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Drake and Josh Go Hollywood

Paramount // Unrated // January 31, 2006
List Price: $16.99 [Buy now and save at Deepdiscountdvd]

Review by Adam Tyner | posted February 2, 2006 | E-mail the Author
"I saw this movie the day it premiered and loved it!!! It is so funny!!! You don't really need to like Drake and Josh to like this movie! One of my favorite parts is when Drake sings "Hollywood Girl". That part rocks!! I highly reccomend this movie!!!"

"I LOVE this Movie!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I just saw this movie like 13 minutes ago and is was so cool, funny and nice!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"I haven't seen this movie yet. It comes out on Nickelodeon January 6th, 7th, and 8th. I have it marked on my calender! I also pre-ordered the dvd. I predict this movie will be fantastic!!!!!!!!!! Drake and Josh is the number one show on television. The movie will probably surpass that!!!!!!!!! Everything Drake and Josh does gets 5 stars!!!!!!!!!!!!"

"The synopsis heres amazing!!!! WORTH YOUR MONEY AND BUY THIS MOVIE: DRAKE & JOSH GO HOLLYWOOD!!!!!!!"
Those are all gen-you-wine quotes from Amazon user reviews of Drake and Josh Go Hollywood, and if those 154 exclamation points are any indication, it has to be good, right?

I guess the really short recap of the show is that Drake (Drake Bell) and Josh (Josh Peck) are a couple of teenagers who really didn't know each other that well until they wound up being stepbrothers. Drake's an aspiring musician-slash-chick magnet, and Josh is...not. Drake is Bud Abbott with a moptop and a French electric guitar, and Josh is a cross between Lou Costello and "...with Donald Sutherland as the clumsy waiter."

Anyway, the premise of this Nickelodeon TV movie is that their folks head out for a cruise, leaving Drake and Josh in charge of getting 11-year-old Megan (Miranda Cosgrove) on a plane to Denver. They accidentally shove her onto a flight bound for...well, look at the title of the movie, so Drake and Josh trek out to La-la-land to track her down. Along the way, Josh lands Drake's band a gig on TRL, but his brother might miss out on his big break when they get ensnared in the theft of a bunch of hardware from the Department of the Treasury.

