Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling (Blu-ray)

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As I was watching it, I couldn't help thinking how much it reminded me of typical old television comedy shows. Specifically, "Gilligan's Island" came to mind, except that no one in the cast of the new movie is nearly as appealing as any of the people Gilligan hung out with. It's not that "Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling" is entirely stupid or insulting; it's not another "Dude, Where's My Car?" or "Freddy Got Fingered." It's just remarkably empty, silly, and pointless, and oh so very boring.

Video:
For this Blu-ray disc Paramount engineers use an MPEG-4/AVC codec and a single-layer BD25 to accommodate the short, ninety-one-minute film. It's probably all that's necessary in displaying the 1.85:1 ratio movie as well as one might expect. The film's colors show up very brightly, very vividly, maybe brighter and more vivid than real life, yet acceptable for a farcical comedy. Facial tones are reasonably natural, grain is minimal, and there are no obvious signs of edge enhancement or other artifacts. The picture is a bit soft on detail, though, and the overall look of the screen is somewhat glossy and glassy. Nevertheless, when it's good, as it is in the Oregon forest locations, it looks quite impressive.

Audio:
The lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio seems like overkill in this instance since it has very little to reproduce beyond a plain-Jane musical soundtrack and some midrange dialogue. Nevertheless, in comparison to the SD disc's regular Dolby Digital, the TrueHD comes off very slightly clearer and smoother. Still, it sounds limited in its frequency range and dynamic impact, and the surround activity is practically nonexistent. Therefore, the TrueHD does exactly what it's called upon to do, even if that's not saying much.

Extras:
The disc includes three featurettes, which the keep case announces are in high definition. That may be true, but the MPEG-2 processing doesn't look like high def so much as it looks like upscaled standard-def. Be that as it may, the featurettes are hardly anything to get too excited about. The first is a ten-minute making-of affair called "Up The Creek: The Making of Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling," that lasts a little over ten minutes and provides nothing more than any other making-of featurette gives us. The second item is "Furious Nuts," about seven minutes with the CGI squirrels; and the third item is "Treehouse Tales," about three minutes on the tree house sets. Things wind down with a five-minute gag reel and four deleted scenes, the latter totaling just over one minute.

Finally, the disc contains sixteen scene selections, with bookmarks; English as the only available spoken language; English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese subtitles; English captions for the hearing impaired; and access to a digital copy download for Windows (not compatible with iPod, iPhone, Apple TV, Sony PSP, or Microsoft Zune).

Parting Shots:
"Without a Paddle: Nature's Calling" looks like a movie produced for thirteen-year-olds. Needless to say, I mean no disrespect to thirteen-year-olds; all of us were or will be thirteen. It's just that the studio marketing department appear to be aiming their film toward people quite a lot older than thirteen, people in their twenties and above, perhaps, and I should think that by that age they would be more discriminating and demand more from their movies than pretty high-def images. This one doesn't provide anything more than a person could find almost any day of the week on the Disney Channel.

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