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Triple Dog
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Well Go USA Review written by and copyright: Ethan Stevenson (17th October 2010). |
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The Film
 “Triple Dog” is a Canadian film directed by Pascal Franchot and written by Barbara Marshall. It’s an after-school-special of a film about a group of stupid high school girls who play a game called “triple dog” (as one of the characters in the film describes it, and I paraphrase, “it’s truth or dare… only without the truth.”) on the night that one of them turns sixteen. I can best sum it up as an unusually bad episode of “Degrassi: The Next Generation” (2000-present) – or an episode that’s more awful than usual, anyway – mashed together with a script written by someone trying to be Diablo Cody… and succeeding. Yes, it really is that bad and, yes, I wish I could end my review right here. But I can’t. And so, I won’t. Having just recently moved to Vancouver, Eve (Alexia Fast) is celebrating her sweet sixteen and in doing so by invites a small group of newly acquainted friends over for a slumber party. It’s a diverse group of girls, that’s for certain; they’re almost archetypal in their breadth and variation. There’s Chapin (Brittany Robertson), the so-called bad-girl, who skateboards on school grounds and wears her hat cocked to the side so that we know she’s the bad one; when she’s introduced the synth-score also plays a little hard-rock theme to emphasize this fact [groan]. Chapin is a newly transferred student who came from the local Catholic School, where was kicked out for reasons not immediately known (rumors persists about both alcohol and drug use and, yes, perhaps, even murder). Chapin and Eve are “besties” because they’re both new. The schools own set of “Mean Girls” (2004) are also invited to the sleepover: Cecily (Janel Parrish), Sarah (Emily Tennant) and Nina (Carly McKillip). They’re popular, and bitchy; Cecily’s the rich one, Sarah’s the blonde one, and Nina is the religious, good girl. Finally there’s Liza (Scout Taylor-Compton), also known as “Rat Girl” because she carries a rat in her purse wherever she goes. Liza is an introverted loaner, and not really part of the clique – she the girl who was only invited because Eve and her mother know each other. Not content with the prospect of a slow night giving each other pedicures, reading each others blogs (“like, omigod.”) and being otherwise “totes lame” (that’s just one of the many non-colloquialisms that Barbara Marshall thinks sixteen year old Canuck girls say on a regular basis), Chapin convinces the group to play a game. This game is called Triple Dog, a remarkably stupid take off of the “triple dog dare” that everyone and their zombie grandfather once played when they were children. The rules of “Triple Dog” are simple: 1) Everyone gets a dare and gives a dare. 2) You get to pick who dares you. 3) You must perform the dare that’s given to you and if you don’t… [sound of electric razor being turned on]… you get your head shaved. (“Like no hair, bald.”) 4) If you know that there’s a dare that you can’t do, you can challenge the person who dares you, and they have to do it. But, if they do it, you get shaved. (“So don’t go daring people things you wouldn’t do, because I’ll backfire.”) 5) Anything goes. “But, you can’t dare someone to shave her head… because that’s against the rules.” They’re also videotaping the whole night, and each of the dares, for laughs – or police evidence – so that they can rewatch it later. The winner, determined by group vote and awarded for completing the most daring dare with the most fair, gets everything in the pot: about $150, an MP3 player, a couple of cell phones, a “Gossip Girl” DVD boxset and some silver earrings. The dares start small – the uptight religious girl has to streak down the street and another hides in a boys closet wearing a skimpy cheerleading outfit – but they slowly escalate as the night goes on. By the next morning Cecily has peed on the school principal’s doorstep, Chapin has robbed a liquor store for a “Penthouse” magazine and booze, and the birthday girl has been dared to get to third base with a boy that she likes. Interwoven into the uncomfortably bubbly birthday game plot, which is more like an old-school teen sex comedy from the 80's than anything else, is a totally uninteresting mystery plot about a girl from the Catholic school who killed herself by jumping off of a bridge. Why did she do it? Is her death related to Chapin’s expulsion from the same school? OH MY GAWD – did Chapin kill this mysterious girl? [cue dramatic tones]. Who freakin’ cares? Well, the film cares. A little too much actually, and that’s problem one with “Triple Dog”. While it wants to be this funny, raunchy comedy about a group of young girls who do outrageous things on the night of friend’s birthday, it also wants to be some commentary on peer pressure, and the dangers of teen suicide. It doesn’t balance either well enough to be compelling, and while I admire the latter purpose, director Pascal Franchot and writer Barbara Marshall go about it entirely in the wrong way. The film has no consistent tone. The film has no real identity. And the film comes across as some desperate after school special that totally – er, sorry, “totes” – wants to be hip and speak to a generation of younger kids about some message. If the film is analyzed purely on a technical level: the direction is fine and it’s actually quite well edited (save for one hilarious flashback scene that has a title card that says “still three days ago”) The terribly dull “murder mystery” is at least pieced together quite well; as many students recount the version of the story that they heard, we see the same event through their slightly modified eyes, and in the final act we see how the event really went down in a pretty nifty, if entirely gimmicky way. The acting is… well pretty terrible from a few of the girls actually (think most of the cast on, yes, I’m making the parallel again, “Degrassi”; hey, sue me, they’re both Canadian productions and as an American, it’s about the only connection I have with the north. Plus it’s still true). However, a few of the performances are quite strong, at least from the Robertson girl and Scout Taylor-Compton (even if they both have terrible dialogue to deal with). But where the film completely dies, again, on a purely technical level, is in its script. The major problem with Marshall’s script is the dialogue. Her characters are generic, but that’s fine – annoying and boring, but fine. After all, I tend to believe that if you at least write a generic, archetypal character well, by giving them a unique voice (i.e. writing natural, believable dialogue), it can work. It’s true that Marshall’s story isn’t interesting enough to drag out for 90 minutes, but then again, how could it be – she basically took a throwaway joke from “The Christmas Story” (1983) and stretched it thin over an entire film, but my real issue her is that I hate the way that her characters talk. I hate the way that they talk because it’s not realistic; truthfully, it’s not even remotely natural. The rapid-fire delivery of the pop-culture-ridden Diablo-Codian dialogue is grating enough, but each time Chapin or one of the other girls says something like “I’m peacing” (a bastardization of “peace out”, I guess) or “totes” or the ever popular “hella _______” (which I’ve never heard anyone outside of northern California use in a non-ironic sense like they do here; ever) you’re just reminded that a fifty year old, who has no current understanding of modern teenagers, is writing the exchanges that way because they think that they’re smart and that’s how they imagine people talk these days. Similarly, some of the dialogue, when it’s not cringe inducing enough already, is just plain terrible. In a scene where Liza finally gets caught in the closet, she’s arguing with the boy who finds her, and the extent of their conversation is, and I kind you not (this is a paraphrase, but close enough): Liza: “You’re a f**k-twit.” Todd: “No, you’re a f**k-twit” Liza: “F**k-twit” Todd: “Get out of my closet.” Liza: “Make me, you f**k-twit.” [long pause] Liza: “F**K-TWIT!” That’s deep stuff, no? And don’t even get me started on the whole “Big Wang’s” sequence. I’ll just say this, picture a cowboy-themed karaoke bar, owned by a live action version of Kim Jong-il from “Team America: World Police” (2004). Yeah, that’s not racist, now is it?
Video
Well Go USA has provided a 1080p 24/fps AVC MPEG-4 encoded high definition transfer, framed at the film’s original 1.78:1 widescreen aspect ratio. Shot on HD video and with production values that barely rival the latest CTV series, “Triple Dog” isn’t exactly the new knockout Blu-ray disc on the market, nor was it ever going to be. All things considered however, this is a fairly agreeable disc with a not-too-terrible picture. It does suffer from a few problems that are related to the video-based source, and the conditions under which scenes were shot, but lets just say that I’ve seen worse, much worse truth be told. Detail, especially facial detail in medium shots and close ups, is well above average almost consistently, although a few key interior shots do suffer from a, slight, soft “glow”. Colors and contrast are good, but the palate is cast in mostly muted hues (the lone exception being a day scene on a soccer field; the vibrancy of the green grass and the red of the girls uniforms is attractive and appealing to say the least). Blacks are an important area of the transfer seeing as the film takes place almost exclusively at night, and luckily they are deep and satisfying (but occasionally a little intrusive, with some mild crush in the lowest lit scenes). Some of the scenes are done up to looks like handheld HDV (I think it actually might be) and the flashbacks are purposefully dreamlike with blooming whites and a near colorless picture that has splashes of bold color. It doesn’t look great, but it looks good. Where the disc starts to fall apart is in its handling of the many dark, street lamp-lit exteriors, which suffer from erratic noise; both CCD source noise and compression-related artifacts. The source noise I can excuse, because even with a Hollywood-sized budget, filmmakers still capture mosquito noise in night shots on HD cameras. Michael Mann’s video-based films for instance are absurdly noisy (“Collateral” (2004) and “Miami Vice” (2006) especially), and David Fincher’s “Zodiac” (2007), “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” (2008), and “The Social Network” (2010) – all films shot digitally, in dark conditions – only look so clean because he specifically applies a post-production DNR filter to his films. The compression artifacts present in “Triple Dog’s” transfer though? Those are unforgivable, and I can only assume that they are bitrate related (I don’t know the numbers offhand; I don’t watch the meter on my PS3) because a 90 minute film with so few extras shouldn’t normally suffer from any noticeable amount, single-layered disc be damned, unless the encoder starved the bitrate. Still, those without a keen eye will probably appreciate the look of this disc and I have to admit it looks much better than I expected it to. At no point did I doubt that this was a high definition presentation and it was quite obvious that “Triple Dog” was shot very recently; it doesn’t look dated or faded at all. Does the disc have problems? Sure. Are they the type of problems that will make the film unwatchable? No, not at all. (Although the plot, dialog and racial stereotypes might).
