Director Jay Chandrasekhar (The Dukes of Hazzard, Super Troopers) strikes a blow for brown underachievers everywhere with his new movie Beerfest. NASA gives you the Chandrasekhar X-ray Observatory? Jay parries with beer, bratwurst and boobies.

The frat boy comedy revolves around a beer-chugging competition at Oktoberfest:

After getting out-drunk by their German cousins, who taunt the residents of the U.S. of A. for “your strip malls and your Zimas,” the boys vow to return the following year in prime chugging condition. [Link]

And the reviewers have noticed: desis have a lock on pot and alcohol (but not sex) on screen

With Dazed And Confused and Harold & Kumar Go To White Castle enjoying a hammerlock on the marijuana crowd, [comedy troupe] Broken Lizard turns its attentions to good old-fashioned suds-sucking in Beerfest… [Link]

Among the cast, Chandrasekhar is easily the funniest of the Lizards… [Link]

Chandrasekhar plays ‘Barry Badrinath’ and ‘Blind Sikh.’ A couple of well-known actors, Donald Sutherland and Jürgen Prochnow, have cameos. Saturday Night Live’s Will Forte plays a German stereotype.

When they go underground, on their way to Beerfest for the first time… There’s the Cabaret guy… the blind Sikh… [and] the woman shoving a leg into a grinder…

Mo’Nique… has a love scene with Jay…

At the end there is where you add those little flourishes. Like you’ll change a character named Barry McCormick to a character named Barry Badrinath… Turned him into a man-whore…

Barry was going to be a guy that worked at a Korean carnival, setting up bottles for a game where you throw rocks at bottles… Then Lemme was like, “We could find him under a bridge sucking dicks for nickels…” [Link]

Chandrasekhar actually made Prochnow do the American stereotype of a German accent the way that Van Wilder made Kal Penn do the Peter Sellers accent:

But [Prochnow] was a sport, that guy. He did everything. He has, obviously, a real German accent and we have these bastardization German accents. We would have it written in the script of how to say a line in German. There was one line where he says, like, “Say ello to da Schtable Boy!” or whatever it was. And he kept saying, “Stable Boy,” and we’re like, “Could you say, ‘Schtable Boy?’” (laughs). He was like, “Why would I say that?” “‘Cause that’s what you guys do, right?”…

It was ridiculous. There was a big difference between how our German German’s spoke and our American German’s spoke. The American German’s have these ridiculous over the top cartoon accents and the real Germans are very sort of subdued. But we were pushing… “Could you German it up a little bit?”… “Make it a little bit more like the propaganda cartoons from the ’40s!” [Link]

Check out the poster — front and center, baby. When you’re directing the movie, you don’t strip desis from the marketing. And yes, even this aggressively lowbrow movie is rated much higher on Rotten Tomatoes than the unfairly-maligned Lady in the Water:

… the gags are frequently surprising… [like] the bizarre sight of Prochnow and Mo’Nique French-kissing. No doubt it’s even funnier when you’re wasted. [Link]

It’s just a tribute to beer pong, ethnic stereotypes, bare breasts, body-cavity invasion, manual frog stimulation, ram urine drinking and a lot of other things calculated to horrify the New York Times arts section. (Which only likes that kind of stuff if it appears in a… Cremaster movie)…

The scene where Chandrasekhar sees himself through beer goggles would have been a classic if it had gone on half as long. [Link]Calculated to horrify the NYT arts section, which only likes that stuff in Cremaster

… unlike so many other frat boy-targeted comedies, Chandrasekhar’s multicultural film is also refreshingly devoid of homophobia and xenophobia, its occasional same-sex jokes and rampant cultural stereotypes (Germans as Schwarzenegger He-Men, Jews as brainy scientists, Swedes as hot snow-bunnies, Brits as aggro-morons) all crafted with good-natured, tongue-in-cheek inoffensiveness that’s in keeping with the action’s general ridiculousness…

… the script nonetheless remains relatively lively thanks to recurring references to co-star Jürgen Prochnow’s Das Boot… [Link]

The movie opened in fourth place with $6.5M last weekend.

Here’s the trailer, which quickly skips over the ‘Tittzenshpritzen’ party hosted by Schtüff magazine

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