| Reviews & Columns |
|
Reviews DVD TV on DVD Blu-ray 4K UHD International DVDs In Theaters Reviews by Studio Video Games Features Collector Series DVDs Easter Egg Database Interviews DVD Talk Radio Feature Articles Columns Anime Talk DVD Savant Horror DVDs The M.O.D. Squad Art House HD Talk Silent DVD
|
 DVD Talk Forum |
|
|
| Resources |
|
DVD Price Search Customer Service #'s RCE Info Links |
|
Columns
  
 
|
|
|
Trading Places (HD DVD)
Paramount // R // June 5, 2007 // Region 0
List Price: $29.99 [Buy now and save at Amazon]
Trading Places was one of the most inescapable movies of the '80s. Just like you could count on something with Gene Hackman or Michael Caine being on at any given time, flip around long enough and you'd inevitably stumble upon Trading Places. It may be one of those movies I've watched mostly in ten or fifteen minute chunks, but add 'em all up and I've seen Trading Places more times than I'd care to count. Trading Places stands up to that kind of abuse, though. It's one of the most endlessly rewatchable comedies of an entire decade thanks to a clever script, the 1980s' most memorable tit shots this side of Fast Times, and two exceptional comedic talents and a director at their peak.
Trading Places updates Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper for the me-me-me-me decade of excess. Since Philadelphia's somewhat infamous for its lack of princes, Dan Aykroyd instead plays a successful commodities broker named Louis Winthorpe III. With a palatial home paid for by his employers at Duke and Duke, an underappreciated butler standing steadfast by his side, a glorified underwear model hanging off his arm, and six figures on his bank statements, the Harvard grad is living the dream, and all he has to do is continue to correctly gauge the direction of pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice.
Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy)...? Nicking Ray Charles' glasses from his Diet Pepsi ads and shoving himself around on a homebrew wooden wagon, the barely-twentysomething Billy Ray pretends to be a crippled Vietnam vet in the hopes of scamming a few bucks from the suits outside Winthorpe's ritzy club. Right around the same time someone calls the cops on him, Billy Ray bumps into Louis and cheerfully hands him back the posh leather briefcase he'd dropped. All that Winthorpe sees is a scary black man clutching the company payroll, and a '30s-style madcap chase around the club later, Billy Ray's dragged off in cuffs.
The bored, aging Duke brothers -- played by Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche -- had been bickering about nature versus nurture anyway, and this inspires 'em to put their theories to the test: take away the luxuries of a pampered Harvard man and give it all to a hustler on the street. Will Billy Ray step up to the role of corporate tycoon? Will a broke, homeless, and thoroughly disgraced Winthorpe be desperate enough to turn to a life of crime? Eh, the Dukes' wager just has a buck at stake, so why not roll the dice and give it a shot?
Busty young prostitute Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets dragged into setting up the switch, and since hookers in movies are supposed to have a heart of gold and all, she takes pity on Winthorpe and puts him up in her apartment. It's not a completely warm and fuzzy arrangement, though; she gambles on Winthorpe's stories about wealth and power panning out so she can cash in on a hefty payday.
The Dukes' scheme looks to be going completely according to plan: Billy Ray's years of hustling give him an advantage in anticipating competitors' moves, and Winthorpe spots his replacement living the good life and goes off the deep-end seeking revenge. The two of 'em eventually cross paths again, and when Billy Ray and Winthorpe both wind up on the same page about how the Dukes have screwed them over, they team up to bring down the brothers and make themselves impossibly rich in the process.
Part of the reason Trading Places is such a brilliant comedy is that for most of the movie, it doesn't act like one. The first hour and a half or so doesn't aim for gigantic laughs or setup any elaborate comedic setpieces. Screenwriters Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris don't just scribble down "here's the rich guy, here's the poor guy", clap their hands, and go; they respect the movie's characters enough to spend time properly establishing them, and much of the humor in the first two acts flows naturally from these well-drawn characters being dropped into unfamiliar surroundings. It's not lazy fish-out-of-water gags, though. Most of these movies paint the nouveau riche as being dazed and confused when they suddenly get that influx of cash, but Billy Ray does the exact opposite. At first he tries to bring the dee-luxe apartment in the sky lifestyle to the dive bar where he used to hang out and then invites his sarcastic-finger-quotes-friends over for a party, but Billy Ray quickly realizes that this isn't going to work and instead makes a concerted effort to try to fit into a world he'd probably only seen on a 13" TV. It only takes a couple of days to go from "Motherfucker? Moi?" and "Who's been puttin' out their Kools on my floor?" to feigning laughter at a lame joke about escargot.
