Bad Parents (2012)

This review is sponsored by

BUY IT

General		Extras
Category	Comedy	None
Rating
Year Of Production	2012
Running Time	88:20 (Case: 92)
RSDL / Flipper	Dual Layered	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Menu
Region Coding	4	Directed By	Caytha Jentis
Studio Distributor	Gryphon Entertainment	Starring	Janeane Garofalo Christopher Titus Michael Boatman Bradley White Cheri Oteri Rebecca Budig Reiko Aylesworth
Case	Amaray-Transparent
RPI	?	Music	James Harrell

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (448Kb/s) English dts 5.1 (768Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	None	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

     Kathy (Janeane Garofalo) leaves her job to become a stay at home mother to her two young children. Surrounded by laundry and chores at home, she signs up her seven year old daughter for a local football (soccer) team coached by Nick (Christopher Titus) and Gary (Michael Boatman). Nick is loud, arrogant and super competitive. Over the opposition of the only parent (Bradley White) who thinks that kids should be there to have fun, Nick, who talks about ‘my team” and believes that “parents are the enemy who stand in the way of a coach”, has a desire to win at all costs; he divides the girls into an “A” and “B” team and gives more game time to his own daughter and other favourites. When her reluctant daughter gets into the “A” team, Kathy is catapulted into the b****y and cutthroat world of junior soccer where some parents will go to any lengths, including bribery and sexual favours, to get their seven year old daughters into the team with more game time. When the girls progress to the state cup semi-finals, things come to a crisis point.

     Bad Parents, from writer / director Caytha Jentis, is based upon the stage play It’s All for the Kids. Its origins in a play are obvious as the film is very much a dialogue heavy, with a voiceover by Janeane Garofalo, lines delivered by a range of characters directly to camera and numerous dialogue scenes with only a couple of actors. Some of the dialogue is snappy and funny, some is not, such as the jokes about an English accent. The film is not subtle: the lengths to which some parents go is certainly exaggerated yet parents acting extremely badly is nothing new. There are also some scenes that seem to belong in another film, such as the soccer academy phone call that goes nowhere, or an internet chat room scene.

     On the plus side, Janeane Garofalo does a great job of portraying a mother who knows that what is happening is not right but is powerless to stop herself being sucked in, Cheri Oteri and Rebecca Budig are fun as two obsessive mothers while Reiko Aylesworth is underused as a mother whose daughter is on “B” team! Mind you, other than Garofalo and to a lesser extent Titus and Boatman, no one has enough screen time to be other than a stereotype.

     Bad Parents is intermittently amusing and other than the odd sexual joke and some bad language is inoffensive, avoiding gross out moments. The play title It’s All for the Kids, is rather more ironic than the film title, for despite Coach Nick stating that it is all for the kids, it is obviously all for the parents.

Video

     Bad Parents is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.78:1, close to the original 1.85:1, and is 16x9 enhanced.

     The print is fine for a mostly dialogue driven film with a few exterior locations. Detail is sharp, the colours including skin tones are natural, blacks and shadow detail fine. Brightness and contrast is consistent.

     Marks and artefacts are absent, although the end titles do shimmer.

     There are no subtitles.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

     Audio is a choice of English Dolby Digital 5.1 at 448 Kbps or English dts 5.1 at 754 Kbps. I listed to the dts and sampled the Dolby Digital and found little difference between them.

     Dialogue was clear and centred. The rears and surrounds were little used except for slight ambience, occasional crowd noise at the matches and music; in fact the only time I noticed any serious use of the rears was for voices during the hallucination scene. The sub-woofer was silent as far as I could tell; not that the film required it for anything.

     The original music by James Harrell was pretty anonymous.

     There were no lip synchronisation issues.

     A low key, front oriented audio track that was really all the film required.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

     There are zero extras.

     The Region 1 US NTSC release of Bad Parents looks to be similar to our version, with no extras listed. There is currently no Region 2 UK release of the film.

     Bad Parents is nothing special or new. However, as a look at the b****y and cutthroat world of junior sport it is intermittently amusing, inoffensive and avoids gross out moments.

     The video and audio are appropriate for the film. There are no extras.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall