American: The Bill Hicks Story (2011/BBC Blu-ray + DVD) + HappyThankYouMorePlease (2009/Anchor Bay Blu-ray) + Just Go With It (2011/Sony Blu-ray +
DVD) + Passion Play (2011/Image
Blu-ray) + Ricky (2008/IFC/MPI DVD)
+ Rubber (2010/Magnolia/MagNet
Blu-ray) + White Lightnin’
(2008/IFC/MPI DVD)
Picture: C+
& C/B-/B- & C+/B-/C/B-/C-
Sound: C+/B-/B & B-/B-/B-/B-/C+
Extras: C+/C/C-/C-/C-/C-/C- Films:
C+/C/C-/C+/C/C-/C-
Comedy
takes many forms and sometimes it crosses over into surrealism and politics. Here is a recent sampling of releases that
demonstrate this….
We start
with a documentary about a comedian who passed away long before his time. American:
The Bill Hicks Story (2011), who I vaguely remember. An unconventional, surreal comedian, he told
wild jokes, challenging jokes and like Jonathan Winters, became many characters
instead of just impersonating them. His
later legacy was standing up against the first Bush Administration during the
first Gulf War when many remained silent and for this, he is highly respected
today. He was talented, but I never
found him outright funny, but he certainly was bold.
This
program goes deep into his past, lays out a solid biography of the man and
shows what he managed to accomplish. My
only problem with the overall work is that it assumes we know him and that we
all find him very funny, so it tends to coast on this when it could have been
showing, asking and saying more about him.
Still, it is a good work worth a look.
Extras include a booklet inside the respective format cases with nice
illustrations and text about the program, while both discs offers a half-hour
of additional vintage performances, 3 hours of extended interviews, Bill’s
personal audio journal, deleted/alternate scenes, alternate animation sequence,
trailers, audience reactions, Austin SXSW Panel with Bill’s friends, Dominion
tour, festival footage in the U.K. & U.S. with the Hicks Family, the family
visiting Abbey Road, U.K. 15th Anniversary tribute, comedy school,
Dwight in London, Making of Arizona Bay and the ranch.
Josh
Radnor’s HappyThankYouMorePlease
(2009) is set in New York
and though it is not quite another tired mumblecore indie release, the
notsofunny tale of a man (Radnor, who has some talent) who finds a quiet young
pre-teen boy on the subway and tries to help him. You can suspend disbelief somewhat, but this
runs on longer than believability allows.
Then there are his other adult friends, including a potential new female
friend who sings (Kate Mara), no luck with men Annie (Malin Akerman) and a
couple (Zoë Kazan and Pablo Schreiber) who cannot decide if they can stay
together and if so, where to settle down.
There are
some good ideas and moments here, but besides seeing some of this before and
having some appealing actors, the scenes too often look like they are reciting
dialogue form the script and trying to look happy doing it at the cost of
naturalism. If this were a hit, I could
see this aspect being spoofed. Of
course, the city is not enough of a character, something Radnor should know
from Woody Allen’s best work. Then there
is the comedy, which is better than a sitcom, but hardly what I would call
funny. We’ll see what Radnor does next, but
this is very uneven.
Extras
include Deleted Scenes, featurette about the music with Jaymay and feature length
audio commentary that is not bad with Radnor and Producer Jesse Hara.
Adam
Sandler is back and he has brought Jennifer Aniston with him in Dennis Dugan’s
new non-comedy that wishes it were: Just
Go With It (2011), which no one should.
The leads have not been funny in years and together, somehow cancel out
each other in this idiot plot piece about Sandler due to get married to another
woman, but turning to Aniston to have her pretend to be his ex-wife to cover
for one of his many dumb lies. Allan
Loeb & Timothy Dowling’s screenplay adaptation of a French play is awful
and this might have been a total disaster, but something funny happens almost
by accident and stops this from being the total; bomb it would have been otherwise.
Dave
Matthews and Nicole Kidman turn up as a snobby couple and her character knows
Aniston’s, so Aniston has Sandler pretend to be her current husband as not to
be outdone and the film becomes entertaining by accident; typical of ALL
Sandler films when they work at all once every 5 -7 years or so. Matthews can act and Kidman is a riot never
faltering as the wacky snob who seems to have it all. If you must see this, know you will not go
into a total coma.
The
Blu-ray has exclusive extras including 11 minutes of additional Deleted Scenes,
9 featurettes, BD Live interactivity and movieIQ interactivity, while both
format versions (including DVD) has other Deleted Scenes, Filmmaker/Cast
commentaries, 3 featurettes and Laughter
Is Contagious – Blooper Reel.
Mitch
Glazer’s Passion Play (2011) could
have been a comedy and has comic possibilities, even with Bill Murray showing
up, but any comedy is very incidental despite the film’s situation. Mickey Rourke is a has-been Jazz musician who
goes to the circus one day and discovers a very beautiful woman (Megan Fox)
there who he is attracted to, but that becomes something more when he discovers
she has wings like a bird!
