Masquerade [DVD]

Definitely a B movie, another Rob Lowe vehicle of that era, yet with some surprising strong points that elevate into something better. And a special bonus - this is an early Dick Wolf script (before all the LAW & ORDERS), and it is interesting to see such a different turn from him. Ultimately, it doesn't quite work, but it entertains and is well worth watching. As noted everywhere here, Meg Tilly carries the movie; (it is her best work in a leading role - and if you like her here you need to see Agnes of God and Leaving Normal). Rob Lowe does his part well and John Glover and Dana Delaney are excellent in supporting roles. There are plot twists, suspense, romance, a little sex; it won't knock your socks off, but neither will it disappoint. I own a copy and rewatch it every few years when I'm in the mood for a good rerun. All in all a good movie better than it's 6 pt. rating.

SOME DEGREE OF SPOILER ALERT HERE...I loved this peek into the lifestyles of the rich, and there were jaw-dropping twists and turns everywhere. Maybe other viewers saw these things coming, but I sure didn't!!!I don't think it is even the first movie in history about a hustler after a woman's money, but it was so good! Meg Tilley is PERFECTLY cast as the preppy heiress and Rob Lowe ALWAYS does a good hustler (see Bad Influence...different kind of hustle, but also a fun ride). His acting is not fantastic, but he sure is pretty in this one!The sex scene goes down as one of the sexiest I can ever remember, and I don't mean to be crass here but Meg Tilley did THE most realistic onscreen orgasm I have ever seen. I am not kidding; VERY convincing. You've got to see this. it shows all the others you've seen as a total joke. I don't know how she pulled that off. Wonder how many takes it took! The music during that scene (and others) is exquisite...sinister music played during "the seduction for money"...brilliant (although at this point I don't think it was about money anymore...which makes the ending that much more sad).It's a really, really sad film on so many levels, and lonely Olivia (Meg Tilley) just cannot seem to catch a break in life. Every time she does...tragedy ensues. A reminder than money cannot buy happiness.I don't want to give stuff away here; just check it out!P.S. Have fun looking at some of the most atrocious set decoration you've ever seen. I know it was the 80s and a beach setting, but the NYC apartment, which should have looked like Studio 54 (though not Olivia's style) looks like the bedroom of a six year old. Then it again, it underplays Olivia's naïve nature on some levels.

This is a thriller that has some twists that I didn't anticipate and while not exactly plausible, they are not outlandish. I like that in a thriller. This movie could easily have been a formulaic soap opera thriller in the 1980's Dallas or Dynasty mode with its tale of a wealthy heiress, greed, love and betrayal but its not. Rob Lowe does his standard handsome hulk thing here that made him the heart throb of that era but the real surprise is Meg Tilly's excellent performance as a wealthy young woman who apparently has had more than her share of grief with the recent death of her mother. Tilly does this vulnerable and longing for love woman perfectly, and yes as noted in the other reviews there's some good steamy sex in this movie. It's a good movie.

This is the last Blu-Ray release from KL (Kino Lorber) studios that I'll ever buy. Never again. After the major flub with "The Executioner's Song", where the package included two versions that were both censored versions, neither of them the version that was originally released for home video, I should have known better. By the mid-'90s I had accumulated a modest collection of Laserdiscs. I regret that I sold the player and the discs, because many of the titles released on LaserDisc have never been released on DVD or on Blu-Ray, or if they have been released, not in the same version. Masquerade is one of the titles I owned on Laserdisc, and I would rather have that Laserdisc version than this Kino Lorber Blu-Ray version.The problem I have with this Bluy-Ray is simple: the image has been cropped. I want to explain this, and to do so, I first need to explain a little bit about aspect ratios. Mostly in the early '60s, the Hollywood studios experimented with anamorphic camera lenses on big budget pictures, producing wide-screen movies that were shown in theaters with special lenses mounted on the projectors. It was easy to tell whether a piece of 35mm or 70mm projection film was true wide screen, because if it was, if you held the film up to the light, it was obvious that everything on it was tall and skinny. This practice quickly faded, largely because of the hassle of having to supply movie theaters with the special lenses. The movies were also more expensive to produce. But Hollywood knew that movie-goers would go to the theater to see a movie in wide screen, so they did something that, to this day, is rarely explained in a forthright way. What they did was to film the movie using normal spherical lenses and then produce the projection reels in the regular "Academy aspect ratio" that had been around for decades (this aspect ratio is 1.375:1), and along with the projection reels they would include a mask, essentially a piece of cardboard with a rectangular hole with an aspect ratio wider than the academy ratio, with instructions for the projectionist to mount the mask in front of the projector lens. The vast majority of "wide screen" movies were done this way. Only a very tiny percentage were actually shot using anamorphic lenses. Now, the thing that is really, really annoying about this is that when Siskel and Ebert raised a fuss about "pan and scan", they never explained this. I wonder in fact if they actually understood this, but it's hard to say. In any case, the truth is that the "pan and scan" method for showing wide screen movies on TV (including distribution on home videotape and DVD and Blu-Ray) only really applied to the very small majority of movies that were shot using anamorphic lenses. All of the other, so-called wide-screen movies were produced (the projection reels distributed to theaters) were shot in 1.375:1, and as compared to the old TV aspect ratio of 1.33:1, the difference is only 3%. Only 3% of the width of the image needed to be cropped in order to present a typical "wide screen" movie in the TV 1.33 aspect ratio. I'm not kidding you. This is a true fact, and it applies to the vast majority of "wide screen" movies. 3% is less than the "overscan" typically applied with older CRT televisions. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, it became common practice with DVDs to mask off the top and bottom of the frame, and to record black bars for the masked portions, in order to achieve the original "aspect ratio" in which the movie was supposedly filmed, and this amounted to a farce. A great many people have observed, when they bought a DVD in both 4:3 TV aspect ratio and the "widescreen" aspect ratio, that the true difference between the two is that with the 4:3 version you got the full picture whereas with the widescreen version you got black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. In other words, with the widescreen version, you weren't able to see the full picture because the top and bottom portions were blacked out. (At some point "anamorphic" DVDs were introduced, which only avoided the need to record the black bars, thus preserving all the bits on the disc for the part between the black bars.)In my opinion the public was misled by film critics like Siskel & Ebert, and by the producers of DVDs. The ubiquitous practice for TV broadcasting of pseudo-widescreen movies had always been to show the full picture. Pan & scan was only ever needed, and only ever used, for the rare movies that had been shot using anamorphic lenses. For the great majority of "widescreen" movies, the television networks simply did what was obvious, given that the movie was actually in 1.375:1 and only a very slight amount of horizontal cropping was needed to make it 1.33:1 for broadcast. No one complained. People only complained when a true widescreeen movie, that had been shot using anamorphic lenses, was subjected to pan & scan out of necessity. The same practices remained in place for home videotape, both Beta and VHS, and also for Laserdisc. At some point people started complaining about pan & scan, justifiably, because it was a horrible practice for movies that were truly widescreen, shot with anamorphic lenses. I don't recall exactly when or what title was first, but at some point, a laserdisc was released where some movie that was truly widescreen and that previously had only been seen on TV at home in pan & scan, was presented with black bars at the top and bottom, in order to avoid pan & scan. That was a great thing, if only it had been applied only to movies that were truly widescreen. Unfortunately, not long after this was done and it was apparent that the public accepted it, the laserdisc producers, and later the DVD producers, started doing the same thing with run-of-the-mill widescreen movies that were actually shot in the Academy 1.375 aspect ratio. The typical early adopter of Laserdisc and DVD was too dumb to understand what was really happening. It became a common practice.So back to Masquerade. As I said, I used to own a Laserdisc copy of this movie in 1.33:1, and with this copy, what was recorded on the laserdisc and presented to the TV was essentially the entire frame as it was originally shot using standard 35mm movie cameras equipped with standard spherical lenses. What Kino Lorber has given us is a version in 1.85:1 aspect ratio. A little more than 1/6 of the frame has been cropped at the top, and as little more than 1/6 of the frame has been cropped from the bottom. Regardless of what they used as their source, when you take a movie that was filmed on 35mm and using lenses that were typical for the 1980s, and throw out more than 1/3 of what was recorded on the film, you do not end up with anything close to the sort of sharp, high-resolution image that is nowadays routinely taken for granted. Not even close. This is a very, very big reason why it make a world of good sense for them to use 100% of that film, i.e., all of the 1.375:1 frame, in producing this Blu-Ray disc. They did not do this, and the fact that they did not reveals that from a technical standpoint, Kino Lorber is ignorant and really has no clue what they are doing. They preserved a little less than 2/3 of the original frame in this Bluy-Ray production, and they could just as easily have preserved the entire 1.375:1 frame. What they did is just plain dumb, and it makes me sick. Regardless of the aspect ratio of the rectangular hole in the cardboard mat that the studio originally shipped along with the projection reels, the full frame that was produced and delivered to movie theaters, and recorded on home videotape, and broadcast on cable TV (and recorded on Laserdisc in the early days at least), should always, always be transferred to Blu-Ray, also to DVD but especially to Blu-Ray, when a home video release is produced. Kino Lorber obviously does not understand this, but from a technical standpoint, they don't really have any clue what they're doing.

I had maybe seen this film once many years ago. So I could remember very little about it. It reminds me of some of the well done thrillers of the 80's. It is a very good plot, with twists and turns. Rob Lowe, Meg Tilly and Kim Cattrell (how good does she look) are the main stars. This is well worth picking up for a few pounds on DVD. It will also bring back memories of the cars and what people were wearing 30 years ago. I also recently dug out Bad Influence, another Rob Lowe movie of the 80's with James Spader, but it wasn't as good as this. Enjoy.

I cannot believe that there are so few reviews of this film on here, and some of those are only for delivery service. This is one of the few films that I can watch over again. There is always something to see again to make sense of the twists and turns along the way. The cast is excellent also. Rob Lowe should give any person the creeps as he woos Meg Tilly's vulnerable heiress; does he care for her or her money? Then there is Doug Savant and the incredibly sexy Kim Cattrall. Sexy Kim gets five stars all on her own. If you have not seen this then you do not know what you are missing.

good quick delivery. good value. I've seen this film before (on video). its a very good film with a few twists and a bigger unexpected twist at the end. Meg Ryan is very good as the innocent millionairess who falls for the charming Rob Lowe. it shows how deceitful people can be and yet it has a touching ending. its not an obvious plot as you watch it. one of my favourite films.

What a forgotten little gem. It has its plot faults but it is well acted and nicely directed. The music by JB is better than the film deserves but to see a gorgeous Kim Cattrell and the handsome Rob Lowe is a bonus with the Hamptons scenery.

An old favourite. Very stylish Hamptons / sailing who dunnit movie. Great twist at the end. Excellent cast. (Where can I get that pink & white spotted dress!)