-611 Reviews

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

What the heck was this about?

[4/10 · 26 March 2006]

Maybe I'm not in the right demographics for this film, but I couldn't grasp the humor. I grew up on Jacques Cousteau specials and expected this to be a satire or parody of them. And there are some items like that, such as the red hats and the ship named "Belafonte" (instead of "Calypso"). But Steve Zissou seemed less a parody or satire of Cousteau than a recast of a jerk in place of lovable Jacques. Parodies usually exaggerate the subject, but this seems to go 180 degrees from it. Instead of a classy, principled, passionate Frenchman with a close-knit family, we get a crude, materialistic, bored American who has explored more moist places on land than undersea.

Throughout the movie I kept wondering if the director either a) doesn't really know much about Cousteau and doesn't really care because that's not the point or b) knows MUCH more about Cousteau than I do, such as his personality in making documentary film deals, and is lampooning that esoteric material.

Maybe it's like one of those dry New Yorker cartoons. If I look at it long enough, maybe I'll get the jokes.

The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure (1967–1968)

What is so hard about the costumes?

[9 June 2002]

I was in fourth grade, the thick of my comic-reading years, when this show came out. I couldn't believe my luck that my favorite DC heroes were now on TV.

The stories may seem corny now, but they were played straight, unlike the campy or downright comical Super Friends.

But some things really annoyed me. Most basically: What was so hard about getting the costumes right? Almost every character had such changes to his costume that even I at age 9 could notice (and still remember at age 44!).

1. The show gave Aquaman black boots. In the comic, he wore no boots, just the green tights.

2. The show gave Flash yellow gauntlets and a regular yellow belt. In the comic, he wears a yellow lighting belt and lightning bands around his forearms with red gloves.

3. The show reