Beerfest (2006)

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

There is just so much movie here. For some it may be too much. But in the same secretly sarcastic way most telemarketers say the phrase, the title of this one is particularly apt.

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The vast majority of the humour is just plain childish or crude. The stereotyping of the people from countries other than the US is not funny but rather insulting and offensive.

It's a competitive beer drinking version of Dodgeball, with more outrageous, over-the-top elements, more slapstick, but fewer laughs.A film like this, a no-holds-barred, free-for-all has a lot of creative freedom to do and say anything, but unfortunately it goes for the lowest common denominator. Lines like "fluid dynamics and quantum bubblenautics" are not funny, pissing in a shoe is not funny, extracting semen from a frog, random German jokes, a beer called Schnitzengiggles, grandma being a whore, etc.A lot of the jokes were already old, but my issue was that the delivery of these jokes was weak. The laughs were few and far between and they rarely had parts where there's a string of laughs, unless you count a fight scene with a fat man and a fat woman (both around 40 years old) as comedy.Some of the jokes fell totally flat - during a team huddle, one of team USA thinks that they are the bad guys and the Germans are the good guys, only to be corrected by the other team members. There's also a German person says "it's like taking black walnut candy from the baby" and someone calling him "Deutschbag." Absurdist - yes. Entertaining, okay. Funny? Not really.

Unfortunately me and my other half couldn't decide what to see when we got to the cinema. And we ended up seeing this load of tripe! Right from the start I knew I was in for 2 hours of boredom. The "German" spoken in this movie is barely passable. In fact did they even consult anyone who spoke the language when they made the film? Because half of it is made up.The "Das Boot" joke was shocking. Though by that point I had come to expect that type of inane predictability.My boyfriend at least thought it was passable, but only because of all the scantily clad women featured.The best thing about this movie was the outtakes, and they weren't even that good.

I try to go into every film I see with a sense of optimism and an open minded approach but films like Beerfest make this really quite difficult. Beerfest is a cynical attempt at a film, a film that, I think, quietly acknowledges how bad it really is but through having no shame whatsoever carries on down its route. But perhaps the makers have an alibi - perhaps they were drunk when they came up with the idea because that would explain the mass inclusion of beer, women and general themes of masculinity and proving oneself through the amount of alcohol one can consume.The film isn't really about anything as much as it is a piece that promotes things like alcoholism and sexism. Beerfest exists purely within the universe of a young, ill-educated and naïve American mind who still thinks getting drunk, girls with big chests (among other things) and funny accents are hilarious – it is Kevin Smith-lite and I don't even like Kevin Smith. The film is a bad advert for American cinema and it is a bad advert for America's wholly view on the rest of the world, particularly Europeans. This is at a time, given the global climate in which we live, in which America need all the friends in the West they can get. People of a European descent are dying in far off lands because of conflicts the Americans have had a hand in kicking off, and the best we can all do is make a film that demonises and humiliates them? How unfortunate.Like I said, Beerfest isn't really about anything more than it is a proving of one's self in an environment naturally hostile through discrimination. It's here that Beerfest advances into whatever little theory it has in the first place. Various Europeans and people of other nations are located at a beer festival in Germany. Americans Jan (Soter) and Todd (Stolhanske) are completely outperformed by some Germans at a drinking contest and are then publicly humiliated by the hating crowd as their dead grandfather's ashes (Donald Sutherland, in a performance that will haunt whatever legacy he'll leave behind) spill all over them. I think it's here the film-makers are trying to get across a statement to do with how they think Europeans see Americans; as these daft and ill-minded youngsters who think they can beat anyone, on any patch and at any game.Humiliated and beaten, they are sent home to lick their wounds. But they aren't finished and propose a 'Team U.S.A.' to compete at the beer festival and win back their pride. Needless to say, the film enters underdog mode. I love the way the American kids attempt to come up with their own reasons for doing what they're doing, apart from the humiliation. It's something to do with Europe and the world's love of football (soccer) and there's a line of dialogue revolving around football and how it acts as a parallel to how Americans are excluded from competition in general, echoing their inability to compete in the drinking contest amongst the world's elite.From here, Jan and Todd recruit Phil Krundle (Heffernan) whose nickname is landfill because of his ability to consume so much food; Barry Badrinath (Chandrasekhar), a male prostitute down on his luck and Charlie Finklestein (Lemme), the stereotypical geek complete with glasses and extensive knowledge in science. Finklestein also adopts the role of the clown in the group, he is the Jew that gives up the respect of his peers and relinquishes the grip on his steady life in scientific study purely so he can compete in a beer drinking contest, additionally, the 'eye of the Jew' sequence when it arrives is done in pretty poor taste.So these guys get their team together in an attempt to win over the beer drinking contest held every year in what the film likes to think as a 'Fight Club with beer games' although to call it that is just an insult to Fight Club. Then again, the film is an insult to a lot of things; particularly common sense. Beerfest is an exercise in wrong doing and ill judged jokes; a glorification of the silly, petty and juvenile humor one hopes people will grow out of when they get to a certain age. Beerfest tries to tackle the results of sex whilst under the influence of alcohol in a manner that has its character see and hear things differently to what's real, but the whole thing is unfortunately played for laughs – how many equally absent minded people will see the film and think 'that looks like fun' more so than 'that looks dodgy' and 'I won't be trying that in a hurry'.The film is an exercise in tedium. It's the sort of film that has its central characters turn down half a million in currency for exchange of a daft beer recipe. Others will try to explain to you the principal of it all but perhaps they should give the rest of the film a watch if they want to give a lecture on principals, rights and common sense. Every single scene in Beerfest is a crummy and distasteful display of unfunny humour, poorly placed racism and blatant sexism and that's not including the frog semen gags; the obese jokes and the anti-Semitism all of which was written and performed by people approaching their forties; which is just utterly, utterly frightening.