Review of Beer (1985) by Paul F — 22 Jun 2005

I don't like rating things on the iffy 1-10 scale, especially when the difference between a "5" and a "6" is the complete approval and disapproval of a film. I never liked the "thumbs up/thumbs down" ratings system either--aren't there any movies that are just kind of mediocre? The half-assed, but genuinely likable flicks that provide an hour and a half of amusement and nothing more?

[i]Beer[/i] was hovering between a "5" and a "6," and because of this I had to base my final choice on purely juvenile reasons. You see, much of [i]Beer [/i]takes place in a bar (not surprising) and in one scene, there's a drunken dwarf. Drunken dwarves are funny--thus, a 6 for [i]Beer[/i]. It made the difference to me. See, now if [i]The Passion of the Christ[/i] had had a scene with a drunken dwarf barroom brawl, it would have gotten a "6" too.

Beer isn't exactly a good movie. Loretta Swit (those over 30 may have to look her up, but she was hot stuff at the time) plays an ad executive for a film whose main client, Norbecker Beer, has lackluster sales. A.J. Norbecker himself (Kenneth Mars) demands that they come up with a new ad campaign that will save the company. Swit ends up at a bar where three average joes--a cowboy type (William Russ), an Italian construction worker (Saul Stein) and a black lawyer (David Alan Grier)--are drinking their problems away. The bar gets robbed, the robber is knocked out, and the three are viewed as heroes. Swit immediately signs the trio to an endorsement deal, hiring scruffy alcoholic filmmaker Rip Torn to the project.

The first commercial goes well, but after is succeeds, the public demands more, and they get it in the series of increasingly sexist and innuendo-ridden spots that all end with the catch phrase, "Whip out your Norbecker!" The three stars go through sub-plots of their own, with the cowboy sleeping with Swit, the Italian becoming impotent and the lawyer trying to "act black," a schtick Grier would later go back to in [i]Amazon Women on the Moon[/i] and on "In Living Color." The public becomes outraged, things spiral out of control, there's a plane crash, and the whole thing comes to an end as the group is caught in a gay bar due to a wacky misunderstanding. (There were more gay bars in '80s films than actual gay characters. It's a fact I just made up.).

There's fun to be had in [i]Beer,[/i] but the problem is that it doesn't quite know if it wants to be a screwball comedy or a satire of the advertising industry, and it never fully manages to be either. The characters are so broad (the Italian's mother is introduced carrying a huge bowl of spaghetti, for God's sake) that the satire is kind of overtaken by the zany antics of everything going on, though the scene when Swit accepts her Clio award with the most hilariously solemn speech about the merits of advertising could have been straight out of Network.

The cast is great, even if their characters don't exactly go anywhere. Mars (now a regular on "Malcolm in the Middle") is especially good as the jovial head of Norbecker, who dismisses differences between beers as they're all "fermented piss-colored water" and ends up starring in a homoerotic bath house commercial at the end ("You can take it in the bottle, or you can take it in the can."), and any "success montage" for a beer that has footage of guys waiting in line for the urinal clearly has its' tongue firmly in cheek.

The problem is that [i]Beer[/i] has was too many ideas and never really manages to focus on any of them. The robber of the bar is hired to play himself in the commercials, but it's just for a quick gag and doesn't really get anywhere, and the same can be said for a lot of the quick bits in Beer that never get more than a few seconds of play.

[i]Beer[/i] has aged quite well--in fact, it's probably a more entertaining film now than it was when it was released to poor reviews and a quick box-office death. The subjects it's satirizing haven't changed, and it's "Simpsons"-like sense of humor has grown into the public's taste, making it more accessable. It's still not a great film by any means, but it's an entertaining little way to spend an hour and a half that doesn't overstay it's welcome, even if the subjects it's parodying have been ridiculed to death at this point.

(There's quite a few good character actors in this as well--Peter Michael Goetz, a bearded, mostly-bald Richard Dreyfussian actor plays the head of the ad agency, David Wohl*, a balding guy mostly known for playing toadies, plays an exec, and Dick Shawn plays a Phil Donohue clone. Shawn and Mars, natch, were previously in [i]The Producers[/i] together.).

(This isn't on DVD yet, but it's owned by MGM, so it may be soon. It seems like one of those movies that would just randomly come out on DVD as some multi-title promotion eventually.).

[size=1]* -- He was the Kurt Fuller of his time.[/size].