STRANGERS WITH CANDY
*½/**** Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
starring Amy Sedaris, Stephen Colbert, Paul Dinello, Ian Holm
screenplay by Stephen Colbert & Paul Dinello & Amy Sedaris
directed by Paul Dinello
by Travis Mackenzie Hoover It may be churlish to hold a film to the standards of a TV show I recently panned, but comparing “Strangers with Candy” the series to Strangers with Candy the movie reveals a massive gulf between the two in both wit and style. The show at least had a sensibility and an idea of what it was satirizing, and it always delivered the goods; if those goods were not to my liking, it wasn’t for lack of trying. But the stillborn film version has neither a sense of craft nor a reason for being: apparently thrown together over a kegger weekend, it’s horribly paced, ugly to look at, and mostly rehashes the broader points of a sitcom that had moved on from its basic premise by the time it reached its final season. Strangers with Candy is neither the movie fans were waiting for nor an attractive intro for neophytes, and will most likely be cable filler before it shuffles off into well-deserved obscurity.
Once again we have Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), the 47-year-old “boozer, user, and loser” who wishes to redeem herself after a lifetime of prison and prostitution. Returning home to discover her father (Dan Hedaya, no match for the original Guy Blank, Roberto Gari) bedridden and paralyzed from news of her transgressions, she goes back to high school hoping to rouse him from his stupor. Meanwhile, Principal Onyx Blackman (Greg Hollimon) has misallocated funds and needs something to show for it, thus he rests his hopes on the upcoming science fair. Roger Beekman (Matthew Broderick), the ringer brought in to lend the competition “pizzazz,” subsequently drives a wedge between science teacher Chuck Noblet (Stephen Colbert) and art teacher/Noblet’s furtive gay lover Geoffrey Jellineck (Paul Dinello). For her part, Jerri sees the fair as a chance to prove herself in the eyes of her catatonic father.
So instead of inflating the concept or covering new ground, the regulars return to the scene of the crime and set up camp–to the degree that you’re damned whether you know the series or not. Aside from some new faces (many of the show’s cast members had grown too old to reprise their teenager roles) and Noblet’s vocational shift to teaching science, anyone who’s watched”Strangers with Candy” has seen this all before–only with better form and a higher density of laughs. And if you’re not familiar with the lay of the program, the movie is too limp and inert to offer much incentive to catch up. It’s little more than a glorified trophy for the creators, an attempt to say they managed to get a feature film out of their cult hit rather than do anything substantial once they got the green light.
It’s sad, because the brilliance of the performers still manages to poke through the hideous surface and badly-timed jokes. Sedaris simply can’t be stopped as the brutal, lascivious Jerri–often, she’s the only cinematic thing in the frame. Colbert, likewise, is suitably put-upon despite the narrative’s truncation of his relationship with Dinello, and Hollimon again shines as the childish megalomaniac Blackman, who was always the best thing about the series, anyway. They deserve better than to struggle through the flat script, especially as they suffer at their own hands. Strangers with Candy is a film with no point-of-view beyond the rote recitation of the show’s basic parameters, from people who don’t feel the need to stretch when they know that their fanbase will lap up whatever they give them.
THE DVD
TH!NKFilm’s disc works wonders with limited material. The 1.78:1, 16×9-enhanced image is surprisingly vibrant and detailed considering the film’s dank, muted palette; colours leap off the screen without bleeding into each other. I daresay Strangers with Candy looks better on DVD than it did in theatres. The Dolby Digital 5.1 audio isn’t terribly well-articulated: it provides a surround experience consisting mainly of room tone and dialogue, while music and dialogue are on the tinny side.
A feature-length yak-track with Sedaris, Colbert, and Dinello is the same kind of convivial laugh-in that graced their commentaries on the series discs; it’s mostly shout-outs to various actors, explanations of why certain roles were recast, and guffawing at various gags. It does, however, yield a hilarious anecdote about how a costume designer thought Colbert’s real ass was a fatsuit. Meanwhile, 19 deleted scenes avail one or two narrative lines dropped in the finished film, among them Sarah Jessica Parker as a guidance counsellor obsessed with her legs (Noblet: “They’re not offensive, if that’s what you mean”) and the extent of Jellineck’s ruinous affiliation with Beekman’s science project, culminating in his “pretend” atomic car. Most of the rest are just random gags, but a few would have improved the final cut. A three-minute music video for “Atomic Car” finds the music of Delano Grove offsetting outtakes of Blackman’s long-suffering secretary Iris Puffybush; as the character does nothing but sit and glower throughout, the whole thing seems pointless and slapped-together. The film’s trailer is also included, while trailers for Awesome: I…Shot That!, The Aristocrats, and the painful-looking Farce of the Penguins begin on startup.
