Pauly Shore Is Dead
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment
Cast: Pauly Shore
Extras: Commentary Track, Featurette, Song Parody, Deleted Scenes
Rating:
This is Pauly Shore’s parody-telling of how he went from a once popular comedic talent and film star, who got his start at the famous Comedy Store, owned by his mother, to become an almost forgotten celebrity. Pauly has fellow Hollywood celebrities wondering what really happened to the once popular comic, by staging his own fake suicide, then documenting the reactions from the celebrities that knew him, in the documentary ’Pauly Shore is Dead,’ which leaves you to ponder the age-old Hollywood question ’Is it better to be a dead genius or a living idiot?’. Well, I’ll leave that for you to decide. I never found Shore’s brand of humor to be all that gratifying, somewhat entertaining at times? That’s questionable, and his performances were never all that memorable in the first place. This documentary, if you could call it that, does reach for that comedic level that strives for you to see Pauly Shore in a different light, but for the most part fails and leaves you waiting for the next big celebrity cameo, and there is quite the impressive list of Hollywood celebrities popping up in this documentary.
20th Century Fox Home Entertainment presents ’Pauly Shore is Dead’ in an anamorphic widescreen presentation displaying a 1.78:1 aspect ratio. The print is nice and sharp containing good black levels that contribute to nice shadow detail throughout. Colors are strong and show good saturation that helps to reinforce the natural appearance of skin tones, which is important, because there are allot of close-up interviews contained within this presentation.
Sound is presented in a single Dolby Digital 5.1 track with subtitles in either English or Spanish. The soundstage is good, but because this presentation is documentary-style, the soundstage is primarily focused on the front three channels, with vocals nicely centered. The surrounds and low frequency channels are pretty much reserved for the odd song present in the background, but otherwise remain inactive.
A full-length audio commentary by director Pauly Shore is included on the DVD as well as a Q&A session with Pauly, entitled ’Interrogating the Wiez.’ A ’Making-Of’ featurette is also included among the extras, just as host wraps by Eminem and Proof and deleted scenes hosted by Pauly Shore, the Hilton sisters and Charlie Sheen.
Fans of Pauly Shore will probably enjoy seeing him in something new that attempts to reinvent his comedic performance. I only enjoyed this presentation for the plentiful inclusion of celebrity cameos that deliver some of the funnier dialogue and on-camera shenanigans.