Director
Paul Thomas Anderson

Cast
Marky Mark,
Julian Moore,
Burt Reynolds,
Heather Graham,
John C. Reilly,
Don Cheadle,
William H. Macy

Music
Michael Penn

When DVD was conceived the porn industry must have been all smiles (and NOT entirely for the reason you think..dirty dirty peoples :) and it wouldn't surprise me if they had a hand on, err I mean 'hand in' the idea of multi-angle playback.
But of course, "I hear" there is more to Porn than just hard core sex, and Boogie Nights takes us back to the 70's to show us a day in the life of an up and coming porn star (no pun intended...honest)

Eddie/Dirk Diggler (Mark Wahlberg) is you "more than average" 17 year old who wants to be famous.  While working as a bus boy at a happening disco, Adult Movie Producer Jack Horner (Burt Reynolds) sees what Eddie has to offer (all 13 inches of it!!) and persuades the young Eddie to star in some of his movies.  
Being rather young and very naive, Eddie's leading lady Amber Waves (Julian Moore) helps him break into the life of a porn star, but this quickly leads Eddie down a path of hard sex and hard drugs. 

In the tradition of Pulp Fiction (don't you just hate films advertised that way) Boogie Nights is a long and detailed look at life in the Porn industry, and is thankfully full of enriching characters that you do actually care for.   The only difference between Pulp & Boogie is the substitution of violence for sex. 

While the subject matter may not be for all tastes, it's not simply a glorification of sexual acts, but more your behind the scenes look at what goes into a Porn, and the end result is rather clinical in nature, not titillating.

With a running time of a whopping 2hours and 30 minutes it's a long haul, but tells a very good tale none the less/

So How Does This Transfer Hold Up??

VIDEO
Presented in it's original aspect ratio of 2.35:1 this Anamorphic Widescreen transfer has been rather well captured for DVD.  With something of a documentary feel to the picture, quality comes and goes, to a small degree, with some shots being incredibly well detailed, while others are left with a soft focus and a lack of definition.  It's a problem that's occurred during production and not that of the encoding, but such problems do make it harder on the poor old DVD. 
While this may be so, we are still treated to picture that is very vibrant and captures that 70's feel extremely well. Even with such image richness there is no sign of chromo noise or any other video nasty to deter away from this [more often than not] very nice looking transfer.
This DVD has been spread over 2 layers of an RSDL DVD and the well placed layer change occurs at 59:00 (ch 26 to 27 on a natural Fade to Black)

AUDIO
Although Boogie was mixed as a 5.1 soundtrack, it's kinda been cheated somewhat.  A huge amount of the music is simply stereo based, so it's only ever coming out of your front left and right speakers (though there was a tiny bit coming from the surrounds now and then).  Granted it sounds very good, but a bit of a remix to create more ambience would have been nice.  In the Dolby 2.0 mix, you'll notice that the music looses a lot of it's spaciousness as the centre channel locks onto a fair bit of the information, but still sounds pretty good. 
Unlike too many New Line films this one has a very good ADR mix, with always clearly spoken dialogue actually matching the onscreen speaking. 
TRIVIA : During the end credits starting at about 1:48:00 the music fades off and you're left with pretty much incomprehensible whispering/mumbling from Eddie..but it's pretty obvious what's going on :-).

EXTRAS
Now a nice amount of extras have been included on this DVD, the best being the running commentary with Director Paul T Anderson.  For 2 1/2 hours he is all action stations offering some great insight into the making of this film (in between the excessive amount of swearing.....boy can he let fly with some foul language)

There's also a theatrical trailer, cast and crew bios/Filmographies(for some reason there's no bios on Julian Moore and Heather Graham, just Filmographies for these 2).  Cast and Crew Interviews (all anamorphic Widescreen), 22 minutes of very nice looking [true anamorphic Widescreen]  Deleted Scenes (that come with a running commentary...a MUST for all deleted scenes IMO), and at the last minute the Dolby Digital RAIN trailer was thrown on for good measure
The main menu is also backed with very very corny carnival music (gotta love it).  I did find the sub menus a little annoying as it's hard to tell what it selected in some cases with a lack of consistency for button colours. (just a minor niggle).

Well after a very very long delay Boogie Nights has hit region 4 DVD from Roadshow, and is another very worthy DVD indeed.

Review Equipment
TV: Pioneer SD-T50W1 (16:9 RPTV)
DVD: Pioneer DV717  (using RGB outputs)
Receiver: Marantz SR870 & Sony SDP-EP9ES
Speakers:-
     Fronts: B&W 602
     Centre: B&W CDMC-SE
     Rears: Jamo Magic 14
     Subby: M&K V125 

- Reviewed 18th March 2000