The Suburbans - O Recomeço

there are just some things Long Islanders love: good pizza/bagels, mafia movies, the beach, and hearing shout-outs to towns and landmarks on our beloved home. Goodfellas takes care of the mafia movies and the shout-outs, and the Suburbans basically use the latter to keep me watching the sorry piece of film. I was practically jumping out of my seat when they said "sunrise mall" and the house that was in Wantagh... so all that being said, that was the only part of the movie that was in any way enticing or watchable. And Will Ferrell was pretty funny, but definitely needed to be featured better. Forget this movie. Oh wait, you've never heard of it and never will....for God's sake im only watching it cause it's on some secondary HBO channel and they know no one's watching.

Four guys Danny (Donal Lardner Ward), Rory (Tony Guma), Mitch (Craig Bierko), and Gil (Will Ferrell) are 30something friends who were once a big 80's one-hit band called The Suburbans. When they perform at Gil's wedding to help Mitch with a hot fan, a record company scout (Jennifer Love Hewitt) in the audience gets them a comeback show for their nostalgia showcase.

Donal Lardner Ward wrote/directed/star in this movie. Quite frankly, I don't know how he got so many then and future stars in this one movie. Ben Stiller and his dad try to ham it up as record studio suits. Will Ferrell is channeling an idiot bass player. However Will can't save this. The fact is the band doesn't have the comedic chops. Craig Bierko is fitting for the lead singer jerk. But the two writers Donal Lardner Ward and Tony Guma should not be lead actors. They really need to search for better comedians to do those roles. The writing is broadly unfunny, and the performances are generally flat.

This is a silly comedy that I could relate to being in my thirties. Will Ferrell is quite good in this film. There is some good satire. If you don't take the film seriously you can get some good laughs out of it.

It's a strange mix of broad satire and angsty romantic comedy.

The satire is hilarious. Ben and Jerry Stiller are wonderful as a father/son team of record company execs. Jennifer Love Hewitt is equally wonderful as long as she stays on the satire side of the line; when the script shoves her over onto the romantic comedy side, she never quite recovers her balance. She has to play two completely different characters; she can't be blamed if it doesn't quite work.

Amy Brenneman, stuck on the romantic comedy side, does her formidable best to make her character work. In fact, she is by far the most sympathetic and memorable character in the movie.

Definitely worth a rental.

When watching this film, it seems to have a big identity crisis throughout. It has all the right components to be a hilarious comedy, but doesn't deliver when it should; often merging into boring drama and romance side plots for long periods of time. After seeing the powerful cast consisting of Ferrell, Hewitt, and Stiller, it's easy to build up high expectations. Here's my analysis of that: Will Ferrell's presence in this film is so insignificant that he shouldn't even have been in the movie at all. He was already pretty big, so I don't get why he was in such a menial role and literally has about 3 light chuckle lines in the whole film.

Stiller has a menial role as well, but his character is funny and one of the higher points of the movie. Jennifer Love Hewitt does a good job with the decent-bad material presented to her, and she gets a lot of screen time. Her character is cute and one of the better aspects of the film.

There are some notably funny elements here and there, but nothing that grabs you as a whole.