Mindless Behavior: All Around The World

My eyes and ears have been bleeding since I finished watching the music documentary on the boy band 'Mindless Behavior: All Around The World.' It's deeply depressing what passes for music these days. It's shameful. And to think someone, particularly Steven Goldfried, who mostly works as a production assistant on 'One Tree Hill,' wanted to make a "documentary" on a young band like this. I put the word "documentary" in quotations, because it really is more of a commercial for the band as is fails to reveal anything worth watching.

If the name 'Mindless Behavior' made you cringe, then wait until you hear the names of the boys in the band. The boy group is made up of Roc Royal, Ray-Ray, Prodigy, and Princeton, all of them are singers and dancers. This long form commercial showcases interviews with the bandmates, their managers and handlers, as well as their families. This is all mixed with concert and video footage of their awful songs, images of them as kids, and home-video footage. Really, who cares? What have they really done, besides make a terrible record that sold a bunch of copies to young screaming 10 year old girls.

We see that these boys were hand-picked to form a band and literally spent two years training in singing and dancing before they released a recording. This sounds like a good move, however most of their songs use auto-tune, and have such a manufactured and dull beat and sound, that this two years of training only seemed to teach them three dance moves. Ironically, this is how the documentary feels...manufactured and tailored, offering no real insight or thought.

This cheesy fabricated portrait also takes us to the hometowns and families of each member, and we get to see their background stories on how they grew up from their humble beginnings. Again, this just shows people praising the boys and saying how amazing they are as people and performers. Sure, the songs they perform don't advocate violence of any kind and the boys tend to sing about girls, love, and texting, but there are things done well, and things done not so well. This is the latter.

It's amazing to me how this band got to perform alongside some of the top acts in the business, for I feel there is no real talent here. The only thing I enjoyed was the fact that each member seemed to go out of his way to interact with fans, sign autographs, and pose for pictures. This formulaic commercial might only interest girls from age 8-12 who enjoy horrible music. Stay far away.

'Mindless Behavior: All Around The World' has a sub-par video presentation that comes with a 1080p HD transfer presented in 1.78:1 aspect ratio. The detail tends to show decent closeups that show facial textures and detailed stitching in costumes, but seems to have a softer image quality from time to time. Flesh tones comes across natural and smooth, with black levels running deep and inky.

The colors are well saturated and balanced, but nothing seems to ever pop off screen. It all seems a little muted. Oddly enough, this image suffers from quite a bit of compression problems and other video ailments such as banding, motion blur, video noise, and aliasing. They are all minor and not on screen at all time, but they do pop up throughout. I expected a little more from this video transfer.

This release comes with a lossless Dolby TrueHD 5.1 audio mix and sounds like four pre-teens mixed and engineered the sound, meaning everything is turned all the way up as loud as it can go with no real sense of balance or good LFE. Much like the band's music, this wall of sound will make you want to chop out your ear drums.

During the talking head interviews, the dialogue becomes clear and easy to understand, but at other times, everything is muffled and produces a belligerent sound that would make a dog howl. The ambient noises of fans cheering and screaming along with other ambient concert noises tend to sound off balance and loud. The bass receives a hefty workout here during the concert footage, but this is a poor excuse for an engineered sound presentation.

• Audio Commentary with Steven Goldfried and the Band - Director Steven Goldfried is joined by the four members of the band to discuss their tour, the making of this movie, and their lives. Only fans of the band would want to listen to this horrible commentary track.
  
• Deleted Scenes and Exclusive Footage (HD, 15 mins) - More interviews with the band and their managers.
  

• Performance of Mrs. Right (HD, 7 mins) - Mindless Behavior performs their song 'Mrs. Right.' But it's so wrong.
  

• Mindless Takeover (HD, 18 mins) - These are shorts that offer glimpses of the boys' everyday lives and interviews with their fans.
  

• Trailers (HD, 8 mins) - Other trailers for other films.
  

'Mindless Behavior: All Around the World' is horrible on all levels. Terrible music, awful filmmaking, and sub-par video and audio presentations. There is no real documentary here. The extras are run-of-the-mill as well. I'm sure fans of the band will be purchasing this, but everyone else...stay far, far away.