Things I learned from Drake and Josh Go Hollywood:
  1. If your band lands a gig at an old folks' home, make sure you play with an amplifier that doesn't shoot lasers.
  2. Kids don't know what a "manager" is, so always refer to him as "band manager". As in "'Cause that's my band manager's idea of a good gig. Man, I hate my band manager." Repeat over and over again.
  3. These two teenagers get in enough wacky misadventures to sustain several seasons of a basic cable TV series, yet their parents trust them enough to leave them alone for ten days and rely on them to put an 11-year-old on a plane by herself to Denver.
  4. They have even more trust in that 11-year-old, who's given a no-limit credit card in case of an emergency.
  5. San Diego has the only airport in the country that'll let people who aren't flying hang around the departure gates.
  6. Airports don't say or list things like "flight 746 to Denver", so be sure to remember exactly what your flight number is; those three digits are your only indication as to where you're actually flying.
  7. If your sister gets on a flight from San Diego to Los Angeles, rather than drive 120 miles each way to pick her up, it's a better idea to spend $500 (or whatever) on airline tickets. Oh, and forget about calling LAX and asking them to keep an eye out for your sister when the plane lands.
  8. In fact, don't just rush to spend $500 on tickets to get to Los Angeles as soon as possible -- when you arrive, sit in the airport and wait for your sister to call your cell phone. I mean, you couldn't possibly do this in San Diego.
  9. If you're a kid who's misrouted and can't get to your final destination, spend the night alone in a strange, expensive city rather than try to get back home.
  10. The U.S. Department of Treasury's money printing system only works if an off-brand iPod is connected to it.
  11. If you sit next to a guy on a plane with an off-brand iPod, don't excitedly show him that you have the same exact model unless you want to set up the action for a 73 minute Nickelodeon TV movie.
  12. An eleven year old with no ID and no parental supervision can rent a limo and get a many-thousands-of-dollars-a-night presidential suite with her working class mother's credit card.
  13. Thugs who can successfully rip off a multi-ton printing press from the Department of the Treasury are no match for two teenage boys and a prepubescent girl. It's the Empire and the Ewoks all over again. Also, if an enormous fan is turned on, scattering their counterfeit money across their dingy hideout, the thugs will chase after individual bills blowing around the room and ignore the fact that the kids they really should've killed in the first place are escaping. I know Nickelodeon TV movies don't usually have a body count, but still...!
  14. If you steal Tony Hawk's Viper, he not only won't press charges -- he'll probably give you his car. That's why he gets all the Kids' Choice Awards!
  15. The only time in the movie when Megan's shown paying for her opulent L.A. lifestyle is when this 11-year-old offers a fistful of counterfeit money to a limo driver. There's a lesson for the kids!
  16. The booking director for TRL can get desperate enough to take an unsigned band he's only seen or heard on a laptop shoved under a bathroom stall and put them on national TV (without a contract or anything, of course). Live TV shows are so loosely coordinated that even if you're in a band the booking director has barely heard that's fronted by a teenager he's never met, he'll grudgingly give you up to 15 seconds before going live to show up.
I know this is just a stupid kids' movie, but Drake and Josh Go Hollywood goes out of its way to be an easy target. There's nothing clever, witty, or funny about it, to the point where it's not that clear what's supposed to pass for a joke. One running gag is that Megan calls her brothers "boobs". Josh rubs his butt while commenting on how thorough airport security was in their strip search. When they board the plane, Drake is flanked by a couple of co-eds who take turns making out with him, while Josh is crushed by a morbidly obese married couple who struggle over ointment and fried chicken. To dupe the thugs into thinking nothing suspicious is going on, Drake and Josh play pattycake. I guess that's supposed to be funny. I think the rule of thumb is that if Josh shrilly yelps, I'm supposed to laugh. The whole thing seems like it was slapped together in a weekend, and even though it's "their first movie!", it looks and feels much more like an awfully long episode of a low-rent sitcom. Maybe really young kids would eat it up, but just because something's geared towards a younger crowd doesn't mean it has to be this mindless.

Video: The packaging says "full screen" (in a couple different places, even), but the DVD is actually letterboxed to an aspect ratio of 1.75:1 or so. Not enhanced for widescreen TVs, tho'. The quality's not particularly impressive, and the shot-on-video photography looks much more like an episode of the TV show than a movie, but it's sharper and more colorful on DVD than it was when some friends of mine and I watched it on Nickelodeon a couple weeks back. (No, this wasn't my first romp with Drake and Josh Go Hollywood.)

Audio: The Dolby Digital stereo audio (192Kbps) doesn't really sound all that much different than a TV broadcast, and the dialogue is kinda tinny and sibilant. Drake Bell's bouncy, catchy, guitar-driven power-pop is pretty good, though, and hopefully that didn't cost me any Elitist Former College Radio DJ points 'cause I really don't have that many left. There are no subtitles or alternate soundtracks, but the DVD is closed captioned.

Supplements: Two episodes from the Drake and Josh TV show have also been packed onto this DVD. "Helen's Surgery" has Drake taking advantage of Josh's boss' decked-out pad while she's temporarily blind and looped out on pain meds. "Mindy's Back" is centered around the return of Mindy Crenshaw, Drake's arch-nemesis and Josh's out-of-his-league secret girlfriend. The TV show is a lot more energetic than the movie and has a much better sense of humor. Too bad the laugh track awkwardly kicks in after every single line of dialogue. Not really my bag (Even Stevens, which I used to watch religiously even in my mid-'20s, set the bar too high), but Drake and Josh deserves a better movie than it got. Rounding out the extras are a standard-issue four-minute blooper reel and a music video for the Drake and Josh theme song, Drake Bell's "Found a Way".

Keepcase. 4x3 menus. Six (!) chapter stops. No insert (nothing related to the movie, at least.)

Conclusion: At least it's cheap. If you're a parent reading this, and your kids love Drake and Josh...well, I'll leave it up to you whether or not you want to buy/rent this DVD, but my advice would be to leave the room as soon as you hit 'Play'. Skip It.

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