Audio
Viewers are given the choice of either an English DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track mixed at 48kHz/24-bit or an English Dolby Digital 2.0 surround mix. No subtitles are included. The lossless track is loud, and I mean really loud, when it comes to music. Overwhelmingly so. Unfortunately if you turn down your receiver whenever the music kicks in, you’ll have to turn it back up to hear any of the dialog which is mixed lower then normal (how’s that for quality control?). The Dolby Digital 2.0 surround track doesn’t suffer from the volume problems to as a great of an extent, but it’s not really a viable option being that it’s both lossy and stereo. Mind you, the lossless DTS-HD track isn’t a winner even forgetting its loudness; some of the pop songs – particularly the one accompanying the opening titles – sound unexpectantly thin and metallic (almost like a 96 kbps MP3 or a low-bitrate DVD soundtrack) and at the mixes best, there’s little actual depth or lossless-like clarity. Surround use is minimal and only really kicks in the final 20 minutes of the film as the location switches to the big party (and even then, it’s not really impressive). The soundtrack, in either variety, is weak; much, much weaker than the video and only mildly adequate for the film, to be blunt.
Extras
You know that there won’t be much in the way of decent supplements when “5.1 HD audio” is listed as an extra on the rear box art as it is on “Triple Dog”. Indeed there isn’t much in the way of supplements here, just a couple of bonus trailers (including one for the feature itself) and a handful of deleted scenes. Although technically encoded in HD some of the bonus material has a suspicious, up-rezzed look. The five deleted scenes (1080i) amount to a whopping 6 minutes and 6 seconds of excised material. These scenes – “Escape”, “Fitting In”, “Sneaky”, “Bathroom”, and “Grounded” – can all be summed up as needless exposition and pointless bits of dialogue between the girls and their mothers, or the girls themselves. I will say that who ever authored this disc is an evil genius because even though the scenes themselves are listed individually in the menu, no matter which scene you choose doing so activates a “play all.” Also, theatrical trailer for “Triple Dog” (1080p, 1 minute 39 seconds) rounds of the disc. there are two forced pre-menu bonus trailers for some atrocious-looking films (here’s hoping that they don’t get released on DVD and Blu-ray anytime soon). “A Fork in the Road” (1080p, 2 minutes 1 second) is a dark comedy about a man who gets framed for murdering his wife, when in reality she just ran off with a recently escaped ex-con. The film looks even less funny than that reads, trust me. “Stuntmen” (1080i, 2 minutes 13 seconds) seems even worse, if only because the faux-documentary about award nominated stuntmen features people I actually recognize – Brandon Routh, Zachary Levi and Leland Palmer himself, Ray Wise, just to name a few – and their talents look to be absolutely wasted.
Packaging
“Triple Dog” arrives on Blu-ray from Well Go USA. The disc is packaged inside a non-eco Amaray (clasp-style) Blu-ray case. I haven’t seen on of these in a while. The artwork is hideous and the rear box art looks like something someone threw together in Microsoft Paint.
Overall
“Triple Dog” is a film with an identity crisis. It doesn’t know if it wants to be comedy, a drama, a thriller, a hard hitting piece of social commentary or a back to the school special that overplays every plot point for dramatic effect. I couldn’t even tell you if the film wants to be serious or a joke; and oddly I kind of felt like it wanted to be both. On one hand “Triple Dog” is really, really awful, mostly because of the truly grating dialogue and half-baked mystery plot. On the other, I admire the underlying message and theme at play – and it seems eerily timely in the aftermath of the death of Tyler Clementi (and the myriad of other teen suicides) and the many recent cases of school bullying reported by the media. But, “Triple Dog” is so poorly executed at some of its most basic levels that it’s really, and I mean this with total sincerity, pretty bad. Maybe in someway I did enjoy the film… in the same way that I enjoy the occasional episode of “Degrassi” (yes, I went there; again). By which I mean, if you approach it with a slightly off-kilter mindset, and look at the film as some sort of weird performance art, or as an intentionally tepid satire on the whole angsty, overdramatic high school sex comedy genre, you might enjoy yourself. Then again, much like that episode of my favorite piece of Canadian trash, or relenting to a swift kick in the head, you’ll most definitely regret it afterwards. The blu-ray is a bit of a mixed bag with decent but imperfect video, really loud, mostly weak audio, and crap extras. Rent it (and play a drinking game when you watch it).
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