Brooklyn Brothers
Beat The Best (2011/Oscilloscope
DVD)/George Lopez: It’s Not Me It’s You
(2012/HBO DVD)/Harland Williams: A Force
Of Nature (2012/Image DVD)/Lapland
Odyssey (2010/Artsploitation DVD)/The
Trouble With Bliss (2011/Anchor Bay DVD)/The Wise Kids (2012/Wolfe DVD)
Picture: C+ Sound: C+ (Lapland: C) Extras: C/C/C-/C/C-/C Main Programs: C/B-/C/C+/C-/C+
As we go
into the new year, here are a set of comedy releases with usually mixed
results…
New York
City-based Oscilloscope Pictures has issued Ryan O’Nan’s initially amusing (and
amusingly titled) Brooklyn Brothers Beat
The Best (2011) with our director as a musician of sorts named Alex who
wants to be in a band and give up his office job to do so, but his talent is…
unique and limited. After a falling out
with the partner of the duo he is in, another guy named Jim (Michael Weston)
finds him in a park after getting into a fight while playing a clinically
depressing song at a school appearance where the children have their own
problems.
This
meeting leads to a tour of sorts and off on a road trip they go. A brave as the performances can be at times,
this was just far too predictable down to the humor, the style of humor and the
mumblecore clichés it represents. It is
still different and has some amusements, but I expected more or at least the
next step in this kind of comedy, but like Judd Apatow’s films (and his many
imitators), this is played out comedy and ought to be the coda of such
comedy. It will not. Andrew McCarthy, Christopher McDonald and
Melissa Leo also show up, but even they cannot make this better. Music fans and NYC fans will be more likely
interested than the rest.
Extras
include the Original Theatrical Trailer, a behind-the-scenes interview
featurette with the co-stars, A Musical
Moose Outtakes reel, two short films by the co-stars and a Live Performance
+ Q&A at the Northside Festival in Brooklyn,
New York.
Much
funnier is George Lopez: It’s Not Me
It’s You (2012), his fun and formidable (but less political) follow-up to Tall, Dark & Chicano which we
covered a little while ago at this link:
http://www.fulvuedrive-in.com/review/9337/George+Lopez:+Tall,+Dark+&+Chicano
He is
still one of the funniest, most gifted stand-up comics in the world, but the 56
minutes of routines here are more personal and general than the previous
release, yet he is not repeating himself much at all versus the past work of
his I have seen. This is the best
release on the list and a behind-the-scenes Road To making of
featurette worth seeing after watching the show is sadly the only extra.
Harland Williams: A Force Of
Nature (2012) has
the wacky and mixed comic trying to do stand-up literally in the middle of
nowhere taping his performances usually meant for an indoor audience. This is an experiment, but it does not work,
almost playing as if he was trying to hide recent troubles with crowds. For fans only, he has some talent, but
sometimes, his comic moments are poor and even outright bad. A “Natural Interviews” featurette is the only
extra.
We do
better with the Finland import Lapland
Odyssey (2010), directed by Dome Karukoski involving a young couple who
have a fight because he did not get her a new digital cable box, so he (his
name is Janne) goes to find a Digibox and keeps finding trouble all over the
place instead. Soon, the police are
after them, they keep running into all kinds of women and old friends, the
police go after them and others go after them with guns, but I will not say
anything more except that its Finnish backdrop makes it more interesting than
if it were a tired U.S.
production.
Unfortunately,
it does not come up with nothing much new, yet I was more entertained at times,
but that eventually takes a turn for the more familiar. Still, it is better than many a comedy I have
seen in the past year by default, so if you think you might find it funny, see
it.
Extras
include an 8-page illustrated booklet on the film including informative text
and interviews on the film inside the DVD case, while the DVD adds a short
entitled Burungo.
Dexter
star Michael C. Hall tries something different with Michael Knowles’ The Trouble With Bliss (2011) as an
older guy still living at home with his father (Peter Fonda), womanizing and
not being able to find a good job. This
is all about to change in this would-be comedy that never rings true, has an
awkward mix of fair performances that never gel and was the biggest
disappointment on the list.
We have
also seen too many of these kinds of comedies as well (both the mumblecore and
Apatow cycles have covered all this territory before and better), so this one
is too weak and too late. Too bad,
because Hall has more in him if he could just find the role.
Extras
include the Original Theatrical Trailer, Deleted Scenes and an on-camera
interview with Hall.
Finally
we have Stephen Cone’s The Wise Kids
(2012), a send-up of strict church culture with some drama as a group of young
adults do a play about the Crucifixion that instead leads to several of the
young men to further come out of the closet and a few young ladies to get
involved as well. Handled better than
most such gay cinema we have seen lately (for the titles we catch), this was a
little bolder, more original, different and surprisingly not restricted to a
gay audience.
The
performances are not bad overall and directing is handled nicely enough. That does nor mean it will set off some new
wave of gay comedy, but it was handled very well and professionally, which is
not the case in so many indie productions of late that deal with relationships.
Extras
include two featurettes: a behind-the-scenes look at the production and Religion & Sexuality In The Wise Kids.
All the
DVDs here are in anamorphically enhanced 1.78 X 1 image transfers save Brothers in 2.35 X 1 framing, but they
are all surprisingly on par with each other including all having some softness
and a little motion blur throughout. Lopez is restricted to one stage, which
helps it out, while Brothers and Lapland have
the best visuals of the bunch. The
narrative releases have lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 while the stand-up releases
only offer lossy Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo, all also offering audio on par with
each other, save Lapland
whose center channel is going into my left speaker for some reason. Kids
actually has both soundtracks as an option with a limited difference (the 5.1
barely edges out the 2.0) because these comedies are mostly about talk.
- Nicholas Sheffo
