Syrup Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		1.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		2.5

Syrup Blu-ray Movie Review

Zero Nutrition

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 18, 2013

The trailer of Syrup promises an outrageous parody of marketing hype, and there are traces of that effort in director Aram Rappaport's 2013 fizzle, which he co-adapted with Max Barry from Barry's novel of the same name. The finished film has just enough marketing parody to construct a tantalizing trailer, but the rest of the film goes nowhere. In that sense, the film isn't so much about something as it is the thing itself: a flashy wrapper for banal contents. Syrup isn't quite as bad as the study cited by the film's chilly blonde heroine, in which marketing hype persuaded test subjects to enjoy the taste of urine, but it's a cynical exercise in substituting flash for substance, all the while condemning that very pursuit.

Proving that people can taste the difference, Syrup won very few fans during its brief sojourn in video-on-demand in May 2013, and almost no favorable reviews during a limited theatrical release the following month. Magnolia Home Entertainment, perhaps conceding defeat, has quietly issued the film without the usually generous helping of extras it provides for its Blu-rays.

(Spoiler alert: In order to provide an overview of Syrup, the following discussion reveals a few plot developments. Any reader who wishes to see the film "cold" should skip this section.)

Much of the satirical setup in Syrup is delivered by the voiceover narration, spoken with cheerful pep by Toby Hemingway (Black Swan). The narrator delivers a stream of jargon, purportedly cribbed from business school marketing courses, providing the theoretical underpinning for the characters' machinations. If only their machinations lived up to the narrator's hype.

The film's anti-hero is a typical twenty-something with a diploma (Shiloh Fernandez) who has moved to the city with dreams of making it big. In modern terms, that means starting at the top. He begins by "rebranding" himself with a new and memorable name: Scat. His similarly inclined roommate, who hides behind sunglasses and never says a word (Kellan Lutz, who plays Emmett Cullen in The Twilight Saga) creates an even better name: Sneaky Pete. Scat considers himself an "idea" man, which is the perfect niche for someone who doesn't want to work too hard. His latest million-dollar idea is an energy drink called "Fukk". The contents of the drink are irrelevant. The key to selling it is the name.

By various strategies, Scat gets his idea to the head of marketing for soft drink giant, Addison Beverage Company. Her name is "Six" (Amber Heard), and Scat spends much of the film trying to learn her real name, which she insists is "Six". (At one point, she receives a name tag and her real first name is visible for a split second.) Six is an entirely sell-invented character. One of the film's few inspired sequences has her explain to the camera how she assembled her identity from disparate elements of various female stereotypes. If more of Syrup had worked in this vein, the film could have been a comic masterpiece.

But the plot quickly falls apart when someone steals Scat's idea and he ends up broke and out on the street, while Addison does great business with its new beverage, which quickly soars to number one in the country. Even Scat starts drinking it. Despite the various distractions and complications, the rest of Syrup consists of Scat's efforts to get back in the game with another "big idea" so that he can get even with the thief who stole "Fukk" and, not coincidentally, have a a second chance at winning over Six, who has him firmly in her spell, even though she's supposed to be a lesbian. (It's all part of the image.)

But there's nothing about corporate rivalry, on-the-job backstabbing or sexual manipulation that makes them unique to the world of marketing. One can find such iniquities in every industry, profession and workplace. Whenever Syrup focuses on such activities—and that's most of the movie—the very quality that promised to make it special becomes mere decor to an otherwise pedestrian story peopled by paper-thin characters. It's as if all the mystique of drinking "Fukk" from its signature black can had been stripped away, and all that was left was a bland mix of generic ingredients sipped from a paper cup. After a few swallows, you wonder why you're still drinking it.

A few moments of energy are provided by a character called "Three" (Brittany Snow), who is the All About Eve rival to Six, because she's younger and even more ruthless. And the film gets a third-act jolt from the appearance of veteran character actors Christopher Evan Welch, Josh Pais and Jack Gilpin as officers of Addison's arch-rival, ZephCo, which is looking for a knockout counterpunch against Addison's domination of the drink market with Fukk. Scat creates a new product involving celebrity exclusives that sounds impossible to implement and control. If you can figure out how it works, you're a bigger fan of Syrup than I'll ever be.

