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Answer Man (The)
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray ALL - America - Magnolia Home Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (20th December 2009). |
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The Film
 There are some movies that you can never live down, for better or for worse actors become synonymous with the characters. Often the big names try to escape into independent movies or stage acting, trying to regain some sort of new identity, but the public can’t be that easily fooled. Sure you have your chameleons who will always adapt into any role regardless of name. For anyone who grew up in the 90’s, Jeff Daniels is Harry from “Dumb and Dumber” (1994). I mean this in the best possible way, but just seeing his face makes me think of explosive diarrhea. Even though I appreciate his move not to repeat his pairing with Jim Carrey over and over into infinity, he’s stuck as Harry the animal guy with too much ex-lax coursing in and out of his system. “The Answer Man” (2009) is Daniels’ latest attempts to get off the toilet and into a new character, but it may be the most miserable failure yet. A terrifyingly quirky attempt at indie comedy, Daniels plays Arlen Faber, the new age genious who wrote the million times over bestseller “Me and God” but yet remains quirkily unhappy and without the answers everyone else has found in his books. Twenty years after his bestseller, the misanthropic author who lives in secrecy is still unhappy. Meanwhile, Elizabeth (Lauren Graham) is an overly protective mother and chiropractor who helps to fix Arlen’s back problems. Maybe she can fix his quirky life problems too? Wait, there’s more, Kris Lucas (Lou Taylor Pucci) is a recovering alcoholic (mildly dramatic, needs more quirk) who owns a failing bookstore (there it is) and discover’s Faber’s address, making a deal to keep his identity secret and take some used books off of his hands in exchange for advice. Mmmm, yes how quaint, guffaw. If you wanted an excuse to hear some pretentious new age babble from a bunch of different, quirky don’t forget quirky, characters, then “Answer Man” has the answers. See what I did there? I’m quirky too. To be real though, the movie is just bad. It’s an exercise right out of a pretentious collegiate creative writing paper, the characters have no real depth, just quirks. Fill that in with a lot of self-praising pretentious babble and you get most of the script for "The Answer Man." Far too much of the movie obsesses over the attempts at uniqueness in the characters, but these are all things I’ve seen before in different forms and done far better in other places. There is no life to any of the characters, or their stories. This movie is plain, meaningless and at it’s best, intensely boring. Jeff Daniels must be desperate to get the ex-lax scene out of his system, pun, because this script is far below him and just about everyone else in the movie. It’s not that I have high respect for everyone in the film, but it’s just not a good enough movie to burden yourself with. Lauren Graham is as good as the script will allow, not good, supplemented by indie movie staple Kat Dennings who I only really saw in “The 40 year Old Virgin” (2005), but I’m already tired of. Still, I liked Pucci in the vastly underrated “Southland Tales” (2007), while Olivia Thirlby was good in “The Wackness” (2008). This is the sort of movie that fulfills my every stereotype about the film festival circuit. Terribly written, horribly put together characters that don’t really do more than new age-ily talk their way through their eccentricities in a white upper class world where everything is okay outside of character’s individual foibles. New businesses and failing bookstores survive through sheer quirk. This movie could do itself a favor by becoming a hugely dark comedy, a satire on the white upper middle class that it exclusively features and obsession with answers and god. But no, it’s that movie that I never needed to see, though will see somehow repeated over and over again. It’s a film that deserves to be buried with it’s fellow poorly conceived and pretentious quirky films like “Smart People” (2007) and “Numb” (2007). Not even the hipster crowd could eat this up. Just go watch “Dumb and Dumber” or clips on the internet to see Jeff Daniels’ masterful acting. Or “Arachnaphobia” (1992), that’ movie’s pretty sweet too.
Video
As shallow as the movie is, the visuals similarly lack depth. Presented in a 1.78:1 aspect ratio in 1080p 24/fps with VC-1 encoding, there’s a nice clean cut look about the film. Unfortunately it lacks any sort of visual style or depth to make this nice transfer do anything. There’s no grain or artifacts on the transfer, but rather the images themselves are so monotonous and disinteresting that flaws in the transfer would help to liven things up a little bit. Still the colors come through well but feel muted, partially because of the environments the movie lives in, but there’s not enough visually there to keep you interested.
Audio
The problems are the same with the sound of the film, it’s English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 audio track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit doesn’t do anything more than put a shine on something incredibly plain. The scoring is incredibly generic for the content, every soft piano track sounds like I’ve heard it before in some other film cut from the same cloth. The transfer and mastering of the sound doesn’t do much with the plain sounding soundtrack, since the film is almost entirely dialogue and soft piano music. It’s almost a waste of a well put together sound mixing job, though mixing the movie probably wasn’t that difficult considering it’s just a formula of outdoor noises, indoor dialogue, soft piano music. Additionally there are English for the hearing impaired and Spanish subtitles.
Extras
For a movie that doesn’t quite deserve extras, it still comes well equipped with an audio commentary track, a collection of featurettes, bonus trailers and BD-Live access. First up is the audio commentary track with writer/director John Hindman, Producer Kevin Messick and Lauren Graham. Hindman is self depcicating, though not really funny, Messick provides some answers about putting together the movie and Graham provides a soundingboard for questions and some attempts at jokes by Hindman. Lots of praise for the movie in the commentary, as you would expect, praise for the actors, with lots of pauses between different comments. They seem to have a good time commentating, but it’s not a good enough movie or commentary track for me to have a good time with them. But hey, at least 3 people enjoyed the movie. “Characters of ‘The Answer Man’” runs for 10 minutes and 14 seconds, this featurette speaks to the character of Arlen Faber and the film itself. Each actor gets their shot at describing the character, their own characters and the plot of the movie itself. There’s no behind-the-scenes material, just clips from the film and talking heads. A disinteresting and generic featurette for a disinteresting and generic film. “‘The Answer Man:’ from concept to creation” featurette runs for 9 minutes and 57 seconds, Hindman and the actors talk more about the creation of the film, with a look at producers Kevin Messick and Jana Edelbaum who talk up the movie as some sort of huge independent film success dropping names of other big independent film comedies that have come out in the past few years, almost like they are trying to convince the audience that this film should be taken well. It comes down to being a secondary sales pitch for the film with maybe a minute of behind-the-scenes footage throughout the entire brief featurette, while sticking to talking head interviews. “HDNet: A look at ‘The Answer Man’” featurette runs for 4 minutes and 33 seconds, more of an extended interview with interviews in it, there’s no new material here. Hindman, Daniels and others discuss the film for a promotional segue for HDNet or a combination of press junkets. Bonus trailers are: - “Food inc.” runs for 2 minutes and 12 seconds. - “Is Anybody There?” runs for 2 minutes and 12 seconds. - “World’s Greatest Dad” runs for 2 minutes and 29. - “The Great Buck Howard” runs for 2 minutes and 34 seconds. - “HDNet” spot runs for 1 minute and 2 seconds. The disc is also BD-Live enabled for profile 2.0 players with an internet connection.
Overall
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