Likewise, the newly-impoverished Winthorpe isn't saddled with any Simple Life-style groaners where he puts a metal soup can in a microwave or whatever. As with Billy Ray, the humor generally doesn't come from what he does but how he reacts, something that only really works with a screenplay and a cast that can flesh out these characters so well. When you see Winthorpe at his absolute lowest point -- gnawing on salmon through a grungy, matted Santa beard on a city bus -- it's not a sight gag; it feels earned. Once Billy Ray and Winthorpe team up, Trading Places shifts gears and starts playing the comedy much broader, tossing in goofy accents and gorilla rape, but the change really isn't that jarring. Even the kinda-sorta-subtle commentary on race and class feels like it's deftly mixed in instead of whacking viewers over the head with some overdramatic third act monologue.
Trading Places is really just a case of right place, right time. Following three consecutive hits -- Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf in London, John Landis was standing on comfortably solid footing as a filmmaker. Not to short change Dan Aykroyd, who's note-perfect as the stodgy Winthorpe and doesn't get the standard issue "there's more to life than money!" makeover by the time the credits roll, but this is Eddie Murphy's movie. Trading Places was only Murphy's second screen credit, following shortly after 48 Hrs., and it marked his first time heading up an out-and-out comedy. It was a well-deserved break-out role for Murphy who'd ride that momentum a year and change later to the quarter-billion-dollar grossing Beverly Hills Cop.
The supporting characters are thinner but still perfectly cast, particularly Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy as money-grubbing schemers who seem deceptively harmless at first glance and Paul Gleason as a ball-busting security expert. Whenever anyone talks about Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places, they're not talking about her performance so much as her...y'know, pulchritude. Her first nude scenes may be short and gratuitous, but they're memorable, and as the sitcom says, they're real and they're spectacular. Anyway, Curtis lends an intelligence and confidence to Ophelia that makes her stand out as more than just another hooker with a heart of gold cliché.
Wow. I thought I'd have maybe three paragraphs in me, and I almost feel guilty taking up this much space to ramble on about a movie I know you've already seen over and over again. Trading Places deserves it, though, in the same way that it's deserved better than the bare metal, bargain bin DVD that was released a while back. Paramount has gone back and given the film a special edition spit-'n-polish, even taking care to include an extra explaining an ending that I've never completely understood no matter how many times I've seen it.
Video: I have to admit to not expecting much from Trading Places in high-def going in -- early '80s comedies tend to look flat and drab in general -- but Paramount has really done an exceptional job with this VC-1 encoded 1.78:1 disc. The lifeless, overcast hues I'm used to seeing on cable are now robust and pop off the screen. Some shots have a slight tinge of softness, but Trading Places is almost always strikingly crisp and detailed. The brick buildings seen throughout the Philadelphia shoot are clear and distinct as are the fine patterns of the overpriced suits its characters wear. There's even a shot of Winthorpe holding up a financial journal, and each and every word is completely legible. Yes, I actually bothered to read the whole thing.
Not that film grain is inherently a bad thing, but there's not much of it here, with only a couple of scattered scenes having much of a coarse texture. None of them are marred by any compression hiccups, and only a couple of tiny specks were spotted throughout. There are a few comedies on HD DVD now from this general era, and Trading Places trumps 'em all, with some closeups looking like they were shot closer to 1993 than 1983. Great, great stuff, Paramount.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 remix doesn't take too many liberties with the original soundtrack, preferring to spread most of the action across the front speakers. It's light on really gimmicky uses of the surrounds, instead using 'em as most modern comedies do to flesh out the atmosphere, reinforce the score, and toss in some reverb in cavernous halls. The dialogue stems are in great shape, not having that muffled, scratchy sound I usually think of when I watch a comedy from the early '80s. Definitely a notch or two above average for a comedy from this era.
Monaural dubs are also offered in French and Spanish, and subtitles are available in all of the disc's languages.
Extras: None of the extras are in high-definition this time around, and what's here is either full-frame or letterboxed in non-anamorphic widescreen. While on one hand that's a drag, Trading Places is one of those rare special editions that's not bogged down by filler and everything's worth a look.
The disc doesn't include an audio commentary, but Paramount has put together an above-average Pop Up Video-style trivia track in its place. It's really comprehensive, pointing out continuity gaffes, precisely where individual shots were filmed, scenes that were scripted but were never shot, cracking ice off of Dan Aykroyd's fur coat between takes during one agonizingly cold night shoot, and actually filming real traders on the floor of the exchange for the climax. There's a bunch of trivia in there too, including the unemployment rate in Philly, Winthorpe being booked under the same number as Elwood in The Blues Brothers, and random cast highlights, including a bit part with Jamie Lee Curtis' sister.
There are two additional bits of footage, the first of which is a promotional piece shot for ShoWest while filming was still underway. Following an extended introduction by John Landis, it's a mix of brief snippets from the movie along with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy riffing in a bathroom, cracking up the crew in the process. There's also a deleted scene that's usually reinserted into TV broadcasts that follows Paul Gleason's character pulling off the whole MacGuffin theft. While the scene is better left on the cutting room floor, it's great to see a studio finally include some of the material that's popped back in on cable. Producer George Folsey Jr. is listed as providing a commentary for this three minute clip, but it's not an audio commentary in the traditional sense; it's actually a trimmed down version of the scene intercut with a video interview.
Although Landis, Aykroyd, and Curtis chime in with new interviews for this release, there's also an eight minute collection of rarely seen interviews with the cast as they were promoting the movie in the U.K. almost a quarter-century ago. Eddie Murphy chimes in with some particularly insightful comments about how he was approaching his career at this early stage.
A few featurettes round out the extras. "The Trade in Trading Places" (5 min.) explains what a mercantile exchange is, exactly, and it also spells out precisely what Billy Ray and Winthorpe were scheming at the end for those of us who bowed out of Finance classes. "Dressing the Part" spends six and a half minutes with Deborah Nadoolman -- y'know, Mrs. John Landis -- and the thought that went into the costuming. The longest and best of the extras is the 18 minute retrospective "Insider Trading: The Making of Trading Places", and it features interviews with most of the key cast and crew. Landis spends quite a bit of time discussing a group of actors the studio wasn't particularly enthusiastic about, and along with quite a few other topics, they touch on the germ of an idea that sparked the story and, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis' rack.
Conclusion: Trading Places doesn't settle for easy laughs...well, for the most part. A sharp, smart comedy that's only a movie or two away for marking a career high for Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and director John Landis, Trading Places is one of the best of the '80s and a movie that's long-deserved the special edition treatment and spectacular visual presentation it's snagged here. Highly Recommended.
Trading Places updates Mark Twain's The Prince and the Pauper for the me-me-me-me decade of excess. Since Philadelphia's somewhat infamous for its lack of princes, Dan Aykroyd instead plays a successful commodities broker named Louis Winthorpe III. With a palatial home paid for by his employers at Duke and Duke, an underappreciated butler standing steadfast by his side, a glorified underwear model hanging off his arm, and six figures on his bank statements, the Harvard grad is living the dream, and all he has to do is continue to correctly gauge the direction of pork bellies and frozen concentrated orange juice.
Billy Ray Valentine (Eddie Murphy)...? Nicking Ray Charles' glasses from his Diet Pepsi ads and shoving himself around on a homebrew wooden wagon, the barely-twentysomething Billy Ray pretends to be a crippled Vietnam vet in the hopes of scamming a few bucks from the suits outside Winthorpe's ritzy club. Right around the same time someone calls the cops on him, Billy Ray bumps into Louis and cheerfully hands him back the posh leather briefcase he'd dropped. All that Winthorpe sees is a scary black man clutching the company payroll, and a '30s-style madcap chase around the club later, Billy Ray's dragged off in cuffs.
The bored, aging Duke brothers -- played by Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche -- had been bickering about nature versus nurture anyway, and this inspires 'em to put their theories to the test: take away the luxuries of a pampered Harvard man and give it all to a hustler on the street. Will Billy Ray step up to the role of corporate tycoon? Will a broke, homeless, and thoroughly disgraced Winthorpe be desperate enough to turn to a life of crime? Eh, the Dukes' wager just has a buck at stake, so why not roll the dice and give it a shot?
Busty young prostitute Ophelia (Jamie Lee Curtis) gets dragged into setting up the switch, and since hookers in movies are supposed to have a heart of gold and all, she takes pity on Winthorpe and puts him up in her apartment. It's not a completely warm and fuzzy arrangement, though; she gambles on Winthorpe's stories about wealth and power panning out so she can cash in on a hefty payday.