Nothing reveals the filmmakers' dearth of imagination more than the motif of characters standing in the middle of Times Square, where Six has an apartment. Yes, it's all aglow with billboards, neon overload and advertisements flashing from every side. That's what it's famous for, and everyone's already seen it, either live and in person, or on TV every New Year's Eve. A much more effective satire of marketing would have tackled a story set in an ordinary-looking town where a roving camera picks out the dense texture of logos, brands and everyday product placements that have affixed themselves to our daily lives with the tenacity of barnacles. There's a famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada where Miranda Priestly explains how her magazine's choices about what to show in its pages determined the color of the sweater her assistant picked up at discount a few years later. That single speech offered more insight and satirical bite than all of Syrup's marketing double-talk and smarmy maneuvers among overconfident kids who wouldn't survive a week in a genuine corporate environment.

Syrup Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The cinematographer on Syrup was Julio Macat, whose proficiency with comedies extends from Home Alone to Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to Horrible Bosses (and its sequel, which is currently in production). No information on the shooting format was available, but the photography was either digital or was so thoroughly processed on a digital intermediate that it might as well have been. The effects work necessary to make the camera appear to be traveling through spaces where a physical rig could not possibly pass could only have been accomplished in the digital realm, so that the film's final form was almost certainly a 2K DI, from which Magnolia's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray was sourced.

In keeping with its advertising milieu, not one frame of Syrup looks natural. Everything and everyone looks like they were photographed for a magazine, with unnatural colors, heightened contrast and an airbrushed appearance. Within that general frame of reference, the image is sharp and clear, with no obvious noise or interference, which is something of an accomplishment with so many oversaturated colors on display. The cool end of the spectrum (the blues, whites and grays) dominates the world inhabited by Scat and Six, because it's a cold-hearted place, where emotions have been reduced to a neurological response to be stimulated for sales. For contrast, a few locations (e.g., the apartment shared by Scat and Sneaky Pete) have warmer tones, but all the surfaces are hard.

Shadow detail sometimes appears to be washed out from high contrast, and some of the blacks tend toward gray from excess brightness, but these appear to be a deliberate part of the visual design. In an unusual decision for Magnolia, the film has been placed on a BD-25, but that decision fits with the generally cut-rate treatment accorded this film, which the studio has obviously written off. The average bitrate of 22.99 Mbps is well within the range that major studios use without encountering significant problems, and no compression artifacts were in evidence.

Syrup Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The sound design of Syrup's 5.1 soundtrack, presented in lossless DTS-HD MA, is more expressive than naturalistic. In addition to the voiceover narration, the track has numerous rushing, zooming and pausing effects, as the camera races around illustrating what the narrator is describing. More ordinary scenes have environmental ambiance, but it is never too pronounced, because the scene may suddenly transform into a marketing lesson, with a character turning to address the camera. The dialogue is clear and front-oriented, and the bass extension is often impressive for certain key moments that I can't specify without spoilers. The score blends effectively with the overheated visual style, which is a credit to composers Peter Bateman and Andrew Holtzman.

Syrup Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Interview with Executive Producer/Costume Designer Sophia Banks-Coloma (1080i; 1.78:1; 7:27): An appropriate interview subject for a film preoccupied with style, Banks-Coloma discusses creating the look for each main character from a fashion chest valued at $2-3 million.



• AXS TV: A Look at Syrup (1080i; 1.78:1; 2:55): This typical AXS TV promo uses excerpts from the costume designer interview listed above, plus brief interview segments with Kellan Lutz.



• Trailer (1080p; 2.35:1; 1:47).



• Also from Magnolia Home Entertainment: The disc includes trailers for To the Wonder, Kiss of the Damned, Hammer of the Gods and Shadow Dancer, as well as a promo for AXS TV. These also play at startup, where they can be skipped with the chapter forward button.



• BD-Live: As of this writing, attempting to access BD-Live gave the message "Check back for more updates".

Syrup Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Perhaps the biggest waste of Syrup is Amber Heard's work in creating the character of Six, because she leaves you at least curious about what makes her tick. A gifted performer with an eclectic resume, Heard combines a character actor's discipline with the looks of a leading lady. She catches your attention with her beauty, as she caught Scat's, but she holds it with an endless variety of behaviors that keep everyone wondering what she'll do next, which is the mark of genuine talent. If there's ever a sequel to Syrup, it should be subtitled "The Further Adventures of Six", and that film would be highly recommended. This one should be skipped.