Nadir-Fest 3 of 3!
ADAM That was contemptible. That was awful. That was unquestionably the worst one.
BETH By far the worst.
ADAM I could make a BuzzFeed-style list of twenty-five things that I hated about that movie.
BETH Let’s start.
BROOM Go for it.
ADAM Well… you were talking the other day about being in a visual world where it feels like no one is home and no one is watching out for you. It really felt like that. Sorry, my thoughts are all clotted up, I’m so angry about this movie.
BROOM “You need some closure.”
ADAM The contemptible message of the movie. The father-son dynamic. The absurd gay stereotype… At least at the end he got to sing along to a Gloria Gaynor song; that must have been exciting for his character. I’m sorry, somebody else jump in here, because I’m just pissed off.
BETH I’m only angry that I had to watch it. I’m not necessarily angry about it. But it was terrible. It was ugly and it was super-nerdy. It thought it had something to say about emotions, but it didn’t actually know what it was doing.
ADAM It had that manic knowingness and topicality that is like a noxious growth in these kinds of animated movies in recent years. It was obviously way too expensive.
BETH So did they fire all their animators and hire a whole new team?
BROOM It’s a very different sort of skill; I don’t imagine there are that many traditional animators who also do CGI animation. I’m not sure where these people came from. They’re not Pixar people.
BETH It seemed like they had a totally different sensibility from Disney people.
BROOM When you said that this was totally nerdy, I feel like that is exactly the essence of it. And Adam, when you said this was like my prior comment about entering a world where there’s no love for you, that’s not the feeling I get from this movie. That’s the feeling I get from movies that I feel have been made by sleaze, by calculating men of a certain insensitivity.
ADAM I just meant that it felt visually unwelcoming.
BROOM I said during the movie that this movie was made by its characters, grown up. Here I felt I was in the company not of sleaze but of stunted nerds.
ADAM That offensive opening, when they’re like, “Once upon a time — Naw!” … “Let’s open the book — Naw! Enough wit’ da book!”
BROOM You said it seemed like an identity crisis.
ADAM They might as well have had Gilbert Gottfried as the father. It was gruesome.
BROOM I really feel confident that behind this I can sense nerds. People who find it a strain to think about emotions. I feel like they strained to the point they could reach, and then had this inspiration: “Hey, you know what I might want to make a movie about? How my father never believed in me, and no-one was ever nice to me, and I was just an innocent nerd who liked karaoke, or was gay, or wasn’t good at sports or something. You know how no-one in the entire town liked me? We should make a movie about that!” And then they started to sketch out how that would work, but they don’t really understand it.
BETH Yeah, it’s Asperger’s-y! The whole movie was really Asperger’s-y! And that’s why it was so hard to watch.
BROOM Yes. All of the “humor,” all of the constant references — it’s like a Rainman thing. It’s what nerds do. It’s why they keep reciting Monty Python skits to each other. “No one understands us… but, well, you know what they say in Star Wars!” And it was striking to me that the elements of the movie that felt most expert were the weird sci-fi elements that never belonged in this story in the first place. The spaceship comes down and suddenly it’s like, “oh, look at this, something they really thought about!”
BETH Because that’s what’s comfortable for them.
BROOM That’s who they were. And I think the movie was uncomfortable to watch exactly because it was by nerds who were trying to address what it’s like emotionally and socially to be a nerd, but they just don’t understand enough about it to make that movie.
BETH They haven’t really resolved it for themselves.
ADAM And their vision of social acceptance is “It’s two strikes at the bottom of the ninth! Will he make it?” That was just a piece of scissored-out movie from some other movie that was inserted here. It felt so hackneyed, which fits with your thesis.
BROOM But they knew what that was. That was intentional. They put the “end of the movie triumph” at the beginning, and then they had him and his father lying there saying “Everything’s great now, right?” And the point is obviously it’s not great, nothing’s been addressed. But then the actual closure they give at the end is still totally insufficient. During the movie I said that they needed to make the father admit that he had felt the same kind of shame and that’s why he was passing it on to his son. But he didn’t! He didn’t understand himself at all, he didn’t explain anything. And when he finally turned it around and said “I believe in you,” he still didn’t actually believe in him! He just had come to realize that being a father meant that he had to say “I believe in you.” The writers couldn’t imagine any greater, more authentic kind of support from this terrible parent.
ADAM Who greenlighted this? Who thought that this was going to sell, or promote the brand?
BETH I think they just went through a lost era in the mid 2000s.
BROOM Didn’t we all?
BETH Michael Eisner was sort of called out for letting the brand get out of control, and… did they fire him or something?
BROOM I don’t know. You might be confusing different stories, because I know that some time earlier than that, Roy Disney was protesting to the board along the lines that the Disney ABC lineup was bad for the Disney brand, that they should save the word Disney for features, that they should save the characters and not stick them on sitcom promos…
BETH Okay, before you post this I’m going to find what I think I remember. [ed: put it in the comments, kiddo!]
ADAM Do you remember how in the mid-2000s it became very popular in hit movies to have a sequence where all the characters sing along to a song from the 60s or 70s? A la My Best Friend’s Wedding? What if we do it eight times?
BROOM What year was Adaptation?
BETH ’02.
BROOM Because that makes fun of the phenomenon outright, and it seemed relevant at the time. It’s died down since then. So this was particularly late. It was just fodder for their compulsion to emulate things — like the joke at the end about how Hollywood would make their movie. Well, that’s how Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure ends, among many other things, so it’s not even their joke. They didn’t own any of it.
