Date Night
Steve Carell, Tina Fey
Two parts to this review: 1) the movie itself, 2) CinemaNow - which is how we watched it.
Date Night is easily one of the funniest films my wife and I have had the pleasure of watching in a long time! Carell and Fey work incredibly well together and were completely believable as a married couple. The story is entertaining and manages to draw you in as it careens out of control without ever getting outlandish. The car chase (?) sequence is high on my list, close to the top of it even, of movie hilarity!
Ironically, I’m not sure this film would go over well with people who’ve just started dating. Regardless, if you’re looking for a great comedy, this should definitely be in your rental queue!
4.5/5 stars
As for CinemaNow, our blu-ray player received an update yesterday that added the service to our viewing options aaaand it came with a $5 coupon/gift certificate… so why not try it, right?
We chose to rent Date Night in HD, which was $4.99 (standard definition was a dollar cheaper) and sat back hoping for the best. It worked, but not without some hiccups.
The HD stream is only stereo, I’m guessing due to bandwidth concerns. Even so, we weren’t even a minute in when the audio fell out of sync with the video. I had to stop/restart the movie twice to correct that.
Irritating.
Then, about halfway through, the system paused the film and told us there was some network congestion and it was switching us to the Standard def version until such time as it cleared up. Just as well since the HD stream seemed to be, uhh, s-t-r-e-t-c-h-e-d, for lack of a better way to describe it. If you’ve ever watched one of the old Spaghetti Westerns and their “PanaVision”, you understand what I’m talking about. If not, think of a letterboxed movie and then stretch the top & bottom to fill your screen. Or go play with some silly putty and the Sunday comics. Anyway, the SD version looked nearly as good and had NO playback issues with either the audio or video. Oh, and the system did eventually change us back to the HD stream - during the end credits!
If you have access to CinemaNow and haven’t used it, see if you can scrounge up a coupon. It works well enough and they seem to have a fairly large selection. But I would recommend sticking with the standard definition version to save you some cash and a headache.
