20 brew-tiful movies for International Beer Day

Based on the title, “Old Man Drinking a Glass of Beer,” you can probably guess what this 1897 British short film is about. Running only about 35 seconds, the extremely brief comedy was directed by George Albert Smith and starred Tom Green (no, not that Tom Green) as a man whose funny facial expressions and gestures become more emphatic the more he sips on his beverage. Smith is notable for being a pioneer of early film editing, as well as being the inventor of Kinemacolor, the first successful color motion picture process.

Based on the unpublished novel “Beer and Blood” by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon, “The Public Enemy” tells the tale of two troublesome youths who break into bootlegging on the eve of Prohibition in the U.S. The duo (played by James Cagney and Edward Woods) are hired as “beer salesmen” by a local smuggler, which leads to gang associations and their eventual downfall. This isn’t an upbeat beer movie by any stretch, but it’s memorable for the scene in which Cagney smashes a grapefruit in the face of Mae Clarke, it earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Story and holds a perfect rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Prohibition in the United States lasted from 1920 to 1933, but there was no law during that time against making movies about alcohol. Enter “What! No Beer?” a 1933 pre-code comedy starring Buster Keaton and Jimmy Durante as two guys who start a brewery after falsely believing that Prohibition had been repealed, and they end up in trouble with the mob. Of course plenty of hilarious hijinks ensue (in classic Keaton fashion) making this a silly, sight-gag-filled film that runs only 66 minutes.

“The Bad News Bears” isn’t actually about beer, per se. It’s about a misfit group of the worst little league baseball players in Southern California, who end up being managed by Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau), an alcoholic swimming pool cleaner who always has a beer in hand. In fact, in the 1976 film’s opening scene, Buttermaker is shown pulling up to the ball field in a busted-up Cadillac, opening a can of beer, pouring a bit out on the ground and topping it off with some whiskey. At the film’s conclusion, the Bears — who overcome their inferior skills and nearly manage to win the championship — celebrate their efforts by sipping and spraying Buttermaker’s beers all over each other. Ah, the ‘70s.

When two wealthy Texans need someone to bootleg 400 cases of Coors beer to Atlanta in 28 hours, they turn to trucker Bo “Bandit” Darville (Burt Reynolds) and his partner, Cledus “Snowman” Snow (Jerry Reed). The duo attract plenty of law enforcement attention while hauling the suds, especially after they pick up a runaway bride named Carrie (Sally Field), who has just left the sheriff’s (Jackie Gleason) son at the altar. Shot for just $4.3 million, the 1977 action comedy “Smokey and the Bandit” earned $300 million and would have been the largest-grossing film of the year if it weren’t for a little sci-fi flick called “Star Wars.”

A manager on the rise (Robert Hayes) is hired to run a struggling brewery that happens to be the biggest employer in his old hometown. He manages to turn the company around, but that’s just the beginning of his work in this surprisingly successful 1981 comedy that also stars Barbara Hershey, Art Carney and David Keith. David Allen Coe and Johnny Paycheck, the writer and performer of the country song from which the film takes its name, also have cameos.

After gaining popularity on the Canadian sketch show “SCTV,” the characters of Bob and Doug McKenzie (Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas) got their own movie, “Strange Brew,” in 1983. In the super silly comedy, the unemployed brothers con their way into jobs at the local Elsinore Brewery and inadvertently discover that the brewmeister (Max von Sydow) is hell-bent on world domination and is responsible for murdering the company’s previous owner. Thanks in part to their expert drinking skills, the brothers end up foiling the brewmeister’s plans and are rewarded with — what else? — cases and cases of free beer.

Also known as “The Selling of America,” the 1985 comedy “Beer” is about the advertising industry, but it’s also about beer, obviously. In an attempt to keep the account of the struggling Norbecker Brewery, ad exec B.D. Tucker (Loretta Swit) creates a campaign around three barflies (David Alan Grier, William Russ and Saul Stein) who inadvertently prevented a recent pub robbery. Unrealistic? Yes. Forgettable? Yep. But hey, it fits the bill.

Richard Linklater’s “Dazed and Confused” has a well-known reputation as a stoner comedy, but what’s the underlying theme that connects the story together? No, not coming of age, trying to fit in as a high schooler or listening to rock music...but throwing a kegger! The movie is set on the last day of school on May 28, 1976, as the evening’s plans are almost ruined when one student’s parents discover his intentions to have a party. Nevertheless, protagonist freshman Mitch (Wiley Wiggins) tries beer for the first time and, toward the end of the film, an impromptu keg party is eventually pulled off in a field. Twenty-five years after its release, “Dazed and Confused” is now considered a classic as it earned near-universal acclaim and featured rising stars Jason London, Ben Affleck, Matthew McConaughey, Milla Jovovich, Parker Posey and Renée Zellweger.

Fresh off the success of their new show, “South Park,” Trey Parker and Matt Stone capitalized by turning out a buddy film for fans of semi-organized amateur sports. In the crude comedy, two loser friends (Parker and Stone) create a game combining the rules of basketball and baseball, and it ends up becoming a nationwide hit that spawns an entire league. The name of the duo’s team? The Milwaukee Beers. The film co-stars Ernest Borgnine, Robert Vaughn, Yasmine Bleeth and Jenny McCarthy, and it features a long list of cameos from various sports figures, as well as the ska band Reel Big Fish, which fittingly perform its hit song “Beer.”

