Body Heat (Blu-ray Review)

December 1st, 2008 Blu-ray-au Posted in Blu-ray Movie Reviews | Comments Off

Body Heat (Blu-ray Review)

“You shouldn’t wear a body like that”

Lawrence Kasdan?s Body Heat is a neo-noir masterpiece in my opinion. It is not a film the MTV crowd will love, as much like Mirrormask, its story is told in a slow, sensuous way, where layers and layers of plot are revealed and twisted in a slow purposeful way. This movie is a fallback to the days of the 40?s and 50?s when film noir use to fill the screens at the local cinema, and is favorably compared to Billy Wilders 1944 classic ?Double Indemnity?. It actually transcends it by adding…

Video

Body Heat brings its highly stylish appearance to the Bluray format in the form of a 1080p/VC-1 encode framed at a 1:85:1 aspect ratio. One must understand the film noir style of filmmaking to honestly evaluate the picture quality of this film, as I have mentioned it is highly stylized and designed to create a certain mood. First, the print master looks in great condition, as I only saw one instance of a pop during the entire film. There were no speckles, spurious image noise, dirt or scratch…

Audio

Body Heat comes in two audio flavors, a 5.1 Dolby TrueHD encode, and a lossy 5.1 Dolby Digital encoded at a constant bit rate of 640kbps. Once again, this movie is about the dialog and images, so there is no directional panning of effects to speak of. However, I found dialog always clean, clear, and easy to understand. John Barry?s jazzy sax laced film score is very well recorded, and fits the mood of the film exceptionally well. While there is no panning of effects, some effects are expertl…

Supplements

The same extras you find on the 2006 Collectors Edition DVD are found on this disc as well. All extras are presented in standard definition video.


Lifted Scenes (9 minutes) are scenes that ended up on the cutting room floor to help maintain the pacing of the film. They are titled as “In the Backseat,” “Stewardess,” “Practice Run,” “First Murder Attempt” and “After the Attempt.”


Body Heat: The Plan (17 minutes) This featurette covers the casting of the fi…

Final Words

As a lover of film classics and very good film noir, this movie is a fine example of both. While more contemporary flavored than previous film noir productions of the 40?s and 50?s (hence the neo-noir distinction), Body Heat is more accessible and fresh, if not more in your face than previous offerings of this genre. This movie is powerful, well written, full of twists and turns, and has a surprising ending to boot. It features outstanding performances from its lead characters, which is essent……

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