ADAM “You’ve got hate mail!” AOL was of course 10 years old, at this point. Nobody had AOL in 2005. That’s the sort of thing that made me say that the people who made this movie not only were nerds but also were a thousand years old. “Kids use cellphones! Let’s put that in the movie!”
BROOM It’s really a whole attitude toward what humor is. Was there a single joke in this movie that did not consist of taking a chunk of existing reference material and putting it in the movie?
ADAM “Oh, snap!”
BROOM “Oh, snap!” Exactly. That’s something people say. It is like Asperger’s: “I’ve heard humans do this!” That’s how nerds talk to each other. They’re comforted by doing it to each other. That’s what “cosplay” is: “You’re dressed as that thing! You dressed up as the thing!” This movie dressed up as a bunch of different things.
ADAM “Modern Mallard says…” Ugh.
BROOM I appreciated that Ugly Duckling here was really just kind of an ugly duck.
BETH Instead of a cute nerdy girl.
BROOM Well, the point is that the ugly duckling is going to grow up to be a swan and is just in the wrong family. This is a movie about nerds as kids, and they were saying “yeah, we were ugly.”
ADAM But at least when this movie was called Mean Girls, the characters were actually warm and relatable.
BROOM They just don’t know what that is. And when you said there was gay-baiting in it, I don’t think so. I think they worked on it. I think that guy was there making the movie and was thrilled to have a character shout, “My Streisand records!”
ADAM I appreciate that it was not hateful gay-baiting. It was meant to be affectionate. But it was just…
BETH It was just clueless.
ADAM Uuuuugh.
BROOM I knew this was going to be the one. I knew this was coming. What I’m worried about is that — despite this having been our day of terror — the next one might be related to this in tone.
ADAM You think we picked the wrong three?
BROOM We couldn’t have improved it, because Home on the Range was the better one. Brother Bear was pretty bad.
ADAM That’s true. Well, we did it.
[we read the Times review]
ADAM I think it’s fitting that the first third of that review read like it came from the business section. As you say, nerds made this movie, but the people who approved it are just evil suits who have no sense of what is humanly compelling.
BROOM I was a little bit stung when you said that Home on the Range didn’t work because it didn’t promote any brands. Because to me, that’s suit thinking. And it’s probably true to some degree… but deep down, the reason that Dumbo and Pinocchio work is not because they were smarter about what they could sell to people, but because they were smarter about what would make a good movie. And yes, it happens that Home on the Range picked a way of making an entertaining movie that doesn’t fit that particular mold. But you wish that they could just think, “if we make a movie that really works as a movie, people will like that and good will come of it.”
ADAM Well look, over at Pixar they’re making movies of things that are not obviously marketable. I mean, Cars is, but Up is not, and Ratatouille is not.
BROOM Wall-E certainly isn’t. That was a very peculiar movie.
ADAM And I get that. But Disney being the franchise that it is, they have to be “Disney movies” if the franchise is going to survive. But this wasn’t that either! Who thinks “Oh, the beloved fairy tale Chicken Little“? What the fuck?
BROOM What is the real story of Chicken Little?
ADAM There isn’t one.
BROOM “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!” That’s about it, right?
ADAM “Let’s make a movie about the Tortoise and the Hare. And the hare will be fast talking, maybe Eddie Murphy will play the hare…”
BROOM Ooh, I like it!
ADAM And the tortoise will be, like,…
BROOM Bill Murray.
ADAM And the tortoise will have a sidekick, like a talking carrot…
BROOM But in the modern day, why does the hare go so fast? He’s trying to be cool and hip but he’s overcompensating. And he’ll learn to relax from the tortoise.
ADAM And then maybe everyone thinks the hare won the race, and he’ll be on a billboard, and it’ll be very meta. There’ll be “Hare” products…
BROOM But then they’ll have some common enemy. You think of them as enemies, but it’s going to be a buddy movie in the end. Because they’ll have to work together to fight off some kind of common enemy. Maybe there’s a bear, or some kind of big monster that they both need to go after. Or Russians, or Arabs or something, that they have to join forces against.
ADAM I’m embarrassed that Sandra Tsing Loh worked on this movie.
BETH This is going to get one star in my Netflix account.
BROOM Rotten Tomatoes reported that 36% of critics gave this a positive review.
ADAM Who? Read me a positive review.
BROOM Well, Ty Burr of the Boston Globe said that the film was “shiny and peppy, with some solid laughs and dandy vocal performances.” And Angel Cohn of TV Guide gave the film 3 stars alluding the film that would “delight younger children with its bright colors and constant chaos, while adults are likely to be charmed by the witty banter, subtle one-liners and a sweet father-son relationship.”
ADAM Ugh.
BROOM Angel Cohn was later found to be dead and blind.
ADAM Also, Zach Braff is as annoying as he is thought to be.
BROOM He was putting on a stupid little character voice. So why did they even hire Zach Braff?
ADAM If there’s anything good to say here, it’s that now you know which is the worst one, when people ask.
BROOM I already knew, though. Guys, I had seen a little bit of this on Youtube already, and seen that they used the rolling ball clip from Raiders of the Lost Ark within the first fifteen seconds of the movie.
ADAM When the water tower was rolling, it was like, “Ugh, they’re doing Raiders of the Lost Ark.” And then OH WAIT, we’re in a movie theater actually showing Raiders of the Lost Ark!
BROOM And even that — the actual ball rolling through the screen showing Raiders of the Lost Ark — even that itself is an existing lame thing that they didn’t make up.
ADAM I wish there had been more modern catchphrases in this movie. What if Chicken Little had been able to say to his father “Homey don’t play dat”?
BROOM Yeah! “Cowabunga, dude!”
