Laugh With Them / Laugh At Them
/ The Butlers Did It
Mark these words: you read it here
first. If the Butler Bros. (Jason & Brett) don't implode, explode or just
plain plode, then I fearlessly predict you're going to be seeing a lot more
from these cinematic siblings from Canada's Big Smoke.
And I'm predicting future success
for these odd bodkins of the brutal boulevard based on the recent release of
their two (count 'em) featurette flicks -- namely, Alive &
Lubricated, a hilarious fantasy about sex-obsessed friends circling the
wagon around a cuckolded comrade, and Bums, a more structured
comedy/drama about the wacky interactions of six preternaturally wiseguy
twenty-something slackers.
Now, I'm admitting up front I don't
know a lot about Indie films – don't see a lot of them – but when I
think Indie I tend to crawl towards the gravity-thick end of the emotional
spectrum, with heavy characters talking heavy things with heavy intellectual
baggage. All PoMo cool, with a red dress on.
These ain't one of
those.
Basically, what we have here are a
couple of coming-of-age comedies which have been twisted by budget, script,
acting and production values into screwball works of affect and effect. In
other words, you're going to laugh with them… and at them. It's that
fluctuation between suspension of disbelief and improbability of the action
that gives these flicks their special sauce and probable cult following, once
the word gets out…
Talkin' It To The
Streets
The temptation is to talk about
these flicks alphabetically, as the Butlers seem to be trending towards having
their third movie's name start with a "C". And although both Alive &
Lubricated and Bums are pretty well the same looks at the same
subject material – twenty-somethings trying to figure out relationships
– A&L for my money is the funnier of the two. But that's just my
opinion.
Can I summarize the basic plot of
Alive and Lubricated better than the Butlers? Probably not. Here's what
they say: "Dickey", a retail veteran, just got ditched by his gal. Attempting
to reconcile his feelings of lost love and sex with some beer banter, skewed
philosophizing, and a few grins, Dickey and his buds have one memorable
weekend. Alive and Lubricated offers an unsettling portrait of guys
interacting in their own environment, where one-upmanship is as common as
thinking they have the answers.
They are equally succinct with
Bums: "A day in the life comedy, Bums follows the lives of six friends
as their relationships blur together to produce love, laughs, lethargy and a
loose cannon. Bums is an insightful and provocative look at life neither here
nor there on a day like any other day – when you don’t have a clue
what you're doing but all the time in the world to do it."
Not bad – covers all of the
Main Point, which is that everybody in both flicks is completely obsessed with
sex. All of which is pretty natural, given the heavy hormonal state of the
protagonists, but rarely will you find a collection of oddball characters so
damn, well, erudite on the topic. Trouble is, they never shut up about it,
either.
And that, my friends… that
inability to turn off the verbal tap (except to pour in more beer)… is
what makes these movies very funny in their own unique way.
Yes, a negative as a positive may
be faint praise, but now we’re encroaching on the raw realities of making
a 75-minute movie for basically $3,500. Let’s face it, dialogue is cheap
to shoot. And when you’re working with an all-in budget of just $50 a
minute, you’re gonna get a lot of dialogue. Problem is, if I may screw
around with one of Homer Simpson’s most famous lines, excessive chatter
can end up as: “dialogue – the cause of, and solution to, all a
filmmaker’s problems”.
And these bozos can bark. The
Seinfeldian banter, Right Man monologues, Wildean aphorisms, and McLuhanesque
observations, couched in a raging torrent of scatological name-calling and
sexual slang, washes out of the stereo 2.0 or 4.0 surround sound and over you
like a tsunami of hilarious secular truths about the way it is, cause
“these are the rules… I don’t make them up, I just pass them
on to the uninformed”, as Ben says to Dickey in Alive and
Lubricated’s opening moments.
And pass the rules on they do, with
relentless zeal.
Yes, the scripts. These movies
don’t have “plots” per se – yes, the characters do get
out and move around a bit -- but the basic action in both flicks is to get
people together in different groupings and have them rap about each other,
bitching/bragging about the past and bitching/bragging about impending
possibilities. No matter, the Butler Boys have lots to say about how crummy it
all can be when you're young and yappy, but if you're not one of this gang you
may find some of the subject material is very specific to the Butler’s
demographic… whatever you call going nowhere twenty-somethings these days.
And when I say "specific", I mean "unblinking".
To wit, perhaps it would be best to
give you some examples of What The Butlers Saw, and how they express
it.
