That Thing You Do
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Cast: Tom Everett Scott, Tom Hanks, Liv Tyler
Extras: Featurette, Music Videos, Trailers
Rating:
Following the funny antics of a fictional one-trick pony band through their high and the following lows, ’That Thing You Do’ is an entertaining film that takes us back in time to the 60s where shaking hips and 5 inch-long hair were considered offensive and lewd. The film was Tom Hanks’ feature film directorial debut – although he had directed some TV productions previously – and once again, he knows how to shine. The film is an exuberant mix of comedy and drama, placed in a setting and time period that is engaging and colorful, and filled with groovy music.
’That Thing You Do’ is presented in its original 1.85:1 widescreen aspect ratio on this DVD in a transfer that is enhanced for 16×9 television sets. The transfer is clean and without defects and the image shows a good level of detail. However at times the image appears a bit soft, which is a bit surprising given the film’s relatively young age. Colors are strong and faithfully reproduced, creating natural looking flesh tones and vibrant settings. Blacks are deep and never lose detail, producing an image that is nicely contrasted and offers plenty of visual depth. The compression is free of compression artifacts, creating a very pleasing presentation.
The DVD offers the movie’s soundtrack in a good 5.0 surround presentation. It makes good use of the surrounds, creating an enveloping sound stage, but as a whole the soundtrack is not nearly as aggressive as you may expect. A natural frequency response with nicely integrated dialogues makes the movie enjoyable and always understandable, while the dynamic range of the track creates a good bed for the music in the film.
The disc contains a few interesting bonus feature, such as trailers and teasers, as well as two music videos of songs from the film. A short promotional featurette further elaborates on the production of the film, remains very shallow though without supplying any real information of value – other than selling points to watch the film, that is.
