Small Time is an appropriate title for writer-director Joel Surnow’s period piece dramedy, the type of movie whose meandering, loose-limbed structure and comparative lack of stakes inform a savvy viewer of the fact that it’s “inspired by true events” even without benefit of the opening credits title card.

Set in the San Fernando Valley sometime after the 1970s but before the advent of cell phones, the film stars Christopher Meloni as Al Klein, a middle-aged divorcee who owns and runs a used car dealership with his best friend Ash Martini (Dean Norris). When his teenage son Freddy (Devon Bostick, tamping down the demonstrativeness of his older brother character in the Diary of a Wimpy Kid movies, but still showcasing a headstrong charm) decides he wants to forego college in order to become a car salesman like his father, Al is secretly moved.

However, Freddy’s decision upsets Al’s ex-wife Barbara (Bridget Moynahan), who along with her second husband, Chick (Xander Berkley), has given her son the comfortable bubble of an upper-middle-class existence, expecting all the while little more than that he would continue his education and reach a little higher than the precarious, paycheck-to-paycheck, blue-collar lifestyle for which Al settled. While Freddy turns out to be a natural salesman, Al eventually has to consider cutting work ties with his son, in order for his long-term benefit.

Small Time represents something of a personal tale for Surnow (24, The Kennedys), whose father was a cold-call carpet salesman his entire life. The script had its genesis in an old, unproduced screenplay, reworked here, that Surnow penned with a college friend when he was only 21, years before he started working in television. Experience from working with his father help lend the movie a certain authenticity in a number of small details — from sales strategy banter and genial cons (in one sequence Ash wears a phony hearing aid and Al quotes an artificially inflated price, in order to give a customer the impression of getting a deal) to father-son friction over advertising and expansion potential.

But there isn’t a lot of what one would consider absorbing dramatic stakes, or even expressive consistency. (Having established Al as being so emotional over Freddy’s graduation that he cries at a TV weather report, it then makes no sense that he doesn’t cry when his son says, “I’d be proud to grow up to be like you.”) For every scene that offers up a sly surprise (Ash taking Freddy to a shady singles bar, or Al and Barbara separately drunk-dialing one another) there are usually one or even two that peter out or feel like padding.

Instead, Small Time surfs along on the appeal of Meloni and, to a slightly lesser extent, Norris, both of whom have considerable Everyman charisma. The latter’s whiskey-swigging guise will ring familiar with Breaking Bad fans, recalling as it does the ball-busting, family-time gregariousness of Hank Schrader. But it’s still a welcome presence here — so much so that one wishes that Surnow had perhaps ditched some of the ancillary din and chatter to develop Al and Ash’s lifelong connection as a stronger parallel arc to that of Al’s changing relationship with Freddy. Small Time has modest insights around the edges, and an overall warm vibe. One merely wishes there was more memorable snap and bite to its platitudes and life lessons.

Arriving on DVD in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer that preserves the aspect ratio of its original theatrical exhibition, Small Time comes housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, stored in turn in a complementary cardboard slipcover. Optional English SDH and Spanish subtitles are included alongside a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track. In addition to the requisite chapter stops and trailer gallery, the only other supplemental bonus feature is a warm, feature-length audio commentary track with Surnow and his lead actors, Meloni and Norris, in which the three share production anecdotes and talk about the go-go schedule of their low-budget effort, but also touch on issues of fatherhood more broadly. To purchase the DVD via Half, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. Or if brick-and-mortar is still the way you roll, by all means, have at it. C (Movie) C+ (Disc)

The title and exploding Capitol Dome on its DVD cover want to summon forth warm, landmarks-go-boom! memories of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day, but this schlocky Syfy sci-fi offering, while heavy on destruction, is so creatively stillborn as to elicit little more than half-arched-brow boredom.

On the Fourth of July, while all of the United States is apparently busy enjoying hot dogs and apple pie at picnics, an alien horde descends, laying waste to everything in its path. When America’s fighter jets are quickly dispatched by the alien invaders — who look suspiciously like a cross between giant, zippered ball bearings and the same sort of flying metallic alien crafts from 2012’s Battleship — it’s up to rogue scientist Celia (Emily Holmes), physics-loving teenager Eliza (Andrea Brooks), and fireman Pete (Ryan Merriman) — the son of stranded President of the United States Sam Garcette (Tom Everett Scott) — to team up and try to activate the only technology capable of taking down the alien mothership.

As an original Syfy movie, Independence Daysaster naturally doesn’t have the budget to compete with Emmerich’s aforementioned 1996 disaster porn, but it seems to have only a rudimentary grasp of this fact. Rudy Thauberger and Sydney Roper’s screenplay is an awkwardly blended mix of the perfunctory and outlandish, and director W.D. Hogan oversees a middling technical package with a point-and-shoot mentality that prizes money-shot theatrics over all else. The dramatic underpinnings here are just not such that one develops a rooting interest in regards to anything that unfolds.

Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case in turn stored in a cardboard slipcover, Independence Daysaster comes to DVD presented in a 1.78:1 anamorphic widescreen transfer, with a Dolby digital 5.1 surround sound audio track that is fairly meager on the low-end bass. Apart from chapter stops and a clutch of trailers, there are no supplemental features herein, further denting this title’s value as anything other than a quickie rental for Syfy genre completists. Nevertheless, to purchase the DVD via Half, click here; to purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. D+ (Movie) D+ (Disc)