Tucker Max needs a medium and film isn't it

I had the opportunity to finally watch I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell last night, and while it was advertised as a comedy I felt it fitting more of an overtly masculine Romantic Comedy/Drama. The film, strongly based around Tucker Max's (oftentimes hilarious) fratirical*, self titled website, centres its plot around Max convincing his soon-to-be-married friend Dan and (described as misanthropic) acquaintance Drew to go to Texas to celebrate Dan's bachelorhood. 

Dissimilarly to Max's third officially published book, Hilarity Ensues, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell not only fails to incite comedy, but it even fails ultimately to evoke shock, or at least not in the same way that his first book did. 

The film, essentially borrowing snippets and ideas from previous Tucker Max stories, is really just one hundred minutes of forgettable performances, weak one liners, and horribly scripted character dialogue. The strongest performance seems to come from the man playing Max, and half of this is simply through the pitiful situations he exposed himself to in the name of acting. While this movie wasn't totally bereft of laughter, it certainly left a lot to be desired, and even more so considering the material it was working with. 

Tucker Max's character is portrayed as a smug, self-centred, obnoxious pig. While this may be very true to his character according to Max's own written accounts of his life, the film doesn't do justice to Max's self-imposed situations. Many of the scenes simply see Tucker Max stumbling in, making a fool of himself while spitting out overly scripted one liners, then the rest of the scene shows the looks of disgust and hatred on the faces of the women he was trying to score with while his friend Dan tries his hardest to fix Max's error and Drew stands in the corner of the scene occasionally legitimizing himself as an actor, and that is by acting like he is acting. 

Of all the characters I have ever seen in any film or show, there are only two which I can say genuinely made me disgusted at their presence whenever they entered a scene. The first is the entire cast of the Jersey Shore (as I believe these people to be not quite human and therefore do not qualify as individual characters by themselves), and the second is Drew from this movie. 

Drew's character is portrayed in such a light that he is hard to be believable; unfortunately, this is just as much the actor's fault as it is the writer's, as not only are his occasional one liners hardly believable as improvised threats, but the delivery of such just completely dismisses any idea that this character could be believable in any respect. His presence goes from being the guy insulting everyone, to the guy at the back not saying anything. The little shred of humanity portrayed in Drew's character sets him out to being a severely autistic person with the mind of an eight year old boy, and his antisocial behaviour so obviously juxtaposes Tucker's extrovert nature. 

Of all the characters, the only one anywhere near believable is Dan, and even this is for the wrong reasons. While his scripts all feel wooden and too rehearsed, there is a slight quality that he as an actor possesses which neither of the other two actors seemed to have. Dan, by rights, is the voice of reason and the connection between Tucker Max and Drew, but this doesn't hold in the scenes depicting him getting drunk at the 'legendary' nightclub in Salem, elbowing a stripper while being more or less sexually molested (seriously), and then being assaulted by three strippers and thrown out of the club by security. 

As I touched on earlier, this film was a comedy, but it didn't live to the expectation that it would actually make me laugh. No doubt some scenes were funny, and on the very rare occasion some of the dialogue was funny, but when the opening scene shows Tucker Max having sex with a deaf girl and then being interrupted by a squad of police officers allegedly responding to an animal abuse incident, all pretense of shock, one of the elements sampled heavily in this film, is completely forgotten. The final few scenes, depicting Tucker drinking alone, picking up a girl, both sharing a drink spiked with laxative, and then following him as he tries to find a bathroom in the hotel he is staying at, are used as a plot element to explain Tucker's 'epiphany' (through lack of a better word) and more or less beg for Dan's forgiveness at his wedding reception. Unfortunately these scenes, while slightly disturbing in nature, are so barely tied to his change of heart that it only really serves as a last alternative to this otherwise cliche plot element, and really only works as the straw to break the camels back in terms of storytelling credibility. In fact, it would be like a story ending with the line 'but then he woke up and it was all a dream.' 

