The Film at 11 podcast welcomes a new participant this week, as I’m joined by both of my sons and, for the first time, our dog JoJo, who was very confused about the whole business. We felt it appropriate to bring in JoJo for a viewing of Christopher Guest’s mockumentary classic Best in Show. I’ll be honest, he mostly slept through it.

The upside to this decision is that, in trying not to upset the dog, the kids were better behaved than usual when I have the both of them together. On the other hand, the logistics of wrangling a dog while recording meant that we kept the conversation pretty brief and this wound up a short episode. Also, it didn’t help much that neither boy was all that into the movie. Sadly, the understated humor of this one didn’t resonate with their ‘tween sensibilities.

Title:	Best in Show
Year of Release:	2000
Director:	Christopher Guest
Watched On:	Fandango at Home (rental)
Also Available On:	Blu-ray TCM Various VOD rental and purchase platforms

Video Streaming

Although Warner Home Video released Best in Show on Blu-ray in 2013, I don’t own that disc and opted for a streaming rental from Fandango at Home (formerly VUDU). Assuming the disc and streaming versions share the same underlying video master, I’m not in a rush to buy the physical media copy. This movie needs a revisit.

I fully understand that Best in Show was shot on 16mm film for a documentary-like appearance. I’m not bothered by that aspect, nor even the frequent speckles and dirt on the source elements, which may even be intentional for all I know. In general, the full-screen 16:9 image has adequate sharpness and color, as well as light film grain.

Unfortunately, it’s also plagued by jaggies, most noticeable during on-screen text, of which the movie has a fair amount. The video master likely dates back to the early 2000s. A troubling number of Warner’s HD masters from that era were struck at 1080i resolution and had to be deinterlaced with heavy vertical domain filtering when recycled for Blu-ray or streaming later. Similar to early Blu-ray editions of Lethal Weapon or The Fugitive (both eventually remastered), or even later discs like Heaven & Earth (not so fortunate), that process leaves the picture with stair-stepping artifacts along the edges of objects, such as the angle of a character’s nose. The larger your screen, the more visible this will appear.

Does that make the movie unwatchable? Arguably, the flaws are tolerable here, given the faux-documentary style of the piece. Still, the film needs and deserves to be remastered.

I have next to nothing to say about the soundtrack, offered only in Dolby Digital 2.0 format. Best in Show has a very standard comedy mix that’s almost entirely dialogue-focused. The small amount of music in the movie has some light stereo presence, but the rest might as well be mono. The track has no noticeable surround activity or bass.

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