- Aspect Ratio: 2.35:1
- Video Codec: AVC/MPEG-4
- Resolution: 1080p/24
- Audio Codec: English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1, English LPCM 2.0
- Subtitles: English SDH, Spanish
- Region: A (Region-Locked)
- Rating: PG-13
- Run Time: 96 Mins.
- Discs: 1 (1 x Blu-ray)
- Studio: IFC Films/MPI Media Group
- Blu-ray Release Date: November 1, 2011
- List Price: $29.98
[amazon-product]B00561BNFO[/amazon-product]
BestBuy.com:
Purchase An Invisible Sign on Blu-ray at CD Universe
Shop for more Blu-ray titles at Amazon.com
Overall
[Rating:2/5]
The Film
[Rating:2/5]
Video Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:3/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0/5]
Click thumbnails for high-resolution 1920X1080p screen captures
(Screen captures are lightly compressed with lossy JPEG thus are meant as a general representation of the content and do not fully reveal the capabilities of the Blu-ray format)
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The Film
[Rating:2/5]
Wow, Jessica Alba can really act! Who would know, with some of the really bad choices she’s made in movie roles, like appearing in such Hollywood dreck like Good Luck Chuck and The Love Guru. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always liked Alba ever since her breakout role in TV’s Dark Angel, but her film appearances have been too uneven for my liking.
Now, along comes this quirky indie film, and she once again shows why she is still around and should be taken seriously. If only she did more roles like these where she can show off her acting skills. Too bad the film itself still isn’t really that good.
In An Invisible Sign, Alba plays Mona Gray, a mousy twenty-something woman who withdrew into her own world of numbers and self-deprivation when ten years earlier her mathematician father (John Shea) became mentally ill. But now, her mother (Sonia Braga) has thrown her out of the house, telling her its time for her to move on, get a life of her own; it’s no longer her responsibility to take care of her father.
When Mona gets a job at the local elementary school as a math teacher, despite never finishing college, thanks to a little white lie told by her mother, it opens her up to a whole new world of possibilities that she tentatively enters. She becomes close to one of her young students (Sophie Nyweide) in particular, a bright and quirky young girl whose mother is dying from cancer. Mona is also facing another challenge, a new friendship and possibly budding romance with the school’s science teacher (Chris Messina). But she has been denying herself the pleasures in life so long, convinced that if she did, God would make her father better. Can she, at last, learn to open herself up to the world; to grow up and to stop punishing herself for being happy?
Alba is magnetic as the quirky and awkward Mona, even if she is still staggeringly beautiful behind the pigtails and geeky attire. She has the eccentricities down to a science. The problem with An Invisible Sign, is, however, it’s not really that good of a film in the end. It’s sugary sweet saccharine with a life lesson that hits you over the head with a mallet, or in the case of this film, in the leg with an axe – literally. The film’s denouement find’s Mona having an axe she brought into her classroom lodged right into her thigh, and then, presto, she has an epiphany! Sigh…this could have been so much better, yet, I find myself once again wondering why Alba, a wonderful and talented actress can’t find better roles than this.
Video Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Some parts of the image in this AVC/MPEG-4 encodement looked rather soft and grainy, with a lack of detail and an outdoor scene in the dark showed some video noise as well. Otherwise, Invisible Sign looked relatively film-like and didn’t show any other processing issues. It did have vibrant color reproduction and very nice flesh tones. The classroom, in particular, looked very colorful.
Audio Quality
[Rating:3/5]
Being that this is a dialogue-driven film, one wouldn’t expect much from the lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack, but at least the dialogue should be clean and free from clipping. Sadly, that is not the case, and I detected a lot of crackle in the dialogue. The surround channels didn’t offer much of any thing at all and low frequencies were mild at best.
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0/5]
There’s nothing but the original theatrical trailer (2.35:1; 1080p/24; Dolby Digital 5.1).
The Definitive Word
Overall:
[Rating:2/5]
It’s quirky, it’s charming, and it’s chock-full of life lessons, but it’s just not that good of a film. In the end, I have to issue a “skip it” for An Invisible Sign.
Additional Screen Captures
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[amazon-product]B00561BNFO[/amazon-product]
BestBuy.com:
Purchase An Invisible Sign on Blu-ray at CD Universe
Shop for more Blu-ray titles at Amazon.com
Overall
[Rating:2/5]
The Film
[Rating:2/5]
Video Quality
[Rating:3.5/5]
Audio Quality
[Rating:3/5]
Supplemental Materials
[Rating:0/5]
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