A Lawyer Walks into a Bar

Although this documentary principally follows six law-school graduates preparing to take their bar exams, it’s laced with seriocomic observations about the legal profession from a variety of commentators: comic actor Michael Ian Black, TV lawyer/journalists Catherine Crier and Nancy Grace, lawyer/novelist Scott Turow, comedian Eddie Griffin, consumer-affairs reporter John Stossel and former O. J. Simpson counsel Robert Shapiro. By the time they finish weighing in, a viewer will wonder why the film’s six subjects wanted to put themselves through the ordeal.

Shelf Talk: Winner of the Grand Jury Prize at last year’s AFI Dallas International Film Festival, this witty, irreverent documentary failed to attract a theatrical distributor, but public fascination with lawyers should make it reasonably successful on DVD. (We can’t see anybody but a prospective lawyer wanting to see it more than once.) It can be promoted as a counterpart—or perhaps a sidebar—to fictional films and TV series built around the profession: The Practice, Boston Legal, Absence of Malice, Presumed Innocent and myriad others.