Between my job, which has gone from soul-crushing to soul-crushingly busy, and this well-advised "watch a movie every day all summer" plan, I've basically lost the ability to think. Which goes a long way to explaining why I'm not talking about anything in the real world: talking about movies is really more of a reflex by now, but analysis? Of the world? That's beyond me at the moment.

That said, here's the quick and dirty rundown of my thoughts for the recent news of the world:
-Jon Benet wasn't killed by that dude? Called it. As did everyone else, but still.
-I for one am glad that Pluto's no longer a planet. So there. And I'm not going to get all weepy-eyed over the Very Educated Mother mnemonic, insofar as I usually had to think of the order of the planets to remember the phrase ("My mother, there's Venus and Earth...and Jupiter...screw this bullcrap").
-New Orleans isn't going to get any better because I blog about it. In fact, New Orleans isn't going to get better ever. Fuck Bush.
-No matter what CNN says, this is not the most important news story right now.

The other effect of this pronounced brain-death is that I found the movie Beerfest funny.

It's not that the film is as aggressively unfunny as, say, Talladega Nights. Indeed, some of the gags even express something akin to wit. Example: the film opens with a mock warning, noting that the beer drinkers in the film are professionals, and if you attempt to drink that much... you will die. Okay, it's not Lubitsch, but it's cutely ironic.

The immaterial. Let it just be said that it revolves around a drinking game version of Fight Club, and the year of training that two American brothers and their three friends undergo in the hope of triumphing. There's a lot else in their, involving the theft of Munich's greatest beer recipe and the rightful heirs to the 4th-greatest brewery in Germany, but for a solid two-thirds of the movie, this is all shunted aside in favor of skit-like scenes of heavy drinkers drinking heavily.

It strives to be a latter-day frat hijinks comedy, and by "strives" I really mean "strains," but sometimes it works. The conceit of a bunch of middle-aged guys finding fulfillment in playing beer games for a year is stupid, it is supposed to be stupid, and it is acknowledged to be stupid. But it is stupid in the name of blue-collar male homosociality, and while celebrating schlubby men is never the stuff of art, this film does a better job of it than e.g. the entire slate of CBS sitcoms. It occurs to me that I should avoid discussing homosociality in the context of a film called Beerfest.

Mostly, the film is a celebration of beer. Now, my people are not beer people. We are whiskey people, gin people, vodka people. In times of economic flower, we are wine people. But I know beer, and I know how it is different to drink beer than other alcohol. You get drunk off hard liquor because you desire to get drunk; you get drunk off of wine because wine is too expensive not to drink it. You get drunk off of beer, however, because you are sharing it. Nobody sits and drinks beer alone until he (and it is always a "he," to this movie) is pissed. If you drink that much beer, it is surely because you are drinking it with your good friends and companions. Unlike wine and liquor, beer drunkenness is an act of camaraderie. Bukowski and Hemingway drank liquor; jovial middle-aged fratboys drink beer.

Imagine watching drunk people. Happy drunk people. Many of the things they do are amusing, some are gross, some are gross but amusing anyway, and the rest are just embarassing. This is precisely the feeling one gets from Beerfest. And for a long time the film rests on the "amusing" side of things, even if it is a sort of thin amusement that is only really satisfying because you have nowhere else to be (again, like watching drunk people). It was written and performed by Broken Lizard, the troupe behind Super Troopers (which I enjoyed) and Club Dread (which I did not), and it is very much of their style: sophomoric, and yet entirely self-aware about being sophomoric. However it is also a bit flaccid, and as the bits go on one gets an ever-increasing sense that the actors are mostly having fun for their sake, not ours. For this I blame director (and co-writer and co-star) Jay Chandrasekhar: he simply does not understand how to lead other people into making a movie. His is by far the best performance, which speaks to a knowledge of the what the film requires, and an inability to communicate that to others. The film is not so drastically flabby as The Dukes of Hazzard, his last outing, but it sags.

This sagging finally comes along and blows the movie's face off towards the end, when that beer recipe and that brewery raise their ugly MacGuffiny heads. This film cannot support a story - hell, it can hardly support characters - and the energy that has steadily been leaking away for an hour and change evaporates completely. "Drinking games Fight Club" is funnier on paper than execution (and are you laughing at the phrase "drinking games Fight Club"? I didn't think so), and to devote a solid 25 minutes at the end to this plot hook is suicidal. Like so many other American comedies, Beerfest is done in not so much because its creators don't know funny, as they don't know moderation. At 110 minutes, Beerfest simply cannot keep up the loose and boozy atmosphere of its earliest scenes, and the endgame is painfully slow.

This is an ideal party film: it does not require that you pay attention to it, it is uniquely suited to being made a drinking game, you can fast-forward through the dull parts, and by the time it hits the brick wall you're too drunk to care. But in a theater? Only if they let you bring alcohol.


P.S. Chandrasekhar has now ended two consecutive films with Willie Nelson pot jokes. Do I smell an auteurist motif?
P.P.S. God, I hope not.