beer league Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Woohoo! Happy New Year, DVD junkies! All right! Let's just kick off this year with a whole bunch of fantastic DVDs!

Beer League -- Low-grade softball comedy that's 100% positive there's nothing funnier in the world than poop, weiners, farts, pee-pee, boobs, burps, jugs, sluts, beer, penises and vaginas. Oh, and the word "joikoff," which is mentioned more times in Beer League than John F. Kennedy is mentioned in JFK. Aims (low) for the frat-boy crowd, but I lived in a frat house for two years, and we would have turned this thing off after nine minutes. Extras include an audio commentary, a few featurettes, and a whole bunch of Artie Lange-related wackiness.

The Covenant -- It's like The Craft got a sex change! A gang of goofy young warlocks make trouble for their enemies, or so I've heard; I haven't actually seen this one yet. But I got the "goofy" part from the trailer alone. Upside for schlock-fans: The director is Renny Harlin. Extras include a featurette and a (Harlin!) commentary.

Snakes on a Plane -- The worldwide mega-wild ultra-hip internet buzz sensation of the millennium ... that yielded a $13 million opening weekend and a total haul of about $34m. So much for internet buzz, eh? Still, a perfectly entertaining piece of mindless cinematic fluff, and one that'll almost certainly play better at home, because home is probably where you keep your beer and your bong. Extras include a bunch of featurettes, deleted scenes, gag reels, music videos ... but I just gotta hear the audio commentary between director Dave Eliis and mega-badass Samuel L. Jackson.

Oh, and new re-issues of Glory and My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Hmph. Let's just write this week off as a New Years Hangover. We'll meet here next Tuesday to talk about DVDs worth renting, like Crank, The Night Listener, The Illusionist and (one of my 2006 favorites) Conversations with Other Women.

About half of Beer League takes place in small, confined spaces like bar corners, bedrooms and diner booths. The other half takes place on a softball diamond. The weird thing about this is that there's absolutely no attempt at laughs during the softball scenes. Man hits ball. Cut to ball being chipped to third base. Cut to man running to the bag. This happens over and over, sans-hijinks, as if the audience cares about the stakes in a slow-pitch softball tournament. It becomes obvious that first-time director Frank Sebastiano, a former Saturday Night Live writer, didn't have the foggiest notion of how to do anything with a camera except maybe rent it, so he simply conceded that the softball half of his movie would be comedy-free. Not that the other half is exactly comedy, either. It's more of a hit-and-miss attempt at expanding the brand of 'Jersey lowlife' shtick beyond what's already been mined by Kevin Smith movies and The Sopranos. So in other words, if you live within a three-mile radius of my apartment, you're in the Beer League demographic.

If there's one thing I don't have, it's attitude. Born and raised in New York City, I've mastered the art of looking like I have attitude by studying those around me ... and it ain't easy. Through my training, I've learned the most important rule to follow while attempting to come off as someone with severe attitude is not to smile. Smiling shows weakness and, because of this, you'll notice that 98% of all New Yorkers rarely smile. Actually that's not true -- they will smile upon seeing something bad happen to another person. They smile because they're so glad it didn't happen to them.

It's okay though -- I've accepted the fact that I don't have attitude. I mean, growing up, I was rarely involved in a situation that forced me to utilize some form of attitude. I never ran with a bunch of punk kids, never played an intense sport like football, never joined the military and I never committed a crime. However, I did play video games and watch MTV. And yet, I don't have an extensive gun collection and never engaged in copious amounts of promiscuous sex. Go figure.

As you may have guessed by now, all of the following films feature characters with attitude. Something I don't have. And never will. I blame you, Carson Daly. Welcome to this week's Trailer Park: