The Movie: I believe this movie made it into my netflix queue because I had heard about Jack Nicholson's famous rant about substitutions in a roadside diner being in this film. As it turned out, that rant wasn't nearly as gripping or as exciting as I thought it was going to be. Oh well.

Five Easy Pieces is about a man who was an accomplished concert pianist from a family of musicians but got sick of all the fakery surrounding his family's high-society lifestyle and left town to go do some menial labor as an oil worker. After being gone for quite some time, he returns home to visit his ailing father, finding that things haven't changed all that much in the time he's been gone.

I can't say I particularly enjoyed this film. Perhaps part of the reason is that a lot of it is a type of social commentary, making the same observations about certain aspects about people and society that I had already made on my own. Or maybe it was just the fact that I didn't really find any characters that I could relate to on a personal level. Whatever the reason... it just didn't strike me as being as great of a masterpiece as so many others feel it is. Of course that's not to say that I hated the film or anything like that.

It certainly has its moments, but maybe I was just expecting too much?

The DVD: This is a double-sided disc with an anamorphic video transfer on one side, and what appears to me to be an unmatted full frame 4:3 transfer on the other. In either case, the video exhibited quite a bit of grain, a murkiness and lack of contrast all consistent with this era of film stock. It was otherwise clean though it suffered from a bit of softness in the image probably resulting from the low-ish bitrate.

Audio was similarly murky and lacking in dynamic range, again, consistent with the era of film. The only special feature to speak of here is a trailer for another Nicholson film, As Good As It Gets.