The Dukes' scheme looks to be going completely according to plan: Billy Ray's years of hustling give him an advantage in anticipating competitors' moves, and Winthorpe spots his replacement living the good life and goes off the deep-end seeking revenge. The two of 'em eventually cross paths again, and when Billy Ray and Winthorpe both wind up on the same page about how the Dukes have screwed them over, they team up to bring down the brothers and make themselves impossibly rich in the process.
Part of the reason Trading Places is such a brilliant comedy is that for most of the movie, it doesn't act like one. The first hour and a half or so doesn't aim for gigantic laughs or setup any elaborate comedic setpieces. Screenwriters Herschel Weingrod and Timothy Harris don't just scribble down "here's the rich guy, here's the poor guy", clap their hands, and go; they respect the movie's characters enough to spend time properly establishing them, and much of the humor in the first two acts flows naturally from these well-drawn characters being dropped into unfamiliar surroundings. It's not lazy fish-out-of-water gags, though. Most of these movies paint the nouveau riche as being dazed and confused when they suddenly get that influx of cash, but Billy Ray does the exact opposite. At first he tries to bring the dee-luxe apartment in the sky lifestyle to the dive bar where he used to hang out and then invites his sarcastic-finger-quotes-friends over for a party, but Billy Ray quickly realizes that this isn't going to work and instead makes a concerted effort to try to fit into a world he'd probably only seen on a 13" TV. It only takes a couple of days to go from "Motherfucker? Moi?" and "Who's been puttin' out their Kools on my floor?" to feigning laughter at a lame joke about escargot.
Likewise, the newly-impoverished Winthorpe isn't saddled with any Simple Life-style groaners where he puts a metal soup can in a microwave or whatever. As with Billy Ray, the humor generally doesn't come from what he does but how he reacts, something that only really works with a screenplay and a cast that can flesh out these characters so well. When you see Winthorpe at his absolute lowest point -- gnawing on salmon through a grungy, matted Santa beard on a city bus -- it's not a sight gag; it feels earned. Once Billy Ray and Winthorpe team up, Trading Places shifts gears and starts playing the comedy much broader, tossing in goofy accents and gorilla rape, but the change really isn't that jarring. Even the kinda-sorta-subtle commentary on race and class feels like it's deftly mixed in instead of whacking viewers over the head with some overdramatic third act monologue.
Trading Places is really just a case of right place, right time. Following three consecutive hits -- Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and An American Werewolf in London, John Landis was standing on comfortably solid footing as a filmmaker. Not to short change Dan Aykroyd, who's note-perfect as the stodgy Winthorpe and doesn't get the standard issue "there's more to life than money!" makeover by the time the credits roll, but this is Eddie Murphy's movie. Trading Places was only Murphy's second screen credit, following shortly after 48 Hrs., and it marked his first time heading up an out-and-out comedy. It was a well-deserved break-out role for Murphy who'd ride that momentum a year and change later to the quarter-billion-dollar grossing Beverly Hills Cop.
The supporting characters are thinner but still perfectly cast, particularly Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy as money-grubbing schemers who seem deceptively harmless at first glance and Paul Gleason as a ball-busting security expert. Whenever anyone talks about Jamie Lee Curtis in Trading Places, they're not talking about her performance so much as her...y'know, pulchritude. Her first nude scenes may be short and gratuitous, but they're memorable, and as the sitcom says, they're real and they're spectacular. Anyway, Curtis lends an intelligence and confidence to Ophelia that makes her stand out as more than just another hooker with a heart of gold cliché.
Wow. I thought I'd have maybe three paragraphs in me, and I almost feel guilty taking up this much space to ramble on about a movie I know you've already seen over and over again. Trading Places deserves it, though, in the same way that it's deserved better than the bare metal, bargain bin DVD that was released a while back. Paramount has gone back and given the film a special edition spit-'n-polish, even taking care to include an extra explaining an ending that I've never completely understood no matter how many times I've seen it.
Video: I have to admit to not expecting much from Trading Places in high-def going in -- early '80s comedies tend to look flat and drab in general -- but Paramount has really done an exceptional job with this VC-1 encoded 1.78:1 disc. The lifeless, overcast hues I'm used to seeing on cable are now robust and pop off the screen. Some shots have a slight tinge of softness, but Trading Places is almost always strikingly crisp and detailed. The brick buildings seen throughout the Philadelphia shoot are clear and distinct as are the fine patterns of the overpriced suits its characters wear. There's even a shot of Winthorpe holding up a financial journal, and each and every word is completely legible. Yes, I actually bothered to read the whole thing.
