Nick Swardson started stand-up at the age of 18, and was chosen early
to perform at the prestigious U.S. Comedy Arts festival. In 2000, he
hit a milestone when he taped his first Comedy Central half-hour
special at the age of 22 — the youngest comedian to do so. His career
really benefited from the championing and guidance of Adam Sandler, though; after bit parts of a string of films produced by and/or starring Sandler, Swardson co-wrote and starred in the Happy Madison films Grandma’s Boy and The Benchwarmers, a pair of reliably goofy, varying-by-degrees naughty comedies (one R-rated, the latter PG-13) that helped cement his status as goofball inheritor to the throne of crass juvenilia upon which Sandler made his name. So it’s no surprise, really, that his latest comedy DVD arrives under the moniker Seriously, Who Farted?
This hour-long set from Swardson’s sold-out concert in Austin, Texas earlier this year features plenty of material built around guy comedian staples — sex, bar life, videogames and Las Vegas debauchery. Swardson starts out by copping to the fact that many folks know him first and foremost from his effeminate guest-starring role on Reno 911 — as hot-shorts-sporting, roller-skating gay prostitute Terry — and thus think he’s homosexual. From there the comedian segues into a dissection of how fast food tastes differently depending on one’s state of intoxication (it’s the “food of the gods” with enough liquor in the system, he asserts), and the hits to one’s self-esteem that online videogame playing delivers. Swardson also cycles through segments on the cockiness of drunken women, his love for brainless blockbuster movies like Transformers, and how he looks forward to getting old, if only because it allows for getting away with saying and doing pretty much anything. Somewhat surprisingly, there’s more than a pinch of nervousness to Swardson’s set, which somewhat dampens the impact of his otherwise impeccably timed anecdotes. The material here isn’t driven by thunderously original insight, but Swardson’s affable persona is warm and inviting, which makes up for a lot.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Seriously, Who Farted? comes presented in 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen, with a 2.0 stereo audio mix. Supplemental extras consist of eight minutes of the show’s opening act, Beardo and Dirt Nasty, followed by a commercial for a mock holiday album from his aforementioned Reno 911 character and a soused parody trailer for 28 Days Later entitled 28 Drinks Later. A seven-minute mock profile of Swardson connects best, featuring the comedian in all sorts of different incarnations, spanning the 1920s to the present day. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Concert) B- (Disc)
The trailer for the dark comedy Serious Moonlight, written by the late Adrienne Shelly and helmed by Cheryl Hines, in her feature directorial debut, has dropped, and it neither rankles, connects nor particularly registers as anything more than a mid-level femme-programmer. The film centers around a career woman (Meg Ryan) who kidnaps artfully detains her husband (Timothy Hutton) when he tries to leave her; Kristen Bell is the other (younger) woman, and Justin Long is a scuzzy interloper of some sort.
No harm, no foul, but there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of real, churned-up emotion here. This is just a sort of frothy domestic revenge fantasy for the white equivalent of the Tyler Perry set, no? With maybe a pinch of the arthouse crossover audience that helped make 2007’s Waitress a respectable hit for Fox Searchlight. And all the AARP-ers that keep Henry Jaglom employed. Not judging, just saying. I actually enjoyed The Deal, but it’d be more interesting to see Ryan navigate away from unlucky-in-love roles and tackle something really nasty — a bitch on wheels like Kevin Spacey’s character from Swimming with Sharks, say. Otherwise, there’s only small degrees of difference that separate this from more desultory tripe like My Mom’s New Boyfriend, which couldn’t escape a direct-to-DVD sentencing despite the presence of Ryan, Antonio Banderas, Colin Hanks and Selma Blair. Which brings us back to this film’s release pattern… Serious Moonlight will be available to 50 million households through Magnolia’s Ultra VOD program in early November prior to its December 4 theatrical bow.
Author and “friend of the program” Telly Davidson contributes this insightful look at ABC’s late, maybe-not-so-great (except in adventurous spirit) cop drama Life on Mars, new to DVD in collected form:
The subject of how we perceive the reality (or is it reality?) of the days of our lives has been the stuff of legend ever since the birth of religion and storytelling. And the thought of time travel in a serious context is also rife with philosophical questions that stumped the likes of Sartre and Einstein, though happy-go-lucky adventures like Back to the Future and comic books have superficially taken the edge off. In more recent times, filmmakers like Charlie Kaufman, Michel Gondry, David Lynch, Ingmar Bergman and Jean-Luc Godard, and novelists like Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, made careers out of it. There is also the documented phenomenon of people “remembering” detailed past-life situations from seminal events in history (the Civil War, Cleopatra’s Rome, the Holocaust), even though the people doing the remembering were born decades if not centuries after the events described took place.