One of my fave scenes in both
flicks is the already-infamous “candy bar” exchange in Alive and
Lubricated. To quickly set the scene… main protagonist Dickey is
running the vid store when his friend Ben arrives. After some small talk about
porn films Ben asks Dickey if he’s been successful picking up women who
rent chick flicks. Dickey snorts no, and then explains why….
Dickey: It’s the candy bar
industry, man… it is the root of all video clerk chastity… picture
it… here I am, making the most blatant sexual overtures to these
honeys…
Ben: Pathetic as they are…
Dickey: Whatever… the thing is they come here with their chick
flicks and their response to my vibe is to go and grab a chocolate bar.
Don’t you see, Ben? These industry guys, they know, they understand that
women derive a certain, shall we say, satisfaction from a chocolate bar.
And they prey on that fact… they prey…
Ben: So what
you’re telling me, if I understand you correctly, is when a woman craves
sexual satisfaction she subliminally reaches for a chocolate bar?
Dickey: Exactly what I’m saying. Just think about candy bar
names and their innuendoes…
Ben: OK
Dickey:
Ohhh Henry!… Mister Big… and the coup d’etat
(sic)… Eat More! Eat More!
Ben: You are really onto
something. Listen to this: Snickers Really Satisfies…. Score…
brilliant, brilliant!
Dickey: I knew you’d understand. I
knew you’d see it. You know what really pisses me off? Some guy
who’s 45, probably still living at home, obviously a virgin, is marketing
these names against us. We’re out here, every day, competing against his
little agenda…
Ben: And how can we compete with that nicely
packaged chocolate-covered wad of nougat and caramel?
Dickey:
That’s all I’m saying. We live in a world with too many hidden
agendas.
No kidding. And The Butlers are
going to ferret out as many hidden agendas as they can from the fertile field
of youthful interpersonal relationships. Both flicks are a hot and steaming
grab-bag of observational grub-clusters, and I could reprint a zillion similar
examples of smartass humour from both movies.
Needless to say, these movies may
not be that female-friendly, unless you know females like the ones portrayed by
the Butlers – chicks who like to swear a lot, drink & party, screw and
never shut up.
Is there really any point in giving
you plot summaries? Bobby Dylan might say when ya ain't got nuthin', you got
nuthin' to lose, but in this case the banter is really the action, and
following the scenes as they go from conversation to more conversation is a
treat I'll leave for you.
In all art, however, there are
patterns to be discovered -- in this case, probably unconscious stuff left for
englit snoops like me to find. Here's a typical idea that seems obvious: the
three male leads of Alive and Lubricated come across like a fragments of
the "adult" sexual male the action strains to achieve. Willy Boy can be nothing
more than the Id -- and nice going on the childlike/penis name, Ben is the
Superego, always reciting society's rules & regs, and Dickey is the
not-yet-developed Ego, damaged and disillusioned by a scheming, predatory
female. Each deals with the action in their pre-supposed psychological manner,
and it is part of the intellectual pleasure of Alive and Lubricated that
Brett Butler's script stays true to this fragmented characterization, and that
the object of this frankensteinian fadscination, the biblically-named Rachael,
acts as the proper catalyst to allow Dickey his rite of emotional
passage.
All of which means there's enough
substance here to come up with jive-ass bullcrap analysis like that sike shit,
and this flick isn't just a series of talking heads all being perfectly funny
in a most literary way. Hell, maybe it's even all a satire. Bums is the
same thing times three, as the six characters inevitably split into three sets
of couples, and the camera follows their actions in a series of tv sitcom
cutaways.
The Bad & The
Ugly
OK, if the script is what’s
great to Laugh With, then everything else falls into the Laugh At category.
However, to be fair, Laugh At is a direct function of financing, as you can
only do so much with a production budget of $50 to $100 a minute. If we break
these flicks down to script, acting, and production values, then the latter two
are The Bad & The Ugly.
Acting… with amateurs you want
people who can get their lines out and minimize their self-consciousness. These
amateurs are almost up to it -- they can talk – but they can’t
ignore the lens. Jason Butler is pretty good, but he's had some acting gigs in
LA (see below), as is his brother Brett, but by and large you’re
chuckling along at their zany delivery, their wooden “acting”, and
sly, surreptitious glances at the camera. And the costumes. All the boys wear
wifebeaters and baggy hiphop jeans -- even Ben, the successful corporate
stooge, is indistinguishable from the slackers around him.
Bottom line, acting is The Bad, but
not so bad it detracts from the overall zaniness of the script.