ACCEPTED
*½/**** Image B Sound B+ Extras C+
starring Justin Long, Blake Lively, Anthony Heald, Lewis Black
screenplay by Adam Cooper & Bill Collage and Mark Perez
directed by Steve Pink
by Bill Chambers Part of me is tempted to laud Accepted for daring to resurrect the late, lamented ’80s campus comedy without satirizing it, but as the filmmakers haven’t really modernized the genre in any respect, post or otherwise (not even its quaint aesthetic gets renovated to meet status quo techniques), the film is tediously anachronistic. A typecast Justin Long stars as Bartleby Gaines, a Max Fischer-esque over/underachiever who concocts a fake acceptance letter to a fake college after being rejected by every single school to which he applied. It’s a stopgap solution to placate his increasingly disenchanted parents (Mark Derwin and Ann Cusack), but, of course, it will take a little elbow grease to sustain the ruse; before long, Bartleby–tentatively linked to Melville’s eponymous scrivener at best–and fellow pariahs Rory (Strangers with Candy‘s Maria Thayer), Glen (Adam Herschman), Hands (Columbus Short), and Sherman (Jonah Hill) are slapping a fresh coat of paint on an abandoned psychiatric hospital and appointing Sherman’s shoe-salesman uncle Ben (Lewis Black) the dean of their fictitious South Harmon Institute of Technology. I reckon the S.H.I.T. acronym would be a lot funnier had the characters never caught on, but the movie is nothing if not bet-hedging, going so far as to give our hero a blonde stick figure of a love interest (Blake Lively) rather than risk sexualizing the less broadly appealing Thayer. (One of Accepted‘s obvious forebears, Revenge of the Nerds, shrewdly split the leading-man role in two, allowing for a tomboy complement to the cheerleader inamorata.) I reckon, too, that the picture would be funnier with an R rating on principle, and since the PG-13 generally means that the only booty flaunted is the money Bartleby makes in tuition fees when his sham starts reeling in co-eds from miles around, this alleged ode to hedonism is more accurately described as a celebration of capitalism. Told you the Eighties were alive and well in Accepted.
THE DVD
Universal presents Accepted on DVD in competing widescreen and fullscreen editions; we received the former for review. The 2.39:1, 16×9-enhanced transfer uses too much edge-enhancement to wring detail from Matthew F. Leonetti’s characteristically murky cinematography, while the loudness of the Dolby Digital 5.1 audio can’t disguise the unimaginative nature of the soundmix. On another track, find a predictably obnoxious free-for-all commentary featuring director Steve Pink and actors Long, Black, Hill, and Herschman that’s bleeped so often I thought my tinnitus was flaring up. Video-based supplements include: “Adam’s Accepted Chronicles” (11 mins.), an interminable mockumentary about Herschman that, like most of these ironic vanity pieces, portrays its subject as a prima donna; “Reject Rejection: The Making of Accepted” (10 mins.), an EPK in which producer Tom Shadyac (of Dragonfly and Bruce Almighty fame) bemoans institutionalized learning by claiming that “flaws of the system…stifle creativity,” which would probably be a lot easier to swallow if the movie he commissioned to promote educational alternatives consisted of auto-didacts as opposed to resourceful slackers; an interactive “Self-Guided Campus Tour” with nested featurettes on the Half Pipe, Pool, BRE Fraternity, Party Hall, and Common Room; a montage of skateboard outtakes (“Hangin’ on the Half Pipe”); the video for “Keepin’ Your Head Up” by The Ringers; a 13-minute block of Deleted Scenes, many of which are extended or alternate versions of scenes already in the film; a censored, 8-minute “Gag Reel Presented by Volkswagen” wherein Long mugs relentlessly; ROM-based MP3s of David Schommer’s score; and an easy-to-spot Easter egg leapfrogging to a longer bit with Sherman in his hot dog suit. Semi-forced trailers for American Pie Presents: The Naked Mile, Balls of Fury, Hot Fuzz, and You, Me and Dupree cue up on startup.
- Strangers with Candy
91 mins.; R; 1.78:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1; CC; Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; TH!NKFilm - Accepted
93 mins.; PG-13; 2.39:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, French DD 5.1, Spanish DD 5.1; English SDH, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; Universal
