Four Lions
(2010/Magnolia/MagNet Blu-ray) + How Do
You Know (2010/Sony Blu-ray) + No One
Knows About Persian Cats (2009/IFC/MPI DVD) + The Owls (2010/First Run DVD) + The People I’ve Slept With (2009/Maya DVD)
Picture: C+/B/C/C/C+ Sound: B-/B/C+/C+/C+ Extras: C-/C-/C/C/C- Films: C-/C-/C/C/C-
Combining
comedy with social issues rarely works.
If anything, it usually leads to sloppy work, though some attempts are
better than just doing an outright pointless comedy. The following five recent releases prove this
point.
Chris
Morris’ Four Lions (2010) wants to
be a comedy about young adult Arabs acting like children wanting to for, a
terrorist group. The premise, one note
as it is, apparently amused some, but I was surprised just how bad this was. Though the idea could be funny if the makers
knew the definition of irony or deeply dug into the politics of the situation,
but instead we get a smug, self-amused wreck of a work that is all over the
place and never amusing. If it wanted to
offer an alternate discourse on those featured, it failed there to.
In
comparison, James L. Brooks’ unfortunate dud How Do You Know (2010) is about nothing much, but at least does not
think it is much more, yet how did this not work? Reese Witherspoon, Owen Wilson and Paul Rudd
are good comic talents, but they tend too often to be only as good as their
material and that is sadly what happens in this misguided comedy in which Jack
Nicholson (as Rudd’s father) steals the few scenes he is in and the rest plays
like a very bad TV movie as a near love triangle forms between the three
younger actors as they all try to figure out what love is. Too bad the screenplay does not begin to know
or care.
The
result is tired fluff that looks good and does not go anywhere, like a Hostess
Cake that looks good, but you should skip eating. Except for very few amusing moments, this is
a big disappointment from Brooks, especially now that I know how much money was
spent on it. Where did the cash go?
Offering
a better Arab discourse than Four Lions
is Bahman Ghobadi’s No One Knows About
Persian Cats (2009) because the people are not portrayed as idiots, but as
people. This is done as a docudrama
involving the underground world of forbidden Rock music in Iran and has some interesting music and moments,
but the scripted parts ruin what could have been a really good piece in the
vein of Milos Forman’s work that drove the Soviet Union
nuts. More music and data on what was
really going on versus the scripted parts would have made this something, but
the contradictory approaches backfire.
Still, I was glad to see it once, even when I was ultimately
disappointed.
Then
there is Cheryl Dunye’s The Owls
(2010) about older lesbians trying to weather changing times and
relationships. Dunye (Watermelon Woman) has managed to
achieve a discourse for alternate female sexuality in her work and is one of
the few directors surviving the industry uncompromised in presenting such
work. There is no explicit comedy, but a
few scenes are comic in an implicit way meant to reflect the realities a
lesbian audience has to deal with in real life all the time.
However,
this falls short, juggles more than the script can handle (despite some good
performances) and gets so carried away at the end that I did not ultimately buy
it. I also saw some missed
opportunities, but maybe that will fit another film. Still, it at least had characters that were
realistic and some of that comes from their dignity, until the film collapses,
than that matters less unfortunately when this implodes.
Finally
is another project with a gay discourse, but one that tries to combine a gay
male sensibility with that of heterosexual females (and an Asian one at that)
in Quentin Lee’s The People I’ve Slept
With (2009) is so fascinated by what he sees as the common denominators
between the two discourses that the storyline about a young lady who loves to
sleep around becomes too silly (and as a substitute for something to say,
gross) to work and it goes from being potentially a challenging work to a very
unfortunate, predictable one.
In
addition, so much of this is predictable and we have seen it in so much indie,
mumblecore and Gay New Wave work that it plays more like a bad student thesis
film than anything that resembles an original work that is finalized. Too bad, because there is much to say, but
Lee became too distracted and self-amused to do what he could have here. Another sign of desperation has the female
lead talking to the audience (breaking the fourth wall) far too often. This might not put you to sleep, but it will
come close.
All five
just add up to apathy.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image on Lions
is loaded with degraded images, shaky camerawork, low def digital and is not
that great looking, while the 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image on Know at least looks like some of its
big budget was used to make this look like a grade-A film, even if it did not
turn out that way all along. The
anamorphically enhanced 2.35 X 1 image on Cats
and anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Owls are the softest here with motion blur, color issues, aliasing
errors and disappointing presentations all around. That leaves the anamorphically enhanced 1.85
X 1 image on Slept looking a little
better than the other DVDs, but not by much.
As for
sound, both Blu-rays have DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 mixes and they sound
better than the DVDs here, but Lions
has rough sound that is sometimes monophonic, distorted and digital in nature
that is not great in the mix. Know does not have a great soundfield,
but it is the cleanest and warmest soundtrack here by default and once again,
enough money went into the mix. All the
DVDs have Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes, save Owls with Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, but
they all have the same basic stereo style of fidelity with the 5.1 mixes
stretching around the low budget sound, which you can hear when you compared
Dolby 5.1 and 2.0 on Slept.
Extras include
making of pieces on all five releases, with Lions adding Storyboards, Deleted Scenes, Bradford Interview and
Background Material, while Know adds
Deleted Scenes, Blooper Reel, Filmmaker Audio Commentary and Blu-ray exclusive
Additional Deleted Scenes, Brooks/Hans Zimmer on-camera interview and BD Live
interactivity. Cats adds a trailer, Owls
has text n the Cast & Crew and other information and Slept also has an Alternate Opening and Alternate Ending.
- Nicholas Sheffo