Production Values… again, with
no dough there’s no knead to expect anything but half-baked. The Butlers
solve most of their production problems by keeping shots simple, and by adding
whatever visual/audio goodies they can afford in post-production. The
cinematography is all over the map, but wild fluctuations in F-stops are
minimized by the predominance of static shots, where the camera sits safely on
a tripod and the actors sit in front of it. There are a few lurid pans, some
attempts at using a moving camera, but most of the topography in this cinema is
one dimensional.
In fact, there are so many static
conversation shots these flicks could be dedicated to the memory of Sitting
Bull.
The Butlers do try to spiff up the
visuals in post, but all we get are basic jump cuts, split screens and various
wipes, all readily available in common digi video editing software. Thankfully,
these techniques are underused and don’t become intrusive to the
foregrounded material.
Comes Complete With Music,
Commentary & More!
Hey, just like real dvds, the
Butler Boys dress up their product with all the de rigueur extras:
Great Sound Track: both flicks use local Toronto bands and what must
be donated songs. Like the actors, you’ve probably never heard of groups
like Skunk Allstars, No Alternative, Machine Love, Sicboy, Blasternaught,
Famous Last Words, etc. Both movies have soundtracks available on
Attack Records.
Hilarious Filmmaker’s
Commentary: These could be the real hidden gems of these dvds. Sure, the
movies are funny, but listening to Jason and Brett talk about making the movies
is often funnier. Could the boys be drinking as they comment? Maybe.
And More: There’s not much
left in the can when these scavengers are finished. The More includes deleted
or extended scenes, outtakes, original Trailers, 4.0 Surround sound and 2.0
Stereo sound, production photo albums, yadda yadda. Only for the hardcore and
relatives.
Meet The Butlers
OK, I can hear you ask…
exactly who are these youthful auteurs? Exactly what I wanted to
know… so I asked them. Here is what they told me:
Brett Butler started out messing
around with cameras and video in high school. He did every project on video
“just because it was more fun”. Some years later at Carleton
University in Ottawa he heard the call again and dropped out of Mass
Communication studies to get back into film, realizing once more it was the
"most fun gig in town -- an occupation that actually celebrated debauchery, and
I could drink while working. Is there anything better?” Brett started
writing Alive & Lubricated after dropping out of Carleton one credit
short of his BA in film. Smart move. He describes the screenplay as a
“kind of a love letter to times had and the vomiting up of that empty
feeling caused by doing the same thing week in and out, and it wasn't changing
even as I was moving into the supposed adult world. I had fleeting feelings
that maybe there is something more than getting drunk and chasing ass.”
About this time brother Jason returned from acting in Los Angeles (see below)
and joined in on the writing of A&L. “We both just kind of rehashed
the days of sitting around drinking, wanting to get out of the retail world,
but not wanting a real job. All angsty bullshit that you have to laugh about.
So it was kind of a meditation on guys just being guys, drunk, lazy, and
wanting tang.
Jason Butler says he never really
fooled around with anything artistic in high school or university, though he
did attend high school with many of the actors on Degrassi High (a
youth-oriented locally-produced CBC television show) -- "which had no impact on
me." After graduating from Laurentian University the corporate world came
calling, and Jason signed on with, as he says, “a large multinational
with a three-letter acronym.” He claims, “early on in my tenure it
became obvious to all involved I was acting like a corporate stooge, but was in
fact not one. So I quit, tried acting intentionally, loved it, went to L.A.,
got in a couple indie films and moved back to Toronto. Once I started working
in a little independent video store, and Brett was back in town, it became
readily apparent that we were somewhat capable of making movies that were at
least as crappy as most of the stuff I was renting out”.
Right on, bro.
Bottom Line: Buy
Them!
Like I say, I’m convinced
Alive and Lubricated will end up a cult classic, so why not jump to the
deep end of the cool pool and be the one amusing your friends, rather than
being upstaged down the road. Bums (did I say it was in colour?)
localizes and examines the lifestyles of the young and unfathomable, and offers
up the shallow end of the pool, so no diving, running or spitting.
And don't forget Jason and Brett's
"director's comments" versions of the flicks. Very witty, quite revealing about
techniques (for aspiring filmmakers), and indicative of the BB's affinity to
standup observations, they may be the best dessert after the main course,
depending, of course, on your preponderance for substance abuse, which I'm
convinced would at least get you up to speed with the actors. These silly
suckers are cheap at $12 each, both for $20, and are available from the
boy’s website.
As for rankings… seems unfair
to compare these efforts to mainstream stuff, so I’m gonna give Alive
and Lubricated 4 eyes for the script alone, and Bums 3 eyes cause I
think it tries a tad too hard to be serious.
© Rick McGrath 11/
2005
OJO RATING:
Alive &
Lubricated:
Bums:
Fcourt |
