![[box cover]](../../reviewimgs/f/frequency.jpg)
Frequency: Platinum Series
Give credit to director Gregory Hoblit and scenarist Toby Emmerich — in an era when filmgoers often buy tickets for lowest-common-denominator movies that offer cheap, visceral entertainment and require little in the way of attention-span, their 2000 Frequency is both a taut thriller and a heady theoretical examination of temporal planes, how they can be warped, and how people once separated in time might be reunited. Dennis Quaid stars in Frequency as New York fireman Frank Sullivan, who dies in 1969, leaving behind wife Julia (Elizabeth Mitchell) and young son John (Jim Caviezel). By 1999 John is a NYPD homicide detective who has trouble bonding with people, but when the city is visited by the Aurora Borealis, brought about by extreme solar flares, he meets a fellow baseball fan on his Ham radio, only to discover that the affable stranger is his father, speaking from 30 years in the past. Both are incredulous at first, but they manage to prove to each other that the temporal skew is real, and John immediately warns his father about the fire that will cause his death. But with one tragedy averted, another becomes real, for John suddenly has memories of his father alive during much of his childhood, but that his mother was murdered by a serial killer — a killer father and son must stop with nothing more than a three-decade bandwidth of altered time. The more routine parts of Frequency, involving the hunt for a serial killer, may bear the mark of familiarity, but they are nonetheless exciting, bolstered by both Quaid and Caviezel, who are sympathetic, dynamic leading men. But the cleverness of the script is why Frequency became a surprise box-office hit, with its head-spinning twists and turns. Every time John relates a piece of information to Frank, they have the ability to alter history, but nobody can guess where that will leave John, who finds himself constantly encountering new realities, his head full of both new memories and memories of things that never happened at all. Andre Braugher is solid in his supporting role as family friend and fellow cop Satch, and Shawn Doyle makes for one of the better villains in recent memory. New Line's Frequency: Platinum Series offers a solid anamorphic transfer (2.35:1) with audio in Dolby Digital 5.1 or Dolby 2.0 Surround. Features include a commentary by director Hoblit, a second commentary by scenarist Emmerich and actor/brother Noah Emmerich, and an isolated score with commentary by composer Michael Kamen; the 38-minute documentary "The Science Behind Frequency" (anamorphic); a "fact and trivia" subtitle track that examines some of the history and science that went into the film; four deleted scenes; a look at the animatics behind the opening sequence; cast notes; a trailer; and DVD-ROM content, including a script-to-screen feature. Snap-case.
—JJB
