Cougars, Inc. Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		2.0
Video		3.5
Audio		4.0
Extras		2.0
Overall		2.0

Cougars, Inc. Blu-ray Movie Review

And here's to you, Mrs. Robinsons.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman May 8, 2011

When did “cougar” start to mean—well, “cougar”? When I was growing up, a cougar was a muscle car, or at least a sports car, Mercury’s answer to the Mustang. Occasionally if you were around hunters, the word signified the actual animal. But of course all that has changed, and you’d have to have been living under a rock not to know that “cougar” is now used seemingly universally to denote older women who prey on, or at least enjoy the company of, much younger men. Forests have been obliterated by the newsprint generated by this relatively recent phenomenon, with a lot of attention to the age disparity mentioned by women themselves. Why does society look so differently on an older woman dating, or indeed bedding, a younger man, than vice versa? And does the common perception of men as horn-toads simply become irrefutable when it becomes obvious that for a lot of guys, either scenario (depending on any individual guy’s age) is a major fantasy? Cougars, Inc. is a slightly smarmy little indie film that doesn’t really fuss or fret about morals very much, despite some third act remorse, and instead just barrels through its setup and development in a filmic equivalent of “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” Kyle Gallner portrays Sam, a sweet if troubled kid who has been kicked out of one private boarding school after another, finally landing at the not exactly Ivy League Moore Prep School in California. You know that Moore is not your typical prep school because its headmaster Dan is played by Jim Belushi and within 15 seconds of meeting Sam, Dan is gushing about his own younger days and the “buckets-full of pussy” he had to ward off as a touring musician. Sam’s mother, an ex-Playboy Playmate, soon finds herself unable to afford the rather tony tuition at Moore, and Sam almost simultaneously discovers that bedding an older, frustrated married woman can be incredibly lucrative. His buddies propose setting up an escort service to keep the local housewives satisfied. Shazam!, you have the gist of Cougars, Inc. in a nutshell.

On the basis of the commentary track included on this Blu-ray, director-writer K. Asher Levin seems like an enthusiastic young filmmaker who, much like his putative hero Sam, had what he thought was a good idea and ran with it. Unfortunately enthusiasm is rarely enough to carry a filmmaker, especially at an early stage of his career. Cougars, Inc. suffers from a slapdash and too self-consciously ironic tone, and most troubling of all, it wavers extremely uneasily between cutesy kind-of comedy and outright melodrama. To Levin’s credit, he assembled a rather impressive cast of television stalwarts like Kathryn Morris (Cold Case), who plays Alison, Sam’s entrée (so to speak) into the joys of older womanhood. Alison soon semi-willingly helps Sam hook up a bunch of her friends with a bunch of his buddies, all for the “good cause” of helping Sam to pay his tuition. Playing supporting roles as no longer desperate housewives are Denise Richards and Rebecca Mader (Lost).

Cougars, Inc. also devolves into a completely idiotic (and predictable) series of coincidences that sees several major players ending up being related to each other a la some long lost and wisely never published Dickens novel. Anyone with even an inkling of Screenwriting 101 “craft” (let’s be charitable) who hears Belushi’s Dan talk about his wonderful daughter, and then watches Sam get involved with local nice (if slightly foul mouthed) girl Courtney (Modern Family’s Sarah Hyland) isn’t going to need a roadmap to figure out what the destination of that plot point is going to be. By the time the supposed twists come lumbering into view, most viewers will have not only guessed them, they will have ceased to care.

Levin tries to enliven the proceedings with interstitials supposedly culled from Sam’s school notebook where questions about his “career” and life in general are scrawled on a college ruled pad, and these brief (a few seconds) sections provide about the only innovative spirit this film can muster. Levin is simply too serious for his own good (something alluded to by Morris in the commentary, where she congratulates him for highlighting the “isolation” of the boarding school by emphasizing wide shots, something that frankly slipped right past me). Cougars, Inc. comes on like a salacious, raunchy wink-fest, and instead turns into a sort of sex-fueled, Californicated version of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. It is, to say the least, a very disconcerting mixture that fails to generate anything much more than long sighs.

Gallner (Veronica Mars) and Morris manage to create a fairly realistic feeling relationship, albeit one which strains credulity from virtually the very first moment. Even better is the interplay between Gallner and Hyland, though Hyland’s character goes through a number of inexplicable, and inexplicably sudden, emotional upheavals as the film lurches toward its denouement. Belushi is—well, Belushi. His Dan is a blustering good guy who is like a somewhat more tempered version of the role he played long ago in The Principal. But too much of Cougars, Inc. seems cut and pasted together, and not very artfully at that, so that character motivations simply appear out of thin air, and scenes seem to begin and end virtually mid-sentence.

1967’s The Graduate saw something along the line of this same scenario, writ small and between one young man and one older female. That film was a masterpiece of ill timing, confusion and brilliant social critique. Cougars, Inc., despite upping the ante with several women and several boys, can’t ever find the mo-jo to exploit its premise for either comedic or dramatic purposes, and the result is a bizarre little film that could have used its own filmmaker mentoring escort service.

Cougars, Inc. Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Cougars, Inc. arrives on Blu-ray with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.35:1. This film has the smooth, textureless look redolent of high-def video (it sounds like Levin might have used the Red camera, though it's hard to completely make out in the overly chatty and noisy commentary track), and as is mentioned in the commentary track by Gallner, it was rather aggressively color corrected for some reason. That means saturation, while certainly robust, is weirdly askew at times, with a brownish tint to many scenes. There's acceptable sharpness in several of the scenes, but nothing that really ever rises to anything approaching a "wow" factor. Interior scenes suffer from crush and murkiness. Some of the exterior scenes pop a good deal more nicely. The overall image, while not soft in the traditional sense, is strangely two dimensional and lacking in depth and texture.

Cougars, Inc. Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Cougars, Inc.'s lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix is fairly aggressive and robust, but it suffers from not being very immersive. The film is filled with a variety of source cues, all of which are reproduced here with abundant low end and sterling fidelity. And dialogue is also very clearly presented. But even scenes with several players—as in the first "party" scene between the young Moore studs and the older women—rarely stray from the front channels, depriving the film of a really cinematic feeling soundtrack. That said, though resolutely front-centric, the film offers really excellent fidelity and a nicely varied dynamic range.

Cougars, Inc. Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Feature Commentary with writer-director K. Asher Levin and actors Kyle Gallner and Kathryn Morris. This is a pretty chatty and laughter filled affair probably made less informative than it might have been by dint of the fact that Gallner and Morris are evidently watching the final cut of the film for the first time. Levin comes off as a well intentioned guy, but one who is perhaps too early in his career to have attempted the tricky tonal tightrope this film required. Gallner is kind of rude, but funny, at several moments throughout the commentary.
• Deleted Scene (HD; 3:31) gives some extra beats for the scene between Sam and Dan when Sam is told his mother can no longer afford Moore.
• Cougar 101 (1080i; 3:01) is a kind of distasteful assortment of prep school guys talking about what cougars are and how to score with them.
• Trailer

Cougars, Inc. Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I'm not sure a film like Cougars, Inc. could have ever worked as anything other than a flat out raunchy farce. Levin is too high minded with this premise and the film spends too much time with needless introspection when instead it should be a crazy quilt of eccentric characters. Adding to the tonal inconsistencies is the fact that the film seems completely slapdash, as if huge swaths of the film were left on the cutting room floor. I doubt any amount of editing could have seriously ameliorated the basic flaw at the core of Cougars, Inc., though—it's a film that wants to be salacious and heartfelt at the same time, two elements which rarely if ever mix.