Beer Wars

BEER WARS begins with a confessional: the writer, director, and star tells us (I paraphrase), “I ran Mike’s Hard Lemonade (Slogan: Helping high school girls get pregnant since 1999!) until I got tired of corporate bullshit.  Then I quit and tried my hand at venture capital, living in an ashram, and basically screwing around on my cushion of money.  I got bored after a while and decided to make this documentary about how evil big companies don’t roll over and let little companies eat their lunch.  Share my post-hippie, comfortably wealthy outrage.”

Well, la de da.

The rest of us work for a living, lady.  So excuse me if I don’t share your anger at Wal Mart (selling good stuff at low prices to people who couldn’t otherwise afford it), Microsoft (revolutionizing humanity’s relationship with information), and Anheuser Busch (Slogan: helping high school boys work up the courage to hit on high school girls since 1852!).

Watching this film, I felt like I’d just been cornered at a cocktail party by the most loathsome person within three city blocks.  Not only was her manifest self-fascination repulsive, her scattershot approach to her subject matter prevented her from building a coherent, compelling case.

Her thesis goes as follows:  Gigantic beer companies, in cahoots with legally sanctioned distributers, conspire to keep smaller companies from reducing their market share.  Ok, this could be interesting.  Make the case that monopolistic behavior is stunting entrepreneurship and call me to arms.  Dilettante filmmaker Anat Baron kills the interest, however, by wasting my time with the story of an entrepreneur flogging a poorly conceived and ultimately unappealing brand of beer (The hook: it has caffeine!  What about tasting good?).  She’d have done much better by focusing all her attention on Sam Calagione, who doesn’t get nearly enough screen time.  Calagione runs Dogfish Head Brewing Company, and he has two things going for him: he’s charismatic and he makes great beer.  I’d have learned more, and been more entertained, by following this guy around for a year.  Wanna show me how megabreweries, with armies of lawyers and harems of politicians, keep the little guy down?  Don’t squawk it at me: just let me watch it unfold as Calagione fights his legal, commercial, and political battles against steep odds.  Stay focused: that’s how you’ll entertain and inform me.

Or just sail around the world or something – whatever self-satisfied rich people do.  I don’t want to hear about it.