Entertainment :: Movies
Reno 911! - Miami (Unrated Edition)
by Timothy Gabriele EDGE Contributor Tuesday Jun 19, 2007 One day, history might judge the absurdist comedy of MTV’s early 90’s sketch comedy show The State (1993-1995) as the Monty Python of their era. While not as innovative as Python, The State was the zenith of silly, both complexly childish and narratively taut. Though far from flawless, The State created a type of humor that is still as funny to me now as it was when I watched it in middle school, though perhaps for different reasons now. The careers of The State’s 11-cast members in their post-MTV days have found them lingering about just under the cultural radar, directing cult films like Wet Hot American Summer, Drop Dead Gorgeous and Diggers, occasionally popping up as celebrity commentators on VH1 specials, and airing in prematurely cancelled series like the cheeky Viva Variety and the utterly brilliant Stella. State alumnus Ben Garant (Junior), Thomas Lennon (Dangle) and Kerry Kenney-Silver (Trudy Wiegel) meanwhile farmed out a nice niche for themselves on Comedy Central’s Reno 911, an underrated weekly half hour of depraved hilarity that has maintained a modest but loyal cult that has kept the show afloat for four seasons (a fifth is on the way.) When the show first debuted in 2003, it caught a lot of people off guard. Filmed on a shoestring budget in the death rattles of reality television’s reign of terror, Reno 911 at first appeared to be no more clever than the myriad parodies of Cops that any Youtube hack have cooked with a few trips to the costume shop. Also working against the program was the fact that it was a show that belittled law enforcement officers at a time when Giuliani and his ilk were mythologizing and deifying the profession. In addition, in the post 9/11 depression of anthrax envelopes and orange alerts, America was still pants-shittingly afraid of anything with a nine, a one, and another one appearing in sequence anywhere in popular culture. Thus began the supposedly un-self-aware high speed pursuit of laughs in television’s Reno 911, which has had the odd character of carrying on in the most irreverent manner imaginable without ever garnishing too much publicity unto itself. In its four year span, it has arguably been more pointedly satirical on matters of race than Dave Chappelle, more distasteful than South Park (making light of, among other things, Megan’s Law and serial killers), and more absurdly episodic than anything on Family Guy, yet it has been awarded none of the lauds, controversies or t-shirt franchises those shows received. Perhaps most impressively contrary to its TV-MA peers, Reno 911 is filmed almost entirely ad lib, often creating entire sequences off of the faintest of plot cues. Reno 911!: Miami does not extend far beyond the show’s common terrain. It’s main storyline, which revolves around the Reno Sherriff’s Department commandeering Miami’s police facilities following a biological attack on a local police convention, is secondary to the film’s true aspirations; watching the thin blue line slowly deteriorate under the supervision of a group of folks that Lieutenant Dangle at one point calls "the dumbest group of people I’ve ever met who weren’t legally retarded." It’s a narrative style that’s jarring to anyone schooled exclusively in the Robert McKee School of filmmaking, but it’s one perfectly fitted to this particular gang of losers. Officers Dangle, Junior, Wiegel, Jones (Cedric Yarborough), Kimball (Mary Birdsong), Williams (Niecy Nash), Garcia (Carlos Alazraqui) and Johnson (Wendi McLendon-Covey) are a bad news bears lot, for whom winning and achieving are on low on the list of priorities. A Reno 911 movie in which characters actually learned things, developed as people and reached personal highs would go against the grain of entire series. Likewise, much of Reno 911: Miami’s charm comes from its lack of excitement. It is a show that finds large laughs in the ways the protagonists only experience the extraordinary peripherally, such as when Jones and Garcia are mistakenly kidnapped and forced to watch a crazy coke mule wield a weedwhacker at a an "accomplice" they’ve never seen before in their lives. Don’t expect the film’s quintessential car chase to rival anything out of Bullit, Ronin or Die Hard. Besides, you’ll be much more entertained watching the drunken crew trying to capitalize on the built-in sexual tension of the force after coming back from a hard night of partying in a brilliantly executed long shot scene set to Pachelbel’s Canon in D. Reno 911: Miami’s anticlimactic ending, amusing tangents, and utter lack of convictions make for, surprisingly enough, a winning combination. Like the show, the film will probably float around with an underground and nearly transparent cult following for years, while undeserving peers shower themselves in the comedic limelight, but it’s also not a film that would be afraid to resign itself to such. Reno 911’s improv nature is well suited to the DVD format of bonus and extended material and this disc contains a bunch. The best entries are a series of foul-mouthed disclaimers meant to play before theatrical trailers including one which has Officer Wiegel instructor theatergoers to turn off their cell phones and "shut the fuck up!" The DVD also has three commentary tracks; one insightful and informative audio track with Kenney-Silver, Garant and Lennon in their roles as writers, producers and directors respectively, and two with commentary by the Reno Sherriff’s Department themselves. The latter, along with the "extended scenes" section of the DVD, are bits of prolonged improv that deconstruct the process that makes Reno 911’s montage style work. Some of these sequences, such as the never-ending argument between Deputy Assistant Mayor/ Acting Mayor Jeff Spoder (Patton Oswalt) and his mother (Mindy Sterling) are hilarious in their own right. Others, like the sequence where the heroes try to think up solutions to get a whale off of the beach, help illuminate the improv process by showing the minute-to-minute interplay that ultimately gets condensed into the films montage scenes. Timothy Gabriele is currently lives in Philadelphia where he is a freelance writer looking to score big on the boulevard of free thought. He keeps track of things and provides the occasional insight at 555 Enterprises, his blog. |
Email
Print
Share