Movie Review: The Greatest Beer Run Ever

The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) 

Directed by Peter Farrelly

Written by Peter Farrelly, Peter Currie, Pete Jones 

Starring Zac Efron, Russell Crowe, Viggo Mortensen, Bill Murray 

Release Date September 30th, 2022 

Apple TV 

Leave it to Peter Farrelly to take a great story and pull its teeth. In fairness, he was awarded a Best Picture statue for doing just that to the life of Jazz music legend Don Shirley and his longtime friend Nick Vallelonga. There however, Vallelonga takes much of the blame for the mediocrity. It was Vallelonga who wrote the self-serving screenplay, much at the expense of the story of Shirley which was lost amid the eye-rolling, uplifting pap in Vallelonga's script and Farrelly's bland direction. Of course it won Best Picture, Hollywood loves to reward uplifting pap. 

The proof of concept for my theory about Farrelly being the go-to director for taking a good story and rendering it supremely mediocre however, comes with his latest directorial effort, The Greatest Beer Run Ever. Here we have a story so insane, so unbelievable, it should make an amazing movie. The true story has a guy from New Jersey deciding that he's going to take cases of Pabst Blue Ribbon to his buddies fighting in Vietnam in 1967. John 'Chickie' Donahue really did this! It's impossible to believe right? It should be an amazing movie. 

Sadly, The Greatest Beer Run Ever is directed by Peter Farrelly, a director whose movies could be sold as baby-proof for their remarkable lack of hard edges. That's not to say that Farrelly's movies aren't controversial, rather they are controversial for all the wrong reasons. Green Book is an almost complete fabrication, a vile white washing of the life of Don Shirley in favor of burnishing the egotistical legend of Nick Vallelonga. Similarly, The Greatest Beer Run of All Time should be a sharp elbowed rebuke of America's involvement in Vietnam. Instead, it's a soft headed comedy about friendship and bravery, tempered with being sad for a few people who didn't come home. 

Chickie Donahue (Zac Efron) is beloved in his small New Jersey neighborhood though not so much at home. A Merchant Marine by trade, Chickie tends to only work when he feels like it and spends most nights getting drunk in a bar owned by The Colonel (Bill Murray). Chickie and his buddies are former military men who went through Korea as kids while the specter of World War 2 hangs over the heads. While at the bar watching brutal footage of the war in Vietnam on the news, Chickie and his friends are upset that the media only shows the horror and seems to dismiss the soldiers who are fighting and dying. 

Click here for my full length, angry, review of The Greatest Beer Run Ever at Geeks.Media. 

Documentary Review A Life on the Farm

A Life on the Farm (2022) 

Directed by Oscar Harding

Written by Documentary 

Starring Oscar Harding, Charles Carson, Karen Kilgariff 

Release Date Fantastic Fest 

Featured at the Found Footage Festival 

Life on the Farm is a fascinatingly bizarre and brilliant documentary. I was not prepared for Life on the Farm. I thought what I was getting would be quirky and funny, and it is. But it is soooo much more than that. Life on the Farm is macabre, mysterious, charming and bizarre. It's a surprisingly emotional experience as well. I assumed that the film's subject, Charles Carson, was just going to be some easy to poke fun at bad filmmaker. Instead, Charles Carson is this genuine, sweet, odd individual who wins you over with his enthusiasm for all aspects of life and death. 

Life on the Farm is the brainchild of director Oscar Harding who turned a vague memory from his childhood into a lifelong search and obsession that culminates in the creation of this documentary. When Oscar was a kid growing up in the English countryside, Charles Carson was a kindly, somewhat addled neighbor who made sure drop something off with Oscar's family every Christmas. That something was Charles' annual VHS Christmas Card. Charles was a camcorder enthusiast whose life was dedicated to capturing life on the farm, in all of its forms. 

Each video started the same way with Charles addressing the camera with his name and the name of his farm, Coombes End Farm, said without a pause, charmingly and incomprehensibly together as CoomesonFahm. The videos have stuck with Oscar Harding for more than 30 years not because they were a secret work of genius, though they kind of are. No, his memory was solidified while watching the VHS with his dad and his dad suddenly clicking the tape off and getting rid of it. Why had his father done this? What could the kindly Charles Carson have had in the video for Oscar's dad to have reacted so suddenly and decisively. 

Meanwhile, somewhere around the globe while Oscar was puzzling over this childhood memory, VHS and found footage collectors were sitting on a goldmine. Through fate or chance, some of Charles' incredibly strange and unique home movies had gone around the globe and wound up part of found footage and found VHS festivals. The Charles Carson tapes were a pre-internet sensation but with no YouTube to save it for posterity, the tapes went into storage and were often forgotten, returning to the status of found footage to one day be rediscovered. 

Incredibly, just as Oscar Harding's Aunt recovered one of Charles' tapes, YouTubers had found one as well and were sharing it, though it wasn't quite as viral right away. The online fandom was small but growing and since Oscar's tape was different from the one that had gone around the globe, the confluence of Charles Carson content was about to reach a boiling point that would create this documentary, Life on the Farm, and a demand for Charles content among small enclaves of found footage devotees that is almost unrivaled. 

Click here for my complete review of A Life on the Farm 

Movie Review Don't Worry Darling

Don't Worry Darling (2022) 

Directed by Olivia Wilde 

Written by Katie Silberman 

Starring Florence Pugh, Harry Styles, Chris Pine, Gemma Chan, Nick Kroll 

Release Date September 23rd, 2022 

Published September 23rd, 2022 

If your life was perfect, how would you know? I’m not talking about the basic signifiers of things you would have that would make your life seem perfect like money, a nice house, a supportive family, I mean, what if life was perfect. No pain, no sorry, no irritation or even annoyance. Your every need is met immediately. Nothing is ever out of place. It’s an impossible standard, of course, but what if? If life were perfect, how would you know? 

This is a philosophical thought experiment. If life were perfect, perfect would be normal and thus not perfect. How do you know there is up without down? How do you know what joy is if you don’t know what the opposite of joy feels like? Yin and Yang, give life meaning. Love and the absence of love are distinct feelings. If you only ever knew love then love would become a mundane expectation of everyday life, unrecognizable without knowing the absence of it. What is loss if you never lose? 

The new movie Don’t Worry Darling got me thinking about this idea of a perfect life and how impossible that idea is. This notion that someone could invent a perfect life is downright silly but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Mad men like Chris Pine’s Frank seek to stamp out all problems from the world, tame life into what they want it to be. He’s admired for this madness and seeks to indoctrinate others to his notion of what a perfect life would look like. 

He’s arrogant enough to push aside the notion that the human mind is not built for perfection. In the brilliant action adventure movie, The Matrix, a character known as Agent Smith, wonderfully played by Hugo Weaving, explains that the A.I monsters who created The Matrix, a simulated reality intended to enslave humans while the humans themselves are treated as organic batteries, first created a perfect simulation. 

The first Matrix created a simulated reality with no heartache, no pain, no death, no war, no negatives whatsoever. Everyone was cared for and their needs were perfectly attended to. The humans went insane in no time at all. The mind rebelled against perfection because how would you know that life is perfect if every day featured the same level of precise perfection? If perfect becomes normal, normal becomes mundane and the imagination seeks something to think about, something to question. 

Click here for my full length review of Don't Worry Darling.