One Day

In ‘09 I had the privilege and the pleasure of sitting down in a little art house theater in Charlotte to watch a screening of Lone Scherfig’s, later Oscar nominated, period drama An Education. I walked away completely engulfed in the film, even after I made it home on my twenty minute drive. To this day it remains one of my favorites for its brutal honesty and wonderful character delivery by its cast as a whole. That being said, when I found a copy of Scherfig’s follow up to An Education, One Day, I was ecstatic. I had missed it in theaters and threw it on with, probably too much, excitement.

One Day follows Emma and Dex, as played by Anne Hathaway (The Dark Knight Rises) and Jim Sturgess (Fifty Dead Men Walking), two souls who find one another and meet just about once a year but keep their friendship alive via telephone. As I watched, and waited for the romantic angle to truly hit me with something profound, I only found myself becoming more and more annoyed with the characters in the film. Kind of a tough break when a film needs you to understand its characters and you only understand that you dislike them, immensely. So, poor me, hopeless romantic who thrives on romantic films, is left to the films devices, which become increasingly dramatic and boring. Please, Hathaway, maintain your British accent or don’t.

Okay, so Hathaway and Sturgess do a pretty good job in the film, They flesh out what little there is of their characters and help the film move along at its snail pace. I’ll give them that. It could have been worse. It could have been another Channing Tatum/Nicholas Sparks film. In any case there was a point when I found myself on my feet pacing, trying anything to not keep from being annoyed by the film. It’s just not that great.

QUALITY:
The film is shot in Britain (and Paris). If you’ve seen almost any European drama you’ll be familiar with its broody look, zapped of most color, and left to look as if its drab self plays somewhat of the third man in the scheme of things. The film is depressing, hello gray scale. This is what you get with One Day. Sharpness is so, so but it passes for a decent Blu-Ray presentation. Black levels are pretty deep but grain does peek its head in. With a film like this you have to look at whatever flaws you might find as a piece to a very large and artistic puzzle. Or you can just write it off as being bad form. It’s up to you.  

Audio quality is great, which makes sense as your meant to hang on the characters every word. Dialogue is everything in a dramatic piece like this. Immersion is kept at a minimum but heavily crowded places offer up a good ambient sound that will place you with the characters.

BONUS FEATURES:
~Commentary with Lone Scherfig
~The Look of One Day
~Emma and Dex Through The Years
~Anne Hathaway: Bringing Emma To Life
~Deleted Scenes
~BD-Live

I was pretty disappointed with the bonus features. The deleted scenes don’t offer much to give you a better handle on the overall story, the other bonus run very short. They were all in HD though, if that counts.