The Rebound Blu-ray Review

Posted February 21st, 2012 by Brandon A. DuHamel

The Rebound Blu ray Review photo

Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
Resolution: 1080p/24 (23.976Hz)
Audio Codec: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz/24-bit)
Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
Region: A (Region-Locked)
Rating: R
Discs: 1 (1 x Blu-ray)
Run time: 95 Mins.
Studio: 20th Century Fox
Blu-ray Release Date: February 7, 2012
List Price: $29.99

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Overall

The Film

Video Quality

Audio Quality

Supplemental Materials

Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures

(All Blu-rayDefinition.com screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG at 100% quality setting and are meant as a general representation of the content. They do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)

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The Film

Okay, I get it, The Rebound is an attempt at turning the tables and scoring one for “grrrl power,” after all the older man/younger woman romances we’ve had to endure on the big screen over the years. The problem is that writer/directer Bart Freundlich’s rom-com is awfully uninventive, stilted, unromantic, and hardly even funny. Stars Catherine Zeta-Jones (“Sandy”) and Justin Bartha (“Aram Finklestein”) are left to lumber through the most incoherent and cumbersome script and plot I have come across in a romantic comedy in a long time.

The story revolves around recently separated mother of two Sandy who leaves her home in suburbia to move into an apartment in Manhattan. There she meets Aram, the young twenty-four-year-old coffee chop worker who is down on romance after his hot French wife dumped him for her faux “brother.” It seems she was using him just to get a green card. Aram’s listless and without purpose, drifting from one job interview to the next. He becomes Sandy’s nanny and, wammo, sparks fly! Well, you get the gist.

Now for the bad stuff. The Rebound, right from the start is laden with stereotypes and jokes that are out of place and in poor taste. “Dad says the city is where minorities and venture capitalists live” one of Sandy’s kids tell her as they are moving into their place. In Aram’s job interview for a womens’ center the black interviewer asks him if his name is Jewish – like that would even be allowed. Then she proceeds to ask what qualifies him for the job. “I used to buy tampons for my mother” is his response. Yeah, it’s that bad. Does this kind of stuff really need to be in a rom-com? Was Freundlich trying to be edgy or did he just have a bad case of writer’s block when he put this thing together?

In the end, The Rebound is an awful experience. I just kept wishing I could stop the disc before the film even ended, it was a real out of body experience. Stay away.

Video Quality

It’s amazing how a film so bad can look so good on Blu-ray. Shot on Super 35mm film, The Rebound is given a 2.35:1 framed AVC/MPEG-4 encodement that looks very strong with vibrant colors, sharp detail and a super-fine layer of grain. There isn’t much in the way of strong lighting effects and CG to really show off a display, but for the material, this is high quality.

Audio Quality

The audio, a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 (48kHz/24-bit) soundtrack is straightforward. Mostly front-heavy and dialogue driven, there is a low level of atmospherics in the surround channels and very little low frequency extension. Dialogue is clean with no audible clipping.

Supplemental Materials