Despite
problems with the men running the circus, including its insane leader (Rhys Ifans),
he escapes and helps her. Then he makes
a mistake and turns to a tough gangster type (Murray, in an amazing performance
where he remarkably out-acts Rourke (which is NOT easy) and everyone else) to
help her and him by offering her to him for a cut of profits, which
spectacularly backfires when this very powerful man becomes more obsessed with
her than expected.
The best
dramatic film on the list, I liked the idea that it was just so different, had
some interesting performances (Kelly Lynch, who reunites with Rourke two
decades after working with Michael Cimino on his Desperate Hours remake) and ideas it actually knows what to do
with. Even Fox is good here. Comedy is replaced with irony often, yet
comedy haunts this work in some odd way and you should see it to see for
yourself.
Francois Ozon also tries a tale of a human with wings in Ricky (2008), a French film that could have moved into many
directions. The title character is a
newborn child, so is it Satanic? Are we
in for another Rosemary’s Baby, Omen or It’s Alive? Will this be a
“feel-good” film? Well, Ozon’s
screenplay does not deliver a supernatural thriller, which is wise considering
how ineffective his thriller Swimming
Pool was. But what we do get is a
doodling tale that is supposed to be funny somehow and never is. It is not a sitcom or outright silly, but the
attempts to do anything joyous and profound never add up and despite some good
actors (including Sergi Lopez and Alexandra Lamy) just don’t work and it is an
amusing curio at best. I just did not
care for it and found it forgettable. A
trailer is the only extra.
Quentin
Dupieux also tries something profound and funny with Rubber (2010) which is almost supernatural in this goofy tale about
a car tire that awakens and possesses telekinetic powers! No kidding.
And the tire somehow has the name Robert, for whatever reason. After a dumb opening dialogue that gets the
color of E.T. wrong (don’t ask), the tire comes to life and gets on a
roll. Too bad this film does not.
This is
just way too silly and pointless to work and cannot deiced if the tire is a
menace or just an amusement, so it is like watching Last Action Hero (though is anything really that bad?) or the Beavis
& Butt-Head episode where Beavis rolls all over the place in a tire, which
seems like a Fellini exercise versus this run-on dud. Extras include a Theatrical Trailer, four
interview pieces, camera tests for the tire and HDNet episode promoting it.
Finally
we have Dominic Murphy’s White Lightnin’
(2008), a story about Jesse White (Edward Hogg), a great dancer who also became
a criminal and legend dubbed The Dancing Outlaw. His father was an all-time great dancer, but
Jesse could not stop getting into trouble and became a criminal after going
from institution to institution with no one to reach out to help him or get him
on a better path. While the performances
(including some bold work by Carrie Fisher) are good, the film, like its camera
style and editing, is all over the place and would qualify (for better and worse,
depending on how you see it) as a Hicksploitation film. I just found it too clichéd and predictable
to recommend. A trailer is the only
extra.
The 1080p
1.78 X 1 digital High Definition image on American
is a culmination of new HD and older analog video footage for the most part,
with some stills thrown in that is edited well enough, but pulls down the
picture quality as expected for a documentary of this kind. The anamorphically enhanced DVD is even more
watered down. The 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital
High Definition image on Just and Rubber fare a little better with a more
consistent presentation, but they too have softness and detail limits. The anamorphically enhanced Just DVD is watered down and Video
Black weak by comparison. The 1080p 2.35
X 1 digital High Definition image on Happy
and Passion manage to be as good,
but also have similar problems.
The
anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on Ricky
is a very weak presentation with blown-out Video White, stylizing that
backfires and degraded imaging to accommodate the digital effects. The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 image on
Lightnin’ is the worst on the list
with purposely degraded images, tired shaky camerawork and other flaws on
purpose that become obnoxious very quickly and add to the clichés.
The
DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) lossless 5.1 mixes on al the Blu-rays (save Dolby True
HD 5.1 on Happy) vary with Just having the warmest presentation
and best soundfield of all the releases (though the Dolby Digital 5.1 on the
DVD version is no match), while American
is the weakest and very, very narrowly better than the Dolby Digital 5.1 on the
DVD version of that release, but that is to be expected considering there is
more monophonic and simple stereo archival audio than any of the other titles. The DTS-MA on Passion and Rubber are
about evenly matched, good recordings, if not perfect soundfields. The Dolby True HD 5.1 on Happy is well recorded and not bad for a low budget production, but
the dialogue-based mix is more in the center channel than I would have
liked. That leaves the Dolby Digital 5.1
mixes on Ricky (French and with some
soundfield) and Rubber, the later of
which is as choppy and sporadic as the image, so expect a broken soundfield and
spaces of monophonic sound.
- Nicholas Sheffo
