As
Cool As I Am
(2011/MPI/IFC Blu-ray)/The
Beauty Of The Devil
(1950/Gaumont/Cohen Media Blu-ray)/Grown
Ups 2 (2013/Sony Blu-ray
w/DVD)/The Internship
(2013/Fox Blu-ray w/DVD)/My
Name Is Nobody
(1973/Image Blu-ray)
Picture:
B-/B-/B- & C/B- & C/B- Sound: B-/C+/B- & C+/B &
B-/C+ Extras: C-/C+/D/C-/D Films: C/C+/D/C-/C+
Here
is a wide-ranging set of comedies that show how unfunny and even odd
the genre can become.
Max
Mayer's As
Cool As I Am
(2011) tries to be a combination of a feel good family film and a
processed mumblecore film and fails badly at both as young Lucy
(Sarah Bolger) wants more of a family as her father is absentee dad
(an odd James Marsden) and working mother (Claire Danes) leave her
more alone than she would like, despite some male friends she is
tentatively involved with. It starts with bad, obvious jokes, than
goes to a set up, another set of bad jokes, another set up and keeps
doing this until it is obvious after a little while it has nowhere to
go.
She
also wants to be a Mario Batali kind of cook and that rings phony,
but the whole 92 minutes never adds up and is not cool as anything.
Not even Cool
As Ice
with Vanilla Ice! Batali joins in as part of a series of familiar
cameos, but that feels like filler for a bad script and this is a big
disappointment that does not know where to go.
Extras
include a Behind The Scenes featurette and an Original Theatrical
Trailer.
Rene
Clair's The
Beauty Of The Devil
(1950) is a comic, non-musical retelling of Faust with Michael Simon
(when Faust & Satan are older) and Gerard Philipe (when they are
younger) in dual roles that work well enough, but cover much of the
same comic territory we have seen in other adaptations and take-offs
of the same material over many decades. Gaumont put out some money
and effort to make this film work at the time and it is intelligent,
energetic, humorous and ambitious, but it has not dated well and was
never my favorite Clair film to being with. Nice that the Cohen
Media Group has issues such a nice Blu-ray so you can see for
yourself. However, only expect so much if you are seeing it for the
first time or for the first time in a while.
Clair
had fared better with Le Million (1931), the more commercial I
Married A Witch (1942, both issued by Criterion) and his solid
1947 film of Agatha Christie's ...and then there were none
(see the VCI Blu-ray reviewed elsewhere on this site) with this film
not always having the character of his best films. Still, it is
worth seeing and is as good as anything in this review.
Extras
include an illustrated booklet on the film with cast/crew listings,
while the Blu-ray disc adds a vintage and new Theatrical Trailer,
plus an hour-long featurette on Clair and the making of the film with
friends, co-workers and scholars who knew him.
Vastly
more Satanic is the new Adam Sandler film, Dennis Dugan's extremely,
absolutely, unnecessary Grown
Ups 2
(2013) which is one of the true horror stories of 2013. Made by Sony
as a sure thing along with some films that bombed for them this
summer (the awful After
Earth
(as bad as this!) and White
House Down),
surprise bombs (by everyone except those who actually like motion
pictures) from every studio were so bad that this sequel slipped
through and made money!
Sandler
is joined by Chris Rock, Kevin James and David Spade sleepwalking
through every unfunny line, unfunny scene and everything these people
have done a dozen times in their career before. They got lucky and
we did not. Only see this is you are trying to acquire permanent
brain damage.
Sadly,
there are extras including the DVD, HD Ultraviolet Digital Copy for
PC, PC portable and iTunes affiliated devices, Deleted Scenes and a
dumb featurette about nothing, plus we get three more tired
featurettes as Blu-ray exclusives including ones on cameos by name
stars who must have needed the money or were extremely bored with
their lives.
Shawn
Levy's The
Internship
(2013) is not quite as cynical, but it unnecessarily reunites Vince
Vaughn and Owen Wilson doing their same old schtick together where
they try to go to Google Campus (this place exists?) to reinvent
themselves after their dead end careers as (analog?) salesmen have
died out, much like the lame screenplay the actors have to work with.
I
can see why this was a dud and even Unrated, I can't image who the
audience is for this or if the audience for these actors still
exists. I guess if they acted dumber and more idiotic like Sandler
and company, this would have made money, but this duo has more talent
and even at this low, tired level, that was too much for the
leave-your-brain-at-the-door audience. This is barely better by
default, but is still a yawner.
Extras
include the DVD and Digital HD Ultraviolet Copy for PC, PC portable
and iTunes capable devices, while the Blu-ray adds the Any
Given Monday
featurette, a
feature length audio commentary track by Levy and Deleted Scenes.
Finally
we have a Spaghetti Western that gets so silly, it belongs on this
list. From a restored print that still needs work, My Name Is Nobody
(1973) was made when those films got too silly for their own good and
this one gets slap happy too often and literally! Co-written and
co-produced by Sergio Leone, Tonini Valerii (A
Day Of Anger)
is credited as the sole director, but it is erroneously referred to
as Leone film on the opening title card announcing it is a restored
print and looks like Leone may have at least done some reshoots.
Terence
Hill plays the adult version of a young boy who was so stunned by
what a great gunslinger Henry Fonda is that he grows up to be the
next great himself. However, they have their own opponents after
stolen money in groups of professional thieves, so can they working
separately get the big money they want for themselves and survive?
This potentially interesting scenario where they never really
collaborate is never realized and foes for so much comedy that fans
of the more serious Leone films will be disappointed and even
shocked.
R.G.
Armstrong, Steve Kanaly and Geoffrey Lewis show up among the cast of
unknowns for amusing turns, but this is a novelty and curio for the
most diehard fans of these Westerns only and reminds us how quickly
this cycle died out.
There
are no extras, but a trailer and some poster art would have been
nice.
For
different reasons, all the Blu-rays have their image limits, starting
with the HD-shot 1080p 1.85 X 1 digital High Definition image
transfers on Cool
and Grown,
which have a few nice shots, but also come across as generic too
often and lack color range, while the
anamorphically enhanced Grown
DVD is very soft and very hard to watch, much like the hit itself.
The
1080p 1.33 X 1 black & white digital High Definition image
transfer on Devil
can be soft in parts, show the age of the materials used in others,
but I also noticed more grain than usual suggesting some material was
either second generation or just shot on older stock that was not
refined.
The
1080p 2.35 X 1 AVC @ 24 MBPS digital High Definition image transfer
on Internship
is also an HD shoot, but at least it has a bit more color range than
the other two HD shoots on the list above, but its
anamorphically enhanced DVD image is also very hard to watch.
That
leaves the 1080p 2.35 X 1 digital High Definition image transfer on
Nobody,
which claims to be a restored print, but the age of the materials
used come through and there are more than a few glaring scratches,
marks and tears that were not corrected, cleaned and fixed. Though
issued overseas in
dye-transfer, three-strip Technicolor upon its original release,
Universal seems to have skipped such prints for the U.S. market.
There is some good detail here, but not all the time and color can be
a little limited and rarely on a level of the kind of Technicolor you
would see in a Spaghetti Western.
Shot
in real 35mm anamorphic Panavision by Director of Photography
Giuseppe Ruzzolini (several of Pasolini's films including Porcile,
Leone's’ A
Fistful Of Dynamite,
Portecorvo's Burn!)
uses the very widescreen frame[pretty well, even if the shots are
nothing new at this point and the improved definition of Panavision
over cheaper Techniscope is does not show much here. Still, this is
far superior to previous releases of the film. It just needs more
work.
Not
expecting much from the sound for any of these entries, all the
Blu-rays offer DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 5.1 lossless mixes, save PCM
2.0 Mono on Devil
and DTS-HD MA (Master Audio) 2.0 Dual Mono lossless sound on Nobody.
Internship
is the big surprise here with a very active, consistent soundfield
throughout taking as much advantage of its DTS-MA 5.1 as a joke and
dialogue-driven comedy could, plus its lossy
Dolby Digital 5.1 from the DVD version is more dynamic than expected
either, finding itself easily competing with the limited DTS-MA 5.1
on the other two new films which are too much towards the front
speakers. The lossy Dolby Digital 5.1 mix on the Grown
DVD is weaker and along with its DTS Blu-ray, shows how lazy the
sound mix really is, which is why the older films with more sound
character can actually compete.
-
Nicholas Sheffo
