Barry Munday (2009/Magnolia Blu-ray) + A
Complete History Of My Sexual Failures (2007/IFC/MPI DVD) + Madea’s Big Happy Family – The Play
(2010/Lionsgate Blu-ray) + Turning Green
(2005/Image DVD) + Vampires Suck
(2010/Fox Blu-ray)
Picture:
C/C/C+/C/B- Sound: C+/C+/C+/C+/B- Extras: C- Features: C- (Green: C)
Castration
anxiety and comedy are always a bad mix, never really saying anything (rare
exception, Martin Scorsese’s After Hours),
but it informs more product than you might think and too often seems to
backfire in various narrative films and various genres. We recently ran into five releases that
repeated the theme in some way or another, with poor results in all cases.
Patrick
Wilson is a really good actor, but plays it dorky as Barry Munday (2009), a man who is unhappy with his life, wants to
meet women, then has an accident where he looses his male organ, yet is sued
for impregnating another woman! Its
starts as a bad comedy, becomes worse, then tries to be a feel good film (!!!),
so you know you’ve got issues in the script by Writer/Director Chris D’Arienzo,
but it also wastes its cast (including Judy Greer, Malcolm McDowell, Cybill
Shepherd and Chloe Sevigny) and our time.
It is one of those projects where only those who were doing pre-production
thought it would work. Wow, were they
wrong, but this could have worked if they scrapped the approach and tried
again… maybe.
As silly
as Chris Waitt’s supposed confessional A
Complete History Of My Sexual Failures (2007) about what a wacky love life
he has had and all his many regrets. He
is burned out and has decided to regress to find some kind of closure by
contacting all the girls he loved (or something like that) before. Is it a diary, wallowing in pity or even
believable? Any so-called surprises are
nonexistent as anything bad is obvious and that many of these women have moved
on is expected, so he is a buffoon in some hip way and we are supposed to
sympathize? Some of the new wacky
moments seem forced and that makes this a reality TV variant, but the idea
could have worked if it was not so self-absorbed and play like every cheap
video project of the last 15 years.
Then
there is Tyler Perry’s latest cross-dressing comedy, Madea’s Big Happy Family – The Play (2010) which has the contradiction
of Perry playing a woman and therefore cross-dressing in another formula comedy
that is also a musical and more of that preaching-to-the-choir Religious Left
material he made his name on, as this DVD set of his early plays will show:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/6267/Tyler+Perry+%E2%80%93+The+Plays
This time
however, we get a script that is much more homophobic than his previous work
(the audience cheers when a female character talks about finding a “real” man
in a way that is left unchallenged), then you have Madea, who (so those
Christians out there are guarded from a gay discourse) a “tough broad” who
knows it all and is crazy enough to get sent to jail to stop certain things
from happening. What was implicit and
not a problem in earlier Madea appearances starts to fall apart here and no new
ground is broken either. The character
is getting worn out and so is this work.
Michael
Aimette and John Hofmann made Turning
Green back in 2005 and it is the most watchable work here by default, yet
the tale of a 16-year-old (Donal Gallery) trying to escape Ireland so he can
grow and have a life is not exactly the most pro-Irish film in recent years and
he lands up crossing paths with criminals to get money, though the story starts
with his inabilities to have sex (or even relief of any kind) in the oppressive
situation he is in. To further this
theme (but with hardly any irony) he sells XXX magazines to make money to
escape, but that is not enough. The
character also does constant voice over about his thoughts and situation, but
this can run on more than it should and does not help the narrative. I also thought the ending was not one that
worked, though co-stars Timothy Hutton, Colm Meaney and Alessandro Nivola are a
plus.
The last
of our releases to fit the castration theme is the latest in the endlessly
tired series of generic spoof films anyone can produce (so generic they are) of
the latest hits films and whatever else they can throw in. Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer have
co-written and co-directed Vampires Suck
(2010), which leads us to ask, it took two guys to make this mess?
To its
credit, it has the nerve to send-up the somewhat sacred Twilight franchise, but they mock anything else they can to add
filler to an 82 minutes (with credits) non-laugh fest, as is usual for these
throw-together releases, including a dig at Lady Gaga that does not help. Its sense of humor about vampires is at least
consistent, but cannot save one restricted to a single film as Mel Brooks
learned with Dracula – Dead & Loving
It. This is as bad and as worth
skipping, though these comedies always work on the premise of a certain
sexlessness that is often of male sexuality, even when young female suddenly go
semi-naked.
All the
Blu-rays offer 1080p 1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image transfers and all the
DVD anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 presentations, but all tend to look on the
cheap side. The DVDs are average at
best, but Munday is surprisingly bad
looking throughout and should probably not have been issued on Blu-ray to begin
with. This is one of the weakest HD
images we have seen of late. Madea is almost as bad as Perry has
converted to HD production and (as a recent slate of dramatic theatrical
releases on Blu-ray showed) tends to have more motion blur than current HD
productions should. That leaves Vampires the only release looking good
enough (here in an AVC @ 18 MBPS presentation) in part because it has to look
good enough to look like the Twilight
films.
All the
Blu-rays have DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless sound mixes and all but Vampires is surprisingly weak, though
the others are dialogue-based in fairness to them. Vampires
at least has some fun with its fairly good soundmix. The DVDs have Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes, but
they are both really stretching out sound that is stereo at best.
Extras on
all include trailers, save Madea,
with two behind the scenes featurettes. Munday adds Deleted Scenes, Gag Reel,
Outtakes, its own making of featurette, an HDNet episode promoting its release
and a feature length audio commentary by the Director, Wilson and Greer. Failures
also has a feature length audio commentary by the Director, Deleted/Extended Scenes,
Photographs and Short Films. Finally, Vampires (here in R and Uncut versions)
has Digital Copy for PC and PC portable devices, Deleted Scenes and a Gag
Reel. Most of this stretches things out
a good bit.
- Nicholas Sheffo
