Starring:	Kevin Spacey	132min
	Russell Crowe
	Guy Pearce	1997
	Kim Basinger
	Danny DeVito
		Cop
Screenplay:	Brian Hegeland & Curtis Hanson	thriller
Director:	Curtis Hanson	Colour

Region	2	Studio:	Warner Brothers
Format	Single Sided, Dual Layer	Subtitles	English
			English / Italian Closed Captioned
Aspect ratio	2.35:1		French / Dutch
			Spanish / Portugese
Anamorphic	Yes		Italian / Arabic
Soundtracks	Dolby Digital 5.1	Extra Features	"Off the record" - 20min docco
	French Dolby Digital 5.1		"Photo Pitch" - 8min docco
	Italian Dolby Digital 5.1		Interactive map tour
			Extensive Production Notes
Case type	Cardboard		5.1 music only soundtrack
			Theatrical & TV trailers
			Music & Animated Menus

The DVD * * * * *		The Movie * * * *
With the film itself weighed down by countless awards, Warner have seen fit to bestow L.A. Confidential with the full Special Edition treatment. From the moment the disc goes in, Press Photographer light bulbs flash, and a newspaper front page corkscrews out into the screen, revealing the disc menu. And all the while, 50's Big Band music leaps out of your speakers. Ladies and Gentlemen, we're off. You could spend all day just trawling through the extras. Best of the bunch is a (for once) decent promotional documentary, where, among other contributors, novelist James Ellroy expresses his a amazement that his dark novel was ever adapted into a film. "It was a book for all the family", he explains, "if your f**king family happens to be the MASON family". In another docco, Photo Pitch, co-writer/director Hanson talks us through the unusual way he pitched the movie to the big guns, by way of seventeen still shots he'd collected together which represented the 50's LA world he wanted to create. Meanwhile, the gimmicky but cute interactive map tour shows a stylized map of Los Angeles - click on a location, and you jump to the part of the film where the location was used, accompanied by Hanson's comments. There's much more to the disc besides, including the complete film, as it turned out. The picture quality is absolutely superb - even the closest visual inspection would pass muster next to a professional video format. The overall image is just a teensy bit softer than some discs, but this more than likely due to other titles looking "artificially" sharp. No, Dante Spinotti's amazing lighting can be appreciated here in all its glory, clearly benefiting from the extra bitspace that a dual layer disc gives. The layer change, incidentally, is brilliantly placed mid way through a quiet close-up. You really have to be concentrating to notice it. The sound is more hit and miss however, and suffers from some rather hack ADR work (ADR being the process of replacing location sound with the actor's voice in a sound studio later). In many scenes, it sounds distractingly artificial, yet amazingly the film was nominated for a sound Oscar. That said, the climactic sequence is as good an example of multi-channel sound and dynamic range as you'll ever hear. This once again shows Warner Brother leading the pack. I'm still not at all convinced that the movie is anything like the classic many are hailing it, with fundamental character contrivances weakening the powerful drama. But even allowing for that, this remains a disc that should be in just about everyone's collection.		Every once in a while comes a thriller so densely plotted that you have to grab hold of both arm rests, sit forward and concentrate just to keep up. The last one was the Usual Suspects - this time it's L.A. Confidential. Not about any old criminals this time, L.A. Confidential concerns corruption in the 1950's LAPD - obviously it's the 50's, for such things couldn't possibly happen now. Anyhoot, the film follows a great number of incidents and threads, but before long comes the film's centrepiece - a downtown cafe slaughter, where an off duty cop is blown away, amongst many other diners. Ambitious squeaky clean Pearce sows the case up to everyone but his self's satisfaction, and when he starts to dig a little deeper, the real trouble begins. This is a really well told tale by co-writer/director Hanson from the blockbusting novel. The male leads are all superb, but Basinger, as a Hollywood star-lookalike hooker, somehow fails to light the fires that she should. In fact, her character and associated shenanigans are uniformly the weak link in the chain, and a few plot turns are, frankly, not credible. Be that as it may, there is enough else here to sink your teeth into, and the film will surely put ex-Neighbour Pearce and especially Russell Crowe on the map. Just try to hold on and keep up...