One of the most satisfying films of 1995, Barry Sonnenfeld’s comic gangster flick 'Get Shorty' is sort of like 'The Player' meets 'Married to the Mob'.
John Travolta stars as Chili Palmer, a Miami shylock who goes to Tinsletown to collect on a debt, and gets caught up in the glamour and glitz of moviemaking. Chili’s love for the cinema makes him a natural at being a movie producer, and in the film’s most sardonic twist, he discovers that the brute methods the mob employs are not too different than the cutthroat, backstabbing tactics rampant in Hollywood.
Gene Hackman, Rene Russo, Danny DeVito, Delroy Lindo and Dennis Farina round out the superb cast, and, like any good movie about Hollywood should, there are a number of star cameos sprinkled throughout.
The THX-produced laserdisc version, from MGM/UA Home Video, is a wonderful collectible. Like the recent 'GoldenEye' disc, MGM’s 'Get Shorty' is a "special edition" with mild supplementaries, but at the standard cost of a movie-only edition. The film is letterboxed for its theatrical ratio of 1.85:1 and even though the masking merely blocks out the top and bottom of the full-screen TV image (revealing absolutely nothing extra on the sides of the frame), it’s clear that Sonnenfeld and cinematographer Don Peterman carefully composed each shot for the 1.85:1 ratio. The framing is dead-on perfect throughout.
The picture and sound are both top-notch (though, despite the disc’s Dolby Digital AC-3 encoding, this is not the sort of "aural fireworks" movie one immediately thinks of as a demo disc; mostly, only the jazzy musical score makes use of the stereo and surround boosts).
Following the film, MGM has included the great theatrical trailer and a funny deleted scene (with a cameo by Ben Stiller) that shows Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman) at work on a movie set; this cut scene is repeatedly alluded to in the trailer. There’s also a running scene-specific audio commentary track by director Sonnenfeld on analog track 1. It takes a while to get used to Sonnenfeld’s nasal, nerdy speech, but once you do, the director offers up a fascinating, often-hysterical narrative of behind-the-scenes tidbits and tales of the production. Sonnenfeld’s sometimes candid remarks are initially a bit startling, but it’s refreshing to hear a filmmaker just tell it like it is. It’s a breezy, intoxicatingly amusing commentary that, unlike most audio essays, holds up well to repeated listenings.
VITAL STATISTICS: MGM/UA Home Video; 2 sides; CLV; Widescreen (1.85:1); THX; Stereo Surround; Dolby Digital AC-3; Chapter stops; Closed captioned; $34.95.
S. Damien Segal.
This review is copyright, and may not be reproduced without the written consent of the author.
