Media

Movie Renter's Guide - October, 2009

"The Girl Next Door" (Blu-ray) - Reviewed by Chris Heinonen

Synopsis

Matthew Kidman (Emile Hirsch) is a high school senior who's just about to graduate and move onto college who thinks he's led a fairly boring high school life. His perspective on this changes when a new girl, Danielle (Elisha Cuthbert) moves in next door he finally starts to experience new things. Of course, when his friends discover that she's actually a porn star, things start to move out of control more quickly than he would like.

 

Commentary

I'll admit that I'm outside of the age group now that a teen comedy like this is targeted towards, but there are many teen comedies that I still enjoy today. Unfortunately, this won't be joining the ranks of those movies as it fell flat for me. Most of the humor just wasn't that funny to me, and I didn't really care much about any of the characters. I did somewhat enjoy Timothy Olyphant's performance, but I usually enjoy it when he shows up in a film and it had a very nice soundtrack.

Technical

Unfortunately from the time you see the 20th Century Fox logo, you can tell that not much time or effort was spent on this video transfer. The image is very soft, to the point that you almost feel that it looks like a very nice upconverted DVD sometimes. The soundtrack is also lacking, with very little use of the surround channels at all except for a few times when songs are played back through them. There were plenty of scenes that could have benefited from more aggressive use of the surrounds to bring you more into the movie.

Extras

The Blu-ray features a full length directors commentary with occasional comments from Emile Hirsch and Elisha Cuthbert, some deleted scenes and a gag reel, as well as the standard making-of featurette. All of the extras are presented in SD and not in HD.