I have liked this movie for years and years. It was well done, charming, and worth repeat viewings.Lionsgate has done an appallingly awful job on this DVD. They don't even know who their audience are...
It opens with a very inappropriate red-banded, R rated noisy hard-sell preview of a horror movie, followed by another horror preview. Both of these fourth-rate screamers have unknown casts, yet they were treated infinitely better than the feature we are paying for on this disc a well written movie starring four very famous actors. While the horror movies got newly remastered in widescreen with new interviews, this movie seems to have been copied from a grainy pan/scan transfer on an old VHS tape.
The gratingly cheesy-busy menus seem to have been made up by someone who thinks the 80s were nothing but disco. The scene selection is lazily authored to force the viewer to manually navigate from page to page, rather than linking them together so you can right click through them all in sequence.
The picture is so dark that many scenes are now played out almost totally unwatchably in black screen or shadows. There are eve changeover cues, meaning it was transferred from an old exhibition print.
Clearly the principle that anything worth doing is worth doing well is lost on Lionsgate. They obviously have no respect for this movie, which they refer to as "forgotten" on the cover, and have deliberately issued a product that is obsolete. It's amazing that they would list "full screen" as a "feature" in today's world when even broadcast TV is going widescreen. The fact is that for a great many people who buy this, it will NOT be in full-screen at all, and it is missing maybe a third of the picture from its Original Aspect Ratio.
Ryan O'Neal, Shelly Long, Drew Barrymore, Sharon Stone, Nancy Meyers and Charles Shyer all have good reason to be proud of this charming film. You'd think they wouldn't mind sharing some interesting thoughts about it for a commentary or "Making of" featurette, but nooooo... Lionsgate couldn't be bothered to consider that. All we get here is a little trivia track that's less informative than annoying by taking a Quiz format rather then just delivering the mostly Irrelevant information.
This product is a slap in the face of anyone who worked on, or likes this movie. SHAME on Lionsgate for treating obscure horror movies better than this one! I will from here on heavily suspect any product from Lionsgate, and rent their titles rather than buy.
Bottom line, there is no excuse for releasing this bad a product. The disc should be recalled, competently remastered in its full aspect ratio from a good print, and reissued with at least a commentary track. Lionsgate owes us an explanation and an apology meanwhile, do not waste your money on this piece of junk.
Buy Irreconcilable Differences (Special Edition) (1984) Now
This was a great movie with an all star cast. The plot was fantastic and it was an excellent "feel good" movie. The movie gets five stars and the film transfer to dvd gets zero stars. My rating is two stars. I love this movie so I bought it to have it in my collection. I am keeping it even though it has many dark scenes and blackouts. Keep this in mind and hopefully someday we will get a good print of this film.Read Best Reviews of Irreconcilable Differences (Special Edition) (1984) Here
I have been waiting for this film on DVD for years; because of its non-existence on DVD I had even saved my old Vestron Video copy when I had gotten rid of the majority of my VHS collection many years ago. I was very excited to seen this film recently released on DVD by Lionsgate...until I watched it. This has got to be one of the worst transfers of a film to DVD that I have ever seen by a major distributor. Lionsgate should be totally and unequivocally ashamed to have put out such a shoddily produced DVD. The transfer is obviously taken from a VHS tape, in fact the original Vestron Video logo even appears before (and at the conclusion) of the film, just as on my original VHS tape from the 1980's. The picture is unbelievably dark in many places and the printers marks denoting reel changes are still present (another clue that this is in fact the VHS master, as these marks appear on the original Vestron copy). If this were a well-done transfer, it would have easily gotten five stars because the film is still one of the most underrated comedy/dramas from the 1980's. I hope that with all the negative reviews that this DVD has gotten that Lionsgate will see fit to give this film a more proper release on DVD. We can only hope.Want Irreconcilable Differences (Special Edition) (1984) Discount?
"Irreconcilable Differences" is finally coming to DVD, and all I can say is: IT'S ABOUT TIME! This is a wonderful underrated movie that was released in theaters way back in the fall of 1984. I remembered seeing it at the theater when it was released. My mother took me to see this and the Sally Field movie "Places in the Heart" in the same day. And it was great to see not one but two great movies at the theater in one day. However "Irreconcilable Differences" was not a hit at the box office, and got pretty much lost while waiting for a DVD release. It was released on home video in the old VHS format, but it has taken what has seemed like forever for the film to get released on DVD. I was constantly checking amazon.com to see if this movie was ever going to be released, and was getting frustrated not seeing anything about a DVD release date. That was until today, when at long last I found out that this terrific little movie was finally getting released on DVD."Irreconcilable Differences" is a comedy-drama that tells the story of a Hollywood couple who marry, have a kid, make movies, write novels, and in the end (after one fight too many) are sued for divorce by their 9 year-old daughter. The stars are: Ryan O'Neal, who was still a big star at the time this movie was made (he has since pretty much disappeared from the acting scene and has been having personal problems in real life); Shelley Long, who was starring on the hit TV sitcom "Cheers" at the time when she made this; a very young Drew Barrymore, who made this a few years after hitting it big with Steven Spielberg's blockbuster "E.T. The Extra Terrestrial"; and a young Sharon Stone, who would go on to be a big star of 90's movies such as "Total Recall", "Basic Instinct", and "Casino". It was directed by Charles Shyer, who co-wrote the screenplay with Nancy Meyers (his wife at the time). This is the same team who won an Oscar nomination for writing the screenplay to Goldie Hawn's hit 1980 comedy "Private Benjamin" and would go on to make the hit comedies "Baby Boom" (1987), "Father of the Bride" (1991), and "Father of the Bride 2" (1995). Meyers later turned to directing and scored box office hits with "The Parent Trap" (1998), "What Women Want" (2000), and "Something's Gotta Give" (2003).
"Irreconcilable Differences" wasn't a hit at the box office, but it received some good reviews from the critics (overall the critical response was mixed). Roger Ebert and his late partner Gene Siskel gave it two thumbs up (both critics gave the movie 3 1/2 stars for their newspaper reviews), and it received 2 Golden Globe nominations: Shelley Long was nominated for Best Actress in a Motion Picture (Musical/Comedy), and Drew Barrymore was nominated for Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture. Everybody does a good job here. O'Neal, Long, and Barrymore are perfect as the Hollywood family who go through good times at first, then rough times later when the couple split up after constantly fighting all the time and in the process ignore their little girl, who feels lost through all of this and decides enough is enough.
I'm hoping that "Irreconcilable Differences" will be released in the widescreen format on DVD. That's the way to view movies. I'm also hoping for some extras on the DVD too. But even if there aren't any extras on the DVD, I'm just glad that it's finally coming to DVD period. It's been long overdue.
WARNING: If you're looking for perfect DVD quality with this film, you might be disappointed. While it was great to see this movie again after not seeing it for so long, the DVD quality of "Irreconcilable Differences" is not the best. All they did was copy the movie off of one of those old VHS tapes from its' original VHS distributor, Vestron Video, and on to a DVD disk (you'll see that old Vestron Video logo on the DVD right before the movie starts, just like it was on the VHS tape). This perfectly explains why the DVD of this film is not in widescreen. And it also explains why the movie doesn't have quite the clear look that you see on most DVD's today. While I may have been a tad bit disappointed by the DVD quality of this film, it's not really all that bad. At least they found a VHS tape of this film that was in pretty good shape. I've seen a lot of DVD's that have been transferred from an old VHS tape to a DVD disk in far worse condition than this. So overall, I'm satisfied with the "Irreconcilable Differences" DVD.
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