Still, taken seriously, the possibility poses challenges to the core beliefs of both religious right fundies and no-intelligent-designers like nothing this side of Darwin himself. Could there be an alternate reality where the Inglourious Basterds did stop Hitler, where John Lennon, Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, James Dean and Heath Ledger are all having a party, where JFK never got shot and Mohamed Atta got shot down? (No, the National Enquirer doesn’t count.) Reincarnation at least postpones a belief in instant-karma heaven (or hell or purgatory), and obliterates the atheist (dis)belief in permanent midnight.
Scott Bakula’s signature Quantum Leap was the first solid, long-running hit about a man who came unstuck in time, and since then there have been other one-season wonders jaunting their way through network prime on their inexorable journey to rerun marathons on SyFy. The latest was ABC’s Life on Mars, starring Jason O’Mara (above right) as a 2008 New York cop named Sam Tyler who, following a car accident that may or may not have been intentional (while pursuing a lead in a serial killer case), finds himself warped back in time 35 years, to the spring and summer of 1973. Strangely, he finds himself working as a cop in much the same precinct (minus computers, cell phones, fax machines, DVDs and DNA, natch), with a crew of 1970s cops who seem to have always known and worked with him.
The fact that he is at first confused by his surroundings and doesn’t remember them lead the group to tease him as “Space Man,” and leads Sam to wonder — could 2008 have just been a dream? Is 1973 where he was from after all? And why 1973, anyway, other than it being the title of a groovy James Blunt song? (The title “Life on Mars” refers to a Velvet Goldmine-era David Bowie hit.) Sam was born in 1969, so it wasn’t to revisit his birth — though both ominous events in his own childhood and the serial killer case he was investigating when he was struck in 2008 both date back to that fateful year. And like a comatose victim, Sam sometimes hears faint voices and hallucinates “visions” of 2008, beckoning him to come back — or to go end-of-watch forever.
The show boasted one of the most A-level casts in recent network series TV, with Michael Imperioli and Harvey Keitel (above left) as the politically incorrect cops in Sam’s precinct, and Gretchen Mol as a possible 1973 love interest, and the only female cop in the squadroom (her semi-affectionate nickname: “No-Nuts”). Based as it was on a BBC miniseries, original stars Philip Glenister and John Simm were approached (strangely, the lead actor in Life on Mars seems to have been intended to be significantly less famous than his costars) but they turned it down, though eventual lead O’Mara is also a son of the United Kingdom.
As someone who has felt severely lost in time for most of his life, this was a guaranteed attention-grabber. Though the show is consistently interesting, it begins to feel like a forced march as it progresses from here to eternity. And its episodic plots, which already have to be contrived to some degree by the nature of the very premise, turn downright gimmicky. CBS’s reliably popular (and superior) Cold Case already covered the theme of contrasting today’s comparative freedom with the stifling racial, sexual and class morays of the ’40s and ’50s (and the boundary-free liberated excess of the 1960s, ’70s, and go-go ’80s) — in far more memorable and emotionally haunting fashion. (While Cold Case can have a heavy hand, Life on Mars hits with a trash compactor.) Without the time-travel MacGuffin, this show is just yet another innumerable wannabe spin-off of original-recipe CSI, Law & Order or NYPD Blue — let alone quirky, flawed, instantly buzz-worthy sleuths like Monk, House and The Mentalist — and without most of those shows’ literate storytelling stylishness.
While I won’t spoil the series ender, it has a fittingly spaced-out final explanation — although, like Dallas‘ notorious “dream sequence” or the autistic-child’s-fantasy ending to St. Elsewhere, the Life on Mars denouement also reduces all the drama and emotional investment in the characters to a mere space oddity. Unless handled with home run brilliance, any reductive explanation of such an outlandish premise is bound to disappoint, though the show at least deserves an “A” for effort in trying, rather than just leaving the viewers hanging once the 17 episode orders ran out. But for a considerably superior — and far more provocative and stylish — small screen look at altered states, one need look no further than your TiVo, for Eliza Dushku and Joss Whedon & Co. on Fox Fridays, with Dollhouse.
Housed in clear plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Life on Mars comes presented in 1.78:1 widescreen, enhanced for 16×9 televisions, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track and optional Spanish and French subtitles. Bonus features include four episodic audio commentary tracks interspersed throughout the series, as well as 10 deleted scenes, a short gag reel, and a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette comprised of EPK-style interviews with cast and crew. Somewhat bizarrely, there’s also a brief featurette in which The Six Million Dollar Man‘s Lee Majors tours the Life on Mars set with O’Mara. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. C+ (Show) B (Disc)