The film grossed less than one third of its budget in the Box Office, and Tucker Max himself blames the advertising campaign. The problem with blaming the advertising is that you are more or less blaming everyone who watches the movie, because like it or not, word-of-mouth is still one of the most effective forms of advertising. His film wasn't well received because it just wasn't likable, and despite popular belief it just takes a few people to talk about something for the popularity (or notoriety) of it to grow. I wasn't quite expecting a great movie to begin with, as most of the reviews and opinion of the film were unpleasant to say the least, but I dismissed these on the premise that being a fan of Tucker Max's work, I would enjoy the film he himself helped make. 

*Fratire is a specific form of satire comedy pertaining to a style of writing popularised by Tucker Max and Maddox. The term is a horrible corruption of the words 'fraternity' and 'satire', coined by a New York Times reporter, and Tucker Max has criticised the name of the genre. I use the term sparingly as a respect to Tucker Max while still utilising it as a means of genre classification and description of his works. 

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour Discography!

Something that has been floating around in my head for a while now, sparked from a single-paragraph review of the album Out of Frequency by the Asteroids Galaxy Tour, is the actual album content and my opinion of the two albums released by this band. While I don't have the exact review posted, the essential message of it was to say that Out of Frequency was more or less similar in quality to their 2009 release Fruit, and that it has just as many good songs as Fruit and a comparable number of bad songs.

The crux of my opinion is that I disagree with this, however I'm not entirely sure which way I want to swing, and I can't really say which one is better. A summary of it would probably be along the lines of such;

Out of Frequency builds on the ideas and compositions released on Fruit, however it doesn't best it. This isn't to say that Fruit is a better album, or that Out of Frequency is an inferior album, but that the two albums work on different levels. 

Ultimately, it would be like comparing the Beatles' 1967 release Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Pink Floyd's 1973 release The Dark Side of the Moon. While both were groundbreaking critical successes and both cited by many (arguably) reputable publications among the best albums ever released, neither have enough similar ties to really be evaluated together, or compared against each other.

The amazing thing about this, then, is that the Asteroids Galaxy Tour have managed to release two great albums which cannot best one and other, something rarely achieved by indie, new, and unrecognised bands. While the overall sound is similar, the structures of the albums are incredibly different, and this is exactly what I want to argue is the reason for this difficulty in comparison.

Out of Frequency, at first glance, draws inspiration from psychedelic rock and pop much more prominently than Fruit, however after I became accustomed to both albums it became clear to me that both possess just as significant ties to this particular genre. Out of Frequency, unlike Fruit, is considerably more album-orientated, without ever stepping into the realm of ever being remotely considered a concept album (in comparison, the same can be said of the Beatles' 1966 album Revolver, and Pink Floyd's 1967 album The Piper at the Gates of Dawn). Some of the songs feed off each other, such as the introductory three song phrase comprising a wordless (while not quite instrumental) opening, a two minute follow up (in a completely different key and tempo), and then a longer, more instrument orientated reprise of the first song, and this section, along with others within the album, add to a feeling of continuity and thematic progression. By comparison, the opening three songs of Fruit are standalone songs, none of which link together musically or thematically. Musical and thematic continuity, however, isn't something that should ever add to the quality of an album, as even some of the best albums scarcely utilised (or even fail entirely to utilise) this tool, which for all intents and purposes can be written off as nothing more than a special effect.

The argument that Out of Frequency has 'just as many good songs and just as many bad songs as Fruit’, while is correct by itself, I feel deserves a larger justification.
Technically, Out of Frequency is a much more fluid album with 'higher highs' (Heart Attack, Out of Frequency, and Suburban Space Invader) and 'lower lows' (Mafia, Theme from 45 Eugenia and Ghost in my Head) than Fruit. That is to say that, while Fruit has some great songs, Out of Frequency has some better songs, and while Fruit has some bad songs, Out of Frequency has worse songs. If song quality were to be graphed based on song quality, the two albums would look something like this.