There’s probably more weed than beer in the 2002 comedy “Super Troopers,” written by and starring Jay Chandrasekhar, Kevin Heffernan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, and Erik Stolhanske (otherwise known as Broken Lizard). But that won’t keep the now-classic comedy about misbehaving cops off this list. After all, in addition to drinking, smoking and other general shenanigans, the final scene in “Super Troopers” features the officers disguising themselves as keg delivery men for St. Anky Beer in order to bust a college party...and eventually drink with the attendees.

There are plenty of cold ones consumed in the 2003 Todd Phillips comedy “Old School,” but the movie makes this list mainly for one reason: the famous scene featuring Will Ferrell and a beer funnel. During a house party attended mainly by college students, the newly married Frank Ricard (Ferrell) is offered a turn at the “beer bong” but initially declines, citing boring adult activities planned for the next day. However, he quickly gives in to peer pressure and guzzles down the golden suds, excitedly exclaiming afterword in a now-iconic line: “It’s so good! Once it hits your lips, it’s so good!” He eventually finishes the night with some good old-fashioned streaking, but not with a trip to KFC.

Although it appears to have come straight out of the 1920s — complete with black-and-white photography, grainy images, and out-of-sync audio —”The Saddest Music in the World” was actually filmed and released in 2003. In the film, the baroness, Helen Port-Huntley (Isabella Rossellini), holds a competition to find the saddest music in existence as a publicity stunt for Muskeg Beer, whose business is threatened by the impending implementation of Prohibition. Packed with plenty of conflict, sex, love triangles and a pair of prosthetic legs filled with beer, “The Saddest Music in the World” was praised by critics for its imagery, nostalgia, originality and direction (courtesy of Guy Maddin), and earned a 79 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

In 2006, the Broken Lizard boys made a film that contains so much beer that they put it right in the title: “Beerfest.” The plot centers on Jan and Todd Wolfhouse (Paul Soter and Erik Stolhanske), two dudes who recruit their hard-partying friends to participate in a competitive drinking contest in order to defend the honor of the brothers’ late grandfather (Donald Sutherland) and retain the rights to his prized beer recipe — which is in danger of being turned over to some mean-spirited Germans. Copyright law in the real world doesn’t really work this way, but it made for an entertaining and crude comedy that was a suitable successor to “Super Troopers,” even though stuffy film critics gave “Beerfest” only a 41 percent freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Beer plus softball equals fun, and Artie Lange capitalized on this fact when he wrote, produced and starred in the 2006 comedy “Beer League.” Then again, alcohol isn’t always painted in the best light in the film, where Lange plays a single, oft-unemployed drunk who lives with his mom. Booze continues to be part of the plot right up until the championship game, in which his team is hopelessly inebriated. “Beer League” co-stars Laurie Metcalf, Ralph Macchio and Joe Lo Truglio, among other familiar faces, but that didn’t help the film at the box office, where it earned less than $500,000.

Although fictional, “Superbad” is a pretty accurate (and hilarious) look at how far high school teenagers will go to get booze — be it at parties, from older friends or siblings or with the use of fake IDs featuring outlandish names like “McLovin.” Protagonists played by Michael Cera, Jonah Hill and Christopher Mintz-Plasse portray this struggle well, with Hill’s character even emptying out laundry detergent containers and filling them with suds when he stumbles upon a stockpile of beer at one particular party. The beer may have been tinted green in the process, but that didn’t slow down any thirsty teenagers in the smash hit comedy...and we wouldn’t expect it to in real life either.

The 2009 documentary “Beer Wars” is fascinating not just because it takes a look at the business behind the brews, but because it makes the case that smaller breweries are often forced to fold or sell out due to the strength volume, and pressure created by enormous corporate breweries. As if this topic wasn’t already interesting enough a decade ago, the explosion in craft beer over the last few years has made the case that smaller breweries can indeed thrive in the market and may end up giving the big guys a run for their money — which makes this well-received doc even more of a must-watch.

While developing “Drinking Buddies,” director and screenwriter Joe Swanberg wanted to make a complicated adult story like the 1969 comedy “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice,” but set in a craft brewery. He did just this with the familiar faces of Jake Johnson, Olivia Wilde, Ron Livingston and Anna Kendrick. Praised for its wit, humor and ample use of improv, “Drinking Buddies” earned positive reviews upon its release at Sundance and owns an 83 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Edgar Wright’s 2013 comedy “The World’s End” is mostly about an extraterrestrial invasion, but the setup involves Gary King (Simon Pegg) rallying a few of his old buddies (Nick Frost, Martin Freeman, Paddy Considine and Eddie Marsan) to go on the “Golden Mile” pub crawl, where participants drink a pint at each of 12 different locations. Even when things go terribly wrong and it’s clear an alien invasion is underway and androids have replaced a large number of the locals, Gary stubbornly insists on continuing the crawl, proving our point that “The World’s End” really is just a movie about drinking beer.

After watching the aforementioned 2009 documentary “Beer Wars,” the next logical viewing would be 2015’s “Blood, Sweat, and Beer.” It’s not a sequel and doesn’t involve any of the same filmmakers, but it shows how much an industry can change in just a few short years. In addition to exploring the quick rise in popularity of craft beer recently, it also investigates what it takes to make it as a new brewery and what roadblocks can occur. Although “Blood, Sweat, and Beer” had a limited release and wasn’t rated by many critics, it holds a perfect 100 percent audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.