anti-drag for anything other than Gwyneth in anti-drag. It was just too obvious and made a contrived story seem even more so. I just can’t do back flips over this movie. I love a period-piece as much as the next person, but this was merely a good one and not a great one.

The DVD just happens to have as stunning a video transfer as I’ve ever seen. The detail, the richness of colors with no over-saturation, and the cleanness of the images are all exemplary. I noticed some video artifacts when playing this disc on the CAL CL-25 player, but the artifacts were not apparent when the same scenes were played on the DVD-ROM drive. This was also the first time that I’ve noticed this type of artifact. In scene twenty-two, Gwyneth is seated in front of an out-of-focus tapestry. At two places in this scene when the camera is focused on Gwyneth, her face seems to flatten into the background while the outline of her face shimmers slightly. However, this never lasted more than three seconds. You must also keep in mind that it was not visible in the computer DVD-ROM player. I am beginning to believe that many, if not most, artifacts we see while watching DVD movies are player related and not necessarily disc related. Not that there are no disc related problems, but it’s just that there may be fewer than I have previously assumed. Unfortunately, I don’t have 100 different models of DVD players to test the DVD’s so we could determine which ones do and which ones do not produce artifacts. However, I can tell you this--if you are seeing artifacts (there are four or five different kinds) frequently, (e.g. some artifacts in every movie), your DVD player isn’t keeping up with the disc. I can watch ten movies and see noticeable artifacts in maybe one.Certainly there are many minor artifacts that you have to sit unnaturally close to the screen to see, but let’s just leave those for the nitpickers.

Sound-wise, this is a fairly decent effort. While nothing stunning, it is perfectly in keeping with the locations. Several scenes in the Gwyneth-loaded Romeo and Juliet stage production (a play within a movie, ho hah!) have some very convincing sonics that make a pretty good case for these scenes being the real deal. But there was nothing really special about the soundtrack. Like the movie the sound is a fine, but not a great effort. Please don’t mistake this for criticism of the effort. There is nothing wrong with the sound and some details are very nicely done, but it just isn’t special sound-wise. You aren’t likely to see this disc at shows being used for demos of sound systems… video display demos, yes; the image quality is just wonderful.

If Shakespeare in Love is merely a good movie and not a great one, then the DVD package should have lots of extras in order to entice us to buy, no? In this case the answer is also NO!. We get nothing but the theatrical trailer. What a giant rip! If I close my eyes and think really hard, I can hear the commentary tracks from at least three people, deleted scenes and games like "Dress Gwyneth In Anti-Drag" and "Shakespeare Sonnet Auto-Writer" games being prepped for the "real" version of Shakespeare in Love. The coming version will be the "definitive" version, but it won’t appear for another 9 to 18 months, Shakespeare In Love – The Collector’s Edition.

All in all with this DVD release we have a fairly good movie in a very plain wrapper.Careful shopping can score the DVD for less than $20 and there will always be a relatively strong sell-through market for any Academy Award winner. But this DVD’s contents could be better and I’ll bet Gwyneth’s fake facial hair against tomorrow’s rising sun that there will inevitably be a Collector’s Edition to relieve the gotta-have-it-all crowd.

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