Next is the idea of feel and mood shift within the albums, which Fruit utilises more prevalently. It jumps from poppy, energetic songs such as Push the Envelope, The Golden Age, and Around the Bend, all three of which can be labelled as celebration anthems, to mellow, relaxed, and spaced out songs such as Crazy and Hero. While Out of Frequency attempts this, it falls short due to the trough in song quality experienced in Theme from 45 Eugenia and its prelude, Arrival of the Empress. Its biggest redeeming factor to this otherwise mood-independent album happens when Ghost in my Head, a relatively monotonous song, ends, and Suburban Space Invader (possibly the best non-single song on the album, and my personal favourite) begins. This then sweeps on to Fantasy Friend Forever, a synth and guitar driven mood lifter, which sort of helps to finish off the album before it's really over. When it Comes to Us, while not necessarily a bad song, isn't fitting as the finishing song on the album, and it could easily have been replaced by either of the two songs before it (Suburban Space Invader or Fantasy Friend Forever) to let the album finish on a more whole note (metaphorically). This argument, however, is a minor discrepancy, and the sound of the synthesizer mocking what could be described as the sound of an alien motor slowing down is just as fitting an ending as any alternative, independent of the actual song that it is appended to.

Fruit, conversely, ends on a worse note exactly because of what I just mentioned, and that was song chronology. The final song, Bad Fever, similar to the final song on Out of Frequency, isn't a necessarily bad song, but lacks the thematic closure (or at least musical structure) to be fluently used as the album's closing song. Empirically, this was one of the strongest points for me not really enjoying this album for a long time (and I have had it in my library for close to two years). Every time I listened to Fruit, I would sort of fade out of actually listening to the music as I did other activities, and then when the album finished, the last (and for the first two or so full listens through, only) thing I would remember of it was that Bad Fever worked as a sort of anticlimax to the perceptual rollercoaster I would eventually notice through the rest of the album, arguably culminating in the two songs Sunshine Coolin' and Hero, the two tracks listed before the final song on the album.

I have scrutinised the introductions of both albums, too, and as I touched on previously, the albums divulge at this point. Fruit begins on a low note with Lady Jesus, which although is a great song, doesn’t develop interest until its chorus. Meanwhile, Out of Frequency begins dramatically with its introductory trio, which helped me enjoy the album thoroughly when I first listened to it, as it grabbed my attention immediately, so that by the end of the third song in the introductory trio I hadn't quite dismissed the album to the back of my attention as I focused on other things. Instead, the album became the forefront of my attention by the beginning of the first song's reprise, which then piqued my interest throughout the album, as while there were some poor (and even horrible songs), the peaks (again, as mentioned previously) kept my attention on the album and my interest in the music for its duration.

The Asteroids Galaxy Tour is by no stretch of the imagination a popular band. In their short four years of studio experience, they have enjoyed modest success, being featured in the Heineken advertisement The Entrance, with their single The Golden Age, and Apple's advertisement The Funnest iPod Ever with their song Around the Bend, both songs released on Fruit. That's what makes this sort of a band so great to listen to: if I talk about them with others, no-one recognises their name, but when I show them one of these two songs they become instantly recognisable, putting them in a strange equilibrium of being both internationally famous, while simultaneously being totally unnoticed.

Amazingly, over the last few months my interest in this band has really skyrocketed. While it really took some time to fully appreciate their sound, the more I listened to them the more I started to like, and eventually I became accustomed to the bad songs, making them more familiar and not as poorly-received as the first few times I had listened to them. In fact, this can be said about their entire first album; the first time I listened to the album, with the exception of their two songs I had already heard through advertising (which actually contributed to me getting this album), only one song really took my interest, and this interest was more or less short lived and barely noteworthy. Although the album has flaws, as I grew to recognise their sound (and listen to more of their music) I found myself strangely drawn to more and more songs from this album, something that even critically acclaimed bands such as the Jimi Hendrix Experience and the Who have failed to do. They're a classic example of great potential through originality, and I don't even feel dirty or regretful in comparing them (in spirit more than any other) to bands such as the Beatles and Pink Floyd. I have overwhelming doubt about the Asteroids Galaxy Tour commercial and cultural chances of success, and I don't believe that they will ever raise comparison with, or rival, those ground breaking bands that came about successfully through the musical and countercultural innovations that the 50s, the 60s, and even the 70s had to offer. What I do know, however, is that there's a soft spot in my mind and musical library for anything and everything these guys have done and will do, and, as cliche as it is, while being a very low-key band, they have a very legitimate, very sizable opportunity at commercial success; what's more, is in the world we live in today, anything's possible.