Not that film grain is inherently a bad thing, but there's not much of it here, with only a couple of scattered scenes having much of a coarse texture. None of them are marred by any compression hiccups, and only a couple of tiny specks were spotted throughout. There are a few comedies on HD DVD now from this general era, and Trading Places trumps 'em all, with some closeups looking like they were shot closer to 1993 than 1983. Great, great stuff, Paramount.
Audio: The Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 remix doesn't take too many liberties with the original soundtrack, preferring to spread most of the action across the front speakers. It's light on really gimmicky uses of the surrounds, instead using 'em as most modern comedies do to flesh out the atmosphere, reinforce the score, and toss in some reverb in cavernous halls. The dialogue stems are in great shape, not having that muffled, scratchy sound I usually think of when I watch a comedy from the early '80s. Definitely a notch or two above average for a comedy from this era.
Monaural dubs are also offered in French and Spanish, and subtitles are available in all of the disc's languages.
Extras: None of the extras are in high-definition this time around, and what's here is either full-frame or letterboxed in non-anamorphic widescreen. While on one hand that's a drag, Trading Places is one of those rare special editions that's not bogged down by filler and everything's worth a look.
The disc doesn't include an audio commentary, but Paramount has put together an above-average Pop Up Video-style trivia track in its place. It's really comprehensive, pointing out continuity gaffes, precisely where individual shots were filmed, scenes that were scripted but were never shot, cracking ice off of Dan Aykroyd's fur coat between takes during one agonizingly cold night shoot, and actually filming real traders on the floor of the exchange for the climax. There's a bunch of trivia in there too, including the unemployment rate in Philly, Winthorpe being booked under the same number as Elwood in The Blues Brothers, and random cast highlights, including a bit part with Jamie Lee Curtis' sister.
There are two additional bits of footage, the first of which is a promotional piece shot for ShoWest while filming was still underway. Following an extended introduction by John Landis, it's a mix of brief snippets from the movie along with Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy riffing in a bathroom, cracking up the crew in the process. There's also a deleted scene that's usually reinserted into TV broadcasts that follows Paul Gleason's character pulling off the whole MacGuffin theft. While the scene is better left on the cutting room floor, it's great to see a studio finally include some of the material that's popped back in on cable. Producer George Folsey Jr. is listed as providing a commentary for this three minute clip, but it's not an audio commentary in the traditional sense; it's actually a trimmed down version of the scene intercut with a video interview.
Although Landis, Aykroyd, and Curtis chime in with new interviews for this release, there's also an eight minute collection of rarely seen interviews with the cast as they were promoting the movie in the U.K. almost a quarter-century ago. Eddie Murphy chimes in with some particularly insightful comments about how he was approaching his career at this early stage.
A few featurettes round out the extras. "The Trade in Trading Places" (5 min.) explains what a mercantile exchange is, exactly, and it also spells out precisely what Billy Ray and Winthorpe were scheming at the end for those of us who bowed out of Finance classes. "Dressing the Part" spends six and a half minutes with Deborah Nadoolman -- y'know, Mrs. John Landis -- and the thought that went into the costuming. The longest and best of the extras is the 18 minute retrospective "Insider Trading: The Making of Trading Places", and it features interviews with most of the key cast and crew. Landis spends quite a bit of time discussing a group of actors the studio wasn't particularly enthusiastic about, and along with quite a few other topics, they touch on the germ of an idea that sparked the story and, of course, Jamie Lee Curtis' rack.
Conclusion: Trading Places doesn't settle for easy laughs...well, for the most part. A sharp, smart comedy that's only a movie or two away for marking a career high for Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and director John Landis, Trading Places is one of the best of the '80s and a movie that's long-deserved the special edition treatment and spectacular visual presentation it's snagged here. Highly Recommended.
|
| Popular Reviews |
| Sponsored Links |
|
|
| Sponsored Links |
|
|
| Release List | Reviews | Shop | Newsletter | Forum | DVD Giveaways | Blu-Ray | Advertise |
|
Copyright 2024 DVDTalk.com All Rights Reserved. Legal Info, Privacy Policy, Terms of Use,
Manage Preferences,
Your Privacy Choices 
| |||||||