Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Don Juan Demarco

This is topic Don Juan Demarco in forum The Afterlife at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Evans A Criswell (Member # 381) on 11-16-2003, 10:01 AM:

I had never heard of this movie until this past Friday night when one of my friends wanted to come over and watch a movie and said he wanted to see it again. I did some quick research and found that it has Johnny Depp in it, so naturally I wanted to see it. (Remember, amazingly, I'd not heard of Johnny Depp until "Pirates of the Caribbean").

It was a 1995 movie and I really enjoyed it. Johnny Depp is excellent at playing eccentric characters and he did a great job of playing the mental institution patient who thought he was Don Juan. He's so beautiful, sincere, and mysterious at the same time in playing that role. Dr. Jack Mickler [Marlon Brando] is a psychiatrist who gets "Don Juan" as his patient 10 days before he retires. I don't want to give away much for people who haven't seen this one.

I highly recommend it, especially if you're a Johnny Depp fan.

The transfer could have been a lot better. This appears to be a made-for-Laserdisc transfer run through an MPEG2 coder. Back in 1995, transfers had different objectives -- like making movies look as sharp as possible on interlaced TVs. Taking such a transfer and encoding it for DVD results in a transfer with artifacts on edges and titles. The transfer was, of course, non-anamorphic, wasting a third of the possible resolution of the DVD. This DVD was made before studios had committed themselves to high-quality work for DVD and still were in the "let's get some stuff out there quickly" mode. The transfer flaws and the lack of anamorphic encoding are very obvious on a 57 inch progressive-scan TV.