...cold, mean-spirited, and tiresome.
To keep an eye on his charges, Drillbit infiltrates the school by posing as a substitute teacher, and nobody questions him. He even teaches classes. How can anybody watching this movie accept anything in it for a minute?
And so on; you get the idea. As a comedy, we expect "Drillbit Taylor" to be silly, but we also expect it to play by some kind of rules. Otherwise, it's just a cartoon where anything can happen. In "Drillbit" anything does happen, and most of it just elicits a groan of despair.
Video:
Frankly, I didn't care for the color palette the director chose, and I said so in my review of the standard-definition disc. The 1080p, VC-1, BD50 transfer does little to change my opinion. I'll admit the high-def video probably represents what was on the original print and what the director wanted (but I cannot be sure because I never saw the movie in a theater). Be that as it may, the colors I saw on the Blu-ray disc did not impress me, intentional or not. The wide, 2.35:1 presentation does its best with what it's got, which means its hues are again quite intense, strongly saturated, excessively deep, and often too dark, too extreme, too glossy, and too shiny for anything approaching real life, not that reality was anything the director intended. While overall definition is adequate for an HD release, detailing remains somewhat soft, especially noticeable in the characters' somewhat bland facial features. No, there is really nothing wrong with the video quality, and a lot of people will find the brilliance, depth, and richness of its colors to their liking. It just looks too glassy bright and smoothed over for my taste.
Audio:
Like the video, the audio is also unexceptional. There isn't much to the sound expect dialogue and raucous background music, so there is not a lot of difference between the BD disc's lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio and the SD disc's regular Dolby Digital. The TrueHD does reproduce some clear, clean mids, a decent stereo spread, and a few well-placed surround effects, environmental noises mainly, like crowds, birds, and cars. Other than that, there isn't much frequency range or dynamic impact to speak of, nor much of anything out of the ordinary about it.
Extras:
For so inconsequential a movie, the Blu-ray disc has a fair number of bonus items, all of them in high definition to sweeten the pot. The first bonus, of course, is the very fact that this particular version of the movie is the "Extended Survival Edition" and includes several additional minutes of footage not seen in theaters. I couldn't tell you what they are, however, not having seen the original version.
Next, there's an audio commentary by the director, Steven Brill, one of the co-writers, Kristofor Brown, and actors Troy Gentile, Nate Hartley, and David Dorfman. After that is a fourteen-minute featurette, "The Writers Get a Chance to Talk," wherein we hear more from Kristofor Brown along with co-writer Seth Rogen. The most interesting item for me, though, was the series of deleted and extended scenes, over twenty-three minutes in high-def widescreen.
After those segments, we find an item called "Line-O-Rama," about four minutes of additional dialogue; followed by a four-minute gag reel; and then a whole series of brief featurettes: "Panhandle," "Rap Off," "Bully," "Sprinkler Day," "Directing Kids," "The Real Dan: Danny McBride," and others.
The bonuses conclude with fifteen scene selections but no chapter insert; several theatrical trailers; bookmarks; a guide to elapsed time; and English, French, and Spanish spoken languages and subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired.
Parting Shots:
It's hard not to like Owen Wilson in any movie, even when he's playing a bum, as he does here. The guy is so charming, we know he's not going to let us down. Much. Yet in "Drillbit Taylor" his character is so very unscrupulous that even Wilson can't save him, and with him goes the movie. The film is harebrained, sentimental, sometimes cruel, often clumsy, mostly unfunny, and frustratingly inane. Not a moment of it rings true, nothing, not an iota, not even farcically true. Wilson does his best, but for how long can he keep playing practically the same charming slacker in film after film?
And so on; you get the idea. As a comedy, we expect "Drillbit Taylor" to be silly, but we also expect it to play by some kind of rules. Otherwise, it's just a cartoon where anything can happen. In "Drillbit" anything does happen, and most of it just elicits a groan of despair.
Video:
Frankly, I didn't care for the color palette the director chose, and I said so in my review of the standard-definition disc. The 1080p, VC-1, BD50 transfer does little to change my opinion. I'll admit the high-def video probably represents what was on the original print and what the director wanted (but I cannot be sure because I never saw the movie in a theater). Be that as it may, the colors I saw on the Blu-ray disc did not impress me, intentional or not. The wide, 2.35:1 presentation does its best with what it's got, which means its hues are again quite intense, strongly saturated, excessively deep, and often too dark, too extreme, too glossy, and too shiny for anything approaching real life, not that reality was anything the director intended. While overall definition is adequate for an HD release, detailing remains somewhat soft, especially noticeable in the characters' somewhat bland facial features. No, there is really nothing wrong with the video quality, and a lot of people will find the brilliance, depth, and richness of its colors to their liking. It just looks too glassy bright and smoothed over for my taste.
Audio:
Like the video, the audio is also unexceptional. There isn't much to the sound expect dialogue and raucous background music, so there is not a lot of difference between the BD disc's lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio and the SD disc's regular Dolby Digital. The TrueHD does reproduce some clear, clean mids, a decent stereo spread, and a few well-placed surround effects, environmental noises mainly, like crowds, birds, and cars. Other than that, there isn't much frequency range or dynamic impact to speak of, nor much of anything out of the ordinary about it.
Extras:
For so inconsequential a movie, the Blu-ray disc has a fair number of bonus items, all of them in high definition to sweeten the pot. The first bonus, of course, is the very fact that this particular version of the movie is the "Extended Survival Edition" and includes several additional minutes of footage not seen in theaters. I couldn't tell you what they are, however, not having seen the original version.
Next, there's an audio commentary by the director, Steven Brill, one of the co-writers, Kristofor Brown, and actors Troy Gentile, Nate Hartley, and David Dorfman. After that is a fourteen-minute featurette, "The Writers Get a Chance to Talk," wherein we hear more from Kristofor Brown along with co-writer Seth Rogen. The most interesting item for me, though, was the series of deleted and extended scenes, over twenty-three minutes in high-def widescreen.
After those segments, we find an item called "Line-O-Rama," about four minutes of additional dialogue; followed by a four-minute gag reel; and then a whole series of brief featurettes: "Panhandle," "Rap Off," "Bully," "Sprinkler Day," "Directing Kids," "The Real Dan: Danny McBride," and others.
The bonuses conclude with fifteen scene selections but no chapter insert; several theatrical trailers; bookmarks; a guide to elapsed time; and English, French, and Spanish spoken languages and subtitles, with English captions for the hearing impaired.
Parting Shots:
It's hard not to like Owen Wilson in any movie, even when he's playing a bum, as he does here. The guy is so charming, we know he's not going to let us down. Much. Yet in "Drillbit Taylor" his character is so very unscrupulous that even Wilson can't save him, and with him goes the movie. The film is harebrained, sentimental, sometimes cruel, often clumsy, mostly unfunny, and frustratingly inane. Not a moment of it rings true, nothing, not an iota, not even farcically true. Wilson does his best, but for how long can he keep playing practically the same charming slacker in film after film?
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[release]23844[/release]