THE TRUTH ABOUT AVERAGE GUYS (a review)

THE TRUTH ABOUT AVERAGE GUYS (a review)

How bad can a movie be made and still be pretty good? This movies seems to be trying to answer that question. Because it is really bad, but it is still pretty good.

The story: pretty standard stuff -- an average guy likes his hot co-worker. He tries schemes to get closer to her, but she still doesn't notice him. When he finds out that she has a mentally handicapped sister, he lies and tells her his brother is also mentally handicapped and then gets his friend to pretend to the lie so he can get close to her. Eventually, of course, the lie will be exposed, etc, etc.

So the actual story is pretty standard stuff. It's a rom-com formula where the protagonist uses a creative lie (that his friend is his mentally handicapped brother) so he can get close to the girl. And that part to the movie is okay, if completely by the numbers. What makes the movie worth watching is the scenes among the group of guys. Just like in apatow movies, it's these scenes with the friends who are both supportive and ripping on each other that are the best -- they have the best energy, the biggest laughs and even hit on an occasional true thing. For those scenes alone (with a decent but not special story) the movies gets --

Okay, before I give the movie it's recommend I have to talk about how badly this movie was made. How bad is it? There's camera noise. Seriously. There is camera noise. So what's camera noise? Well, in a film camera you have a spool of film that is pulled down and run past the lens and then respooled on the other side of the camera, and while it is doing this it makes a small amount of noise, noise that the sound microphones will pick up almost every time. And one of the first things filmmakers do is get rid of the sound. It's why most people don't know about camera noise -- because every professional film gets rid of it, or masks it, comepletely. Here it is everywhere. It's even in shots that don't need sound. For instance there's an exterior shot with a guy walking up to the house and the only noise you hear is camera noise? Seriously? You have it even on an MOS shot? You didn't just cut it in post and lay over a couple seconds of ambiant sound???? OMFG! And once you hear it once in the movie you begin to notice it again and again and again -- in dialog scenes (where it can be hard to remove) to MOS to everything else. It's like they did no sound editing on the film at all.

And it's this lack of attention to detail that hurts the film. A lot. For instance, there are dialog scenes where there are weird gaps in the dialog where one person speaks and the next person waits to say their response. Waits a lot. In a pro film, you would have coverage and be able to cut and tighten the dialog. Here, nope. And for a film that is basically dialog driven this kills those scenes.

Arggg! I could go on. This is a movie that has problems all the way through it. Huge, amateur problems. It really feels like a movie made by people still in film school. Like their first year of film school. And yet, I'll give it up that overall the movie was enjoyable. But if you watch it don't listen for the camera noise, because once you near it it will distract from almost every scene. Or make a drinking game out of it. A very, very big drinking game.

I will say that the writing is pretty solid. Not spectacular, but solid. The one place where it lapses is the title -- the truth about average guys -- because it never really talks about this truth until the very end, which is epsecially weird since there are plenty of group of guy scenes where they could talk about this truth. Now maybe the title came after the movie was made, but it's a shame because the title implies a better, more interesting movie that the filmmakers never quite get to.

*** rental recommend (if you like Apatow movies) ***