Post by Dracula on Oct 2, 2022 6:23:38 GMT -5
The Greatest Beer Run Ever(9/30/2022)
It’s been almost four years now, but that Green Book victory at the 91st Annual Academy Awards still burns. It just bristles that something so obviously retrograde was declared that year’s best film by an organization that’s supposed to be at least a little more in touch with what’s going on in society. I don’t necessarily want to hold that against director Peter Farrelly in his future endeavors, and yet his follow-up movie is almost impossible not to compare with that previous “triumph.” After all he’s managed to follow-up his movie about a dumb white guy coming to learn that the Jim Crow South was bad actually on a wacky road trip with a movie about an even dumber white guy who finds out that the Vietnam War was bad actually on an even wackier road trip. I wonder if his next movie will be about a mentally ill white person finding out that Richard Nixon isn’t an entirely honest politician to close out his trilogy of idiots in the 60s learning lessons that are now banally uncontroversial. Let me back up, so The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a movie based on the true story about a guy from a blue collar neighborhood in New York who took an improbably trip to Vietnam at the height of the war there in order to deliver beer to his friends from the neighborhood who are over there as a gesture of goodwill to counter all the negative news coverage about the war. Lessons are learned along the way. I’ll give the movie this, I probably did generally find the road trip elements here a bit more entertaining than I did in Green Book just because a war zone is an inherently more active background than Georgia. Additionally I can envision a world in which this came out about fifteen years ago and it would have had at least some allegorical power when paired with the “support the troops” frenzy that kept us in Iraq and Afghanistan as long as long as we were. Of course it’s too late for that kind or relevancy but it is at least better than being fifty years out of date like Green Book was. So yeah, I wasn’t impressed by this on any kind of substantive level, but it doesn’t exude incompetence or anything, I’m sure there are some people out there who would enjoy it but not me.
** out of Five
It’s been almost four years now, but that Green Book victory at the 91st Annual Academy Awards still burns. It just bristles that something so obviously retrograde was declared that year’s best film by an organization that’s supposed to be at least a little more in touch with what’s going on in society. I don’t necessarily want to hold that against director Peter Farrelly in his future endeavors, and yet his follow-up movie is almost impossible not to compare with that previous “triumph.” After all he’s managed to follow-up his movie about a dumb white guy coming to learn that the Jim Crow South was bad actually on a wacky road trip with a movie about an even dumber white guy who finds out that the Vietnam War was bad actually on an even wackier road trip. I wonder if his next movie will be about a mentally ill white person finding out that Richard Nixon isn’t an entirely honest politician to close out his trilogy of idiots in the 60s learning lessons that are now banally uncontroversial. Let me back up, so The Greatest Beer Run Ever is a movie based on the true story about a guy from a blue collar neighborhood in New York who took an improbably trip to Vietnam at the height of the war there in order to deliver beer to his friends from the neighborhood who are over there as a gesture of goodwill to counter all the negative news coverage about the war. Lessons are learned along the way. I’ll give the movie this, I probably did generally find the road trip elements here a bit more entertaining than I did in Green Book just because a war zone is an inherently more active background than Georgia. Additionally I can envision a world in which this came out about fifteen years ago and it would have had at least some allegorical power when paired with the “support the troops” frenzy that kept us in Iraq and Afghanistan as long as long as we were. Of course it’s too late for that kind or relevancy but it is at least better than being fifty years out of date like Green Book was. So yeah, I wasn’t impressed by this on any kind of substantive level, but it doesn’t exude incompetence or anything, I’m sure there are some people out there who would enjoy it but not me.
** out of Five
