Leaving Las Vegas DVD

• Cat.no: EDV 9020
• Cert: 18
• Running time: 107 minutes
• Year: 1995
• Pressing: 1999
• Region(s): 2 (UK PAL)
• Chapters: 12 plus extras
• Sound: Dolby Digital 2.0 (Dolby Surround)
• Languages: English
• Subtitles: None
• Widescreen: 1.85:1
• 16:9-enhanced: No
• Macrovision: No
• Disc Format: DVD 5
• Price: £15.99
• Extras : Scene index, trailer, featurette
  

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  Director:

  Mike Figgis

  (Internal Affairs, Leaving Las Vegas, Liebestraum, One Night Stand, Stormy Monday)

Producers:

Screenplay:

Music:

Cast:

Ben Sanderson: Nicolas Cage (8MM, Amos and Andrew, Birdy, City of Angels, Con Air, Face/Off, Guarding Tess, Honeymoon In Vegas, It Could Happen To You, Kiss Of Death, Leaving Las Vegas, Moonstruck, Raising Arizona, Red Rock West, The Rock, Rumble Fish, Snake Eyes, Wild At Heart, Wings Of The Apache, Zandalee)
Sera: Elisabeth Shue (Adventures in Babysitting, Back to the Future 2 and 3, Cocktail, Deconstructing Harry, The Karate Kid, Leaving Las Vegas, Palmetto, The Saint, Soapdish)
Yuri: Julian Sands (Aracnophobia, Leaving Las Vegas, A Room with a View, Warlock: The Armageddon)

Leaving Las Vegas is the film which gained Nicolas Cage an Oscar for his role as Ben Sanderson, a man who works in the movie industry, but for whom the pressure of work, life and everything is taking its toll and turning him into an alcoholic of great proportions. Upon losing his job, he sells up and moves to Las Vegas where he plans to drink himself to death.

By chance he bumps into a hooker, Sera (Elisabeth Shue), who has enough problems of her own from her working life as well as her nasty pimp Yuri (Julian Sands), but then who’s ever heard of a nice pimp? A relationship develops between the pair, but it’s doomed to fail since they have an understanding: he won’t ask her to give up her job and she won’t ask him to stop drinking, but they’re both not at all easy to give up.

When I first learned of this film’s premise it didn’t have a lot of interest for me and I’m not much of a fan of Ms. Shue, but when I first saw it on BBC2 last year it was a perfect example of a time when you expect nothing from a film but it delivers everything. Cage’s performance is a tour-de-force throughout its entirity, the jazz score is unsurpassable and the locations around Vegas make for stunning viewing.

The picture is framed in the original widescreen ratio of 1.85:1 and is free of artifacts but the print has a number of dropouts and sadly is not anamorphic, unlike the Region 1 DVD which gets an anamorphic widescreen version on top of a 4:3 open-matte option. The average bitrate is a middling 5.9Mb/s, briefly peaking over 7Mb/s.

Again, the sound is disappointly Dolby Prologic, not Dolby Digital 5.1 like the American release. It’s not an action-packed epic, obviously, but the excellent soft, sombre tunes from the likes of Sting (performing Angel Eyes, It’s a Lonesome Old Town and My One and Only Love) and Michael McDonald (Lonely Teardrops) could have come across that much better.

Extras : Chapters : Like a lot of their recent discs, 12 chapters again and again EiV have provided approximate times for where the chapter breaks occur. This time they’re only an hour ahead, but seem to have spawned timings down to 1/100ths of a second !?! Who’s putting this stuff together?

Languages & Subtitles : English only in Dolby Surround but no subtitles, despite what the back cover states.

Trailer and featurette : The original theatrical trailer is included as well as a standard 5-minute made-for-TV featurette which combines clips from the film with chat from the cast and crew, but doesn’t particularly go beyond that.

Menu : The main menu is silent and static with only basic options on view and nothing to shout about.