Life of the Party Blu-ray Review
New/Old Girl on Campus
Reviewed by Michael Reuben, August 6, 2018
You have to give it up for Melissa McCarthy. She's managed to turn herself into a brand with
enough of a fan base to support a stream of comedies in which she basically plays the same
character. Whether cast as a loser (
Tammy), a spy (
Spy), an online swindler (
Identity Thief), an
FBI agent (
The Heat) or a business tycoon (
The Boss), McCarthy's persona remains essentially
that of a motor-mouthed bovine in a china shop. Indeed, one of the reasons why McCarthy's
SNL impression of former Presidential press secretary Sean Spicer was so effective was the
unstoppable energy she brings to all her characters. As her version of Spicer bulldozed his way
through troublesome reporters, blaring from a motorized podium, McCarthy managed to be
spicier than the real "Spicy".
McCarthy's most recent film,
Life of the Party ("
LotP"), is another collaboration with husband
Ben Falcone, who directed and co-wrote the script with his wife. The same team also
created
Tammy and
The Boss, but
LotP was far less well-received at the box office. Maybe
McCarthy's fans were simply waiting for the video release, as the window between video and
theatrical continues to shrink. Or maybe the formula is wearing out. Either way,
LotP is a
dispirited affair, intermittently amusing but on the whole disappointing.
As many have already noted,
LotP borrows its basic premise from Rodney Dangerfield's classic
Back to School, with appropriate
adjustments for the intervening thirty-two years and a female
lead. McCarthy plays Deanna Miles, who dropped out of Decatur University in her senior year to
have daughter Maddie (Molly Gordon), while her husband, Dan (Matt Walsh), graduated and
went on to a career. Now, as Deanna and Dan drop off Molly for
her senior year, Dan tells his
wife that he wants a divorce, because he's in love with another woman, a sharp-edged realtor
named Marcie (Julie Bowen). After commiserating with her parents (Stephen Root and Jacki
Weaver) and her best friend, Christine (Maya Rudolph), Deanna decides to re-enroll and
complete her archaeology degree. Maddie is less than thrilled to be sharing the campus with her own mom,
but just as in
Back to School, Deanna's indomitable spirit eventually wins over both her daughter
and the rest of the student body. (And she does it without the assistance of the personal fortune,
formidable bodyguard or athletic prowess that Dangerfield's character had in
Back to School.)
LotP is dominated by sitcom aesthetics and bizarre contrivances. Maddie's sorority house, where
Deanna is eventually inducted into membership, is more spacious and lavishly appointed than
any campus residence I've ever seen. It's more like the luxury dorm suite that Dangerfield's
Thornton Melon inhabits
after an expensive remodel. Maddie's sorority sisters are a collection of
problems who can benefit from Deanna's mothering, and her roommate (current
SNL cast
member Heidi Gardner) is a stereotypical looney (she never leaves the room). Like Thornton
Melon before her, Deanna flirts with a professor, Wayne Truzac (
SNL alum Chris Parnell), who
just happens to have been one of her classmates all those years ago, and whose bad puns about
his chosen field of archaeology don't get funnier with repetition—though Deanna enjoys them.
But before Deanna can respond to the professor's advances, she first has to get years of frustrated
sexuality out of her system with a hunky senior named Jack (Luke Benward), who, in the film's
most eye-rolling subplot, is so besotted with a woman more than twice his age that the pair can't
meet in the library without disappearing into the stacks for a torrid coupling. I suppose the
turnabout is only fair play, after years of male movie stars being romantically paired with much
younger women, but
LotP doesn't even try to make Deanna and Luke a convincing couple
beyond the suggestion that, you know, older women
know things. Admittedly, the affair does
culminate in one of the film's best jokes, but it's still about as credible as the near-complete
absence of notebook computers and tablets in a contemporary college lecture hall—what was the
production designer thinking?—or the notion that Deanna, who's anything but shy, freaks out at
the prospect of making a class presentation.
The best parts of
LotP arrive courtesy of its supporting cast. Weaver and Root as Deanna's
parents are such an effective comedy team that they deserve their own movie (their character
names, Sandy and Mike, are taken from McCarthy's real-life parents, and according to
McCarthy, so is much of their behavior). The reliable Maya Rudolph effortlessly transforms
Deanna's best friend into the kind of unpredictable whirlwind that Deanna is trying so hard to be
(and when Rudolph's Christine keeps slipping off to have sex with her age-appropriate husband,
you believe it). As Deanna's creepy roommate, Heidi Gardner expands a one-note character into
an aria of dysfunction—and also turns out to be key to one of the film's many convenient
coincidences. Meanwhile, poor Molly Gordon, who has been such a memorable presence in
TNT's
Animal
Kingdom, remains saddled with the thankless role of perpetual onlooker,
alternately annoyed, embarrassed and bemused by her student-mom's antics. With everyone
around her pushing their characters' eccentricities to the limits in order to keep up with
McCarthy's cyclonic presence, the film's only "normal" character gets blown off the screen.
Life of the Party Blu-ray, Video Quality
Life of the Party was digitally photographed by Julio Macat, who also shot McCarthy's
The Boss
and whose comic credits include
Wedding Crashers
and
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.
The film
has been designed and lit like a glossy TV sitcom, no doubt to assist in the extreme suspension of
disbelief that McCarthy's films require. Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray exhibits all the
usual virtues of contemporary digital capture, with solid blacks, superior sharpness and detail and
an absence of noise, interference or artifacts. The colors are bright and richly saturated, never
more so than at the Eighties theme party attended by Deanna with Maddie and her friends, where
costume designer Louise Mingenbach has had a field day re-imagining an era where the clothing
was wildly excessive (but rarely so much as in
LotP's Hollywood re-creation).
A reputation, once acquired, can be very hard to change, and I still see posts at Blu-ray.com
decrying Warner's low bitrates. However,
LotP is yet another example of the studio's new-found
(and, as yet, inconsistent) embrace of more generous encoding, with an average bitrate of 29.79
Mbps and a capable encode.