Thursday, August 24, 2006

Movie Review: Beerfest

By Dan Gattuso

Beerfest

When American brothers Todd and Jan Wolfhouse travel to Germany to spread their grandfather's ashes at Oktoberfest, they stumble upon a super-secret, centuries old, underground beer games competition -- "Beerfest," the secret Olympics of beer drinking. The brothers receive a less than warm welcome from their German cousins, the Von Wolfhausens, who humiliate Todd and Jan, slander their relatives, and finally cast them out of the event. Vowing to return in a year to defend their country and their family's honor, the Wolfhouse boys assemble a ragtag dream team of beer drinkers and gamers: Barry Badrinath, the consummate skills player with a dark past; Phil Krundle (aka Landfill), a one-man chugging machine; and Charlie "Fink" Finklestein, the lab tech with a PhD in All Things Beer. This Magnificent Five train relentlessly, using their hearts, minds and livers to drink faster, smarter and harder than they ever have before. But first they must battle their own demons, as well as a bunch of big, blond, German jerks who want to destroy the team before they can even make it back to Munich.

Source: Cinema Source

• Showtimes and more on Beerfest

I usually have one rule when it comes to critiquing comedies: Is it funny?

This rule only applies to run-of-the-mill comedies mind you, not romantic comedies, sophisticated satires and dark comedies that are trying to be more than merely funny. I'm talking about films like Wedding Crashers, Old School and The 40-Year-Old Virgin, to name a few recent successes in this category. These movies have no higher aspiration than to make you laugh. They're either funny or they aren't, and there's no need to expend a lot of unnecessary time and energy explaining why they aren't cinematic masterpieces.

For the second time, the Broken Lizard comedy team — a group that takes the term sophomoric down a notch (Is freshmoric a word?) — has defied that rule.

Their second film, Super Troopers, is a surreally stupid comedy with lots of funny bits that don't amount to anything, coupled with the inexplicable appearance of Brian Cox, a somewhat distinguished British actor who begs the question "what are you doing in this movie?" every time he turns up on screen.

Beerfest puts forth much the same paradox: many entertaining gags that hold your attention for five seconds at a time and leave you wholly unsatisfied in the end. While it has the common decency to caution viewers not to drink as much as the characters in the film do, a warning about the disorienting nature of the comedy would have sufficed as well.

For good measure Beerfest ups the ante in the cameo department, dragging names like Donald Sutherland, Cloris Leachman and Jürgen Prochnow into the muck, making particular use of the latter for some not-so-clever references to Das Boot and generally mocking German– shall we say– rigidity.

The plot, if you can call it that, concerns two brothers who round up their college buddies to try and win Beerfest, a secret beer-drinking competition in Munich run by the wicked half-brother of their wrongly disgraced grandfather.

The resulting classic bits of comedy run the gamut from puns (the family-run tavern is called Schnitzengiggles) to send-ups of narrative strategy (one character is killed and replaced by his "twin brother" so things can proceed without missing a beat); but mostly gross-out jokes about all the consequences of drinking to excess rule the day.

What sets the Broken Lizard guys apart (and below) from Will Farrell, Vince Vaughn and the Wilson brothers — and their behind-the-scenes collaborators — is the compulsion to try and one-up the last joke, instead of just making sure every joke is as funny as the last. As with many things in life, comedy is about quality, not quantity, no matter how silly it is.

Still not sure if I'm panning this movie or not? Neither am I. I'm still confused about how much I laughed, and how much I disliked it. I doubt this was intentional, but watching Beerfest is kind of like the morning after a bout of heavy drinking: The night before was probably a lot of fun, but there isn't much to show for it. Unlike the film's beverage of choice, however, I can say with certainty that there's no chance I will ever indulge in Beerfest again.

This story was submitted by a member of the TexasGigs community

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