Balls Out – Gary The Tennis Coach: Extras Big &
Bouncy Edition (2008/Sony DVD)
Picture: C Sound: B- Extras: C Film: C
Danny
Leiner has made two of the dumbest comedy films of the decade in Dude, Where’s My Car? and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle. They represent a decline in commercial
filmmaking in Hollywood, especially as they actually, eventually made money for
their studios. In a strange twist of
fate of sorts, he is the director of Balls
Out – Gary The Tennis Coach (2008), a new comedy with Seann William Scott
that turns out to be too raunchy to land up in theaters. It has a bad script by newer writers and
would not be so good, but Scott gives a performance so outrageous, this may
just find an audience.
Scott
plays the title character, a janitor at a high school who always loved tennis
and in some ways, never gave up his dream.
When he meets the school’s tennis coach (Randy Quaid) under odd
circumstances, he starts to get involved with the team and his ways are
eccentric on the surface. When he takes
over the whole team, he goes bonkers and all hell breaks loose.
Can he
teach the young kids to play the game well?
He can actually play, which is a plus.
However, he starts to cross the line in wacky ways and some of them
include hiring strippers to get key team members to grow up, become “men” and
he turns out to be more demented than expected.
The moustache he has is a prop used to great effect and the result is he
comes across as Andy Roddick on many, many drugs with a few screws loose. Again, the film is not great, but the
boldness of Scott (which is has been known for to begin with) and some patches
of the script that do work produce some outrageous laughs. If you can handle hard R-rated situations,
this is worth a look.
The anamorphically
enhanced 1.78 X 1 image is not great however, has motion blur to go along with
its inconsistent look and should have looked a bit better, but I bet we see a
Blu-ray if this is a DVD hit. The Dolby
Digital 5.1 mix is somewhat dialogue/joke-driven and the surrounds are reserved
for music and funny sound effects. Extra
include deleted scenes, outtakes and the making of featurette Tennis Anyone? See the film before watching those for best
effect.
- Nicholas Sheffo
