Bobby Collins: Telling It Like It Is (2011/MVD DVD)/Chalet Girl (2011/IFC/MPI DVD)/Highroad (2010/Millennium DVD)/Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story (2008/Anchor Bay DVD)/See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989/TriStar/Image Blu-ray)

 

Picture: C/C+/C/C/B-     Sound: C/C+/C+/C/B-     Extras: C-/C+/C-/D/D     Main Programs: B-/C+/C-/D/C+

 

 

Comedy is not easy and sometimes it is very hard.  Then there are times it does no work.  Here are some recent releases that show both.

 

 

Bobby Collins: Telling It Like It Is (2011) is our only stand-up comedy release this time, but it is of the underrated and genuinely funny comic who should have had more success than he landed up with, so I was pleased to see him back.  He has new things to say and has a better mood and energy than many of the stand-ups we have recently seen in action.  It is about an hour, is the best release here and worth your time, especially if you want to laugh.  Collins’ comedy is honest and we don’t hear that enough these days.  A brief interview piece is the only extra.

 

 

Phil Traill’s Chalet Girl (2011) is a racier British variant of the “gal out of water” comedies Disney and bad cable TV channels have done for years.  Felicity Jones is a young lady sick of boring, low paying jobs and takes a job working for rich people on vacation at a ski resort.  Of course, she’ll automatically meet the man of her dreams, but he’ll be engaged to be married (note they are never already married) and this one (Ed Westwick) at first does not seem to possibly be in her life.  Only later, to the credit of the writers, that changes.

 

However, we get eccentric characters, clichéd moments and save the nice locales, this is everything we have seen before, but is really meant for older teens and up.  We also get some good supporting actors (including Brooke Shields playing a snob and the underrated Bill Nighy) so this is an ambitious production and I liked the look of it, but it eventually becomes predictably boring and sadly does not go very far.  Hope we see these actors again, though.  Extras include a trailer, bunch of viral videos, bunch of interview clips, bunch of behind the scenes clips and commentary.

 

 

Matt Walsh’s Highroad (2010) is even worse, a stoner comedy of sorts that also wants to be a road movie, but fails on all levels.  A Rock Band is also involved, but not much of a plot.  Horatio Sanz also shows up, but to no avail and the result is a bad work obviously trying to top the Hangover films and failing miserably.  See it at your own risk.  Extras include Cast/Crew Interviews and digital copy.

 

 

Even worse, the worst of all, is Tommy Reid’s Screwball: The Ted Whitfield Story (2008), a would-be comedy about a whiffleball champion that also wants to spoof the sports and baseball world, but is remarkably bad, pointless, unfunny and has more of the style of HBO’s overrated Eastbound & Down series than I would have liked.  It is one of those duds that is certain it thinks it is funny when it never is.  Wow is this awful!  There are no extras.

 

 

Finally we have Arthur Hiller’s See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989), the third of four teamings of Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder, which had previously yielded two hits: Hiller’s Silver Streak and Poitier’s Stir Crazy.  This did some business, but was not as big a hit.  A very politically incorrect film that would never get made today, Pryor is an angry blind man with a foul mouth and Wilder is a deaf newsstand owner who is alone and they eventually meet when Pryor is looking for a job.

 

Unfortunately, someone is killed after the meeting and they (through wacky circumstances) become the accused.  Like Silver Streak, this wants to be a thriller and a comedy, but the thriller part never works and comedy only sometimes, especially because is tries to have a refined version of the foul humor of Stir Crazy, but that does not pan out either.  The music and shooting style are so 1980s and the use of New York City pre-9/11 makes this odd to watch.

 

Some humor works, but other moments do not, but we do get a very young, then unknown Kevin Spacey as one of the villains and Anthony Zerbe as another.  It is not a great film by any means, but if you like comedy, you might want to try it once just to get all the good laughs out of it.  You can see Pryor was already not doing well, starting to get sick from his Multiple Sclerosis and the leads’ chemistry is starting to fade, but they still are talents and they have enough moments to visit or revisit this.  There are no extras here either.

The anamorphically enhanced 1.85 X 1 on Chalet is the best looking of the DVDs here, with some good color and shots, but still some softness, but not as many motion blur issues as the other three DVDs, all here in anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 presentations.  However, the 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image on Evil is the best here, though the print and transfer has its limits, this is a professional 35mm shoot that was geared towards commercial appeal and holds up for its age.

 

The lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo on Collins is limited but just fine for a stand-up comedy release, while the remaining DVDs have lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mixes that sound better if not having the best soundfields save Screwball, which might as well have been 2.0 Stereo being very limited sonically and shows its low-budget roots.  It also has some location audio issues.  The PCM 2.0 Stereo mix on Evil has Dolby Pro Logic surrounds and they can be very amusing, not always working, especially since this was originally issued in Dolby’s older A-type analog noise reduction system.  The music score is an odd one by former Police member Stewart Copeland, who also scored TV’s The Equalizer (reviewed elsewhere on this site) with sometimes similar results.

 

 

-   Nicholas Sheffo