Thoughts on Mystery Team

Sunday, November 28, 2010 11:00 AM By Simon

-Derrick Comedy group--Community's Donald Glover, DC Pierson, and Dominic Dierkes star (and write/produce/score with Dan Eckman and Meggie McFadden) as the Mystery Team, a suburban detective agency that must've been cute when they were seven, but now, eighteen and graduating from high school, is naive and creepy. When a little girl approaches them about solving her parents' recent murder, they decide to take it, to prove themselves as legitimate detectives.

-Funniest movie of 2009, probably. Fuck The Hangover (which is 2009, right?). While the last two acts, plot-heavy, can't possibly touch the first act in general awesomeness, it helps that the GIC care for the characters as more than jokes, and take great care in keeping with the mystery genre, both murders and the Enyclopedia Brown genre.

-Seriously, why didn't this get more attention?

7 comments:

Alex said...

I really wanted to see this but it had such a weird theater release situation. It's in my netflix queue and you have reminded me to bump it up higher! Good to hear you dug it!

November 28, 2010 at 12:26 PM
Colin Biggs said...

I was hoping its Demand It campaign would get it released in more cities, but it didn't much to my disappointment.

November 28, 2010 at 5:42 PM
Ryan T. said...

Saw this a few months back. Funnier than I expected!

November 29, 2010 at 3:12 PM
The Taxi Driver said...

I can somewhat answer your last question because I actually worked on trying to sell this movie. It was picked up to go theatrical in NA from Sundance by Roadside Attractions who gave it a limited theatrical release to which it didn't really permform that way people were hoping it would. That's reality: just because a movie is a hit at a festival doesn't mean it will hit with the public. Lionsgates picked it up for DVD release and dumped it out with the rest of their direct-to-video crap as Lionsgate do to all their non-big budget works.

Some of the problem was with Maggie and Dan who were doing this for the first time and were learning their way through it. Once they realized they had made all the money they could have they more or less gave up on it instead of pushing forward. I was trying to track down post-production materials (textless backgrounds, dialogue transcript, 5.1, DVD Bonus features etc) and they just had no idea. It was literally like clubbing seals. It's not the sales persons job to be calling up the post-production labs in LA in order to track down masters.

It was thought that the movie would be big in the U.K. but there was no interest in it. 30 Rock wasn't a hit, Community had not arrived and there was no hype around the movie at all. I have no idea if it has done any business since but generally when you approach a company promising them "the next big thing" they say okay, get back to me when they are the current big thing.

November 30, 2010 at 9:17 AM
Simon said...

Alex: Yay!

Fitz: I tried to Demand It, but it involves making an account, which is a bitch.

Ryan: Of course! It's brilliant!

December 1, 2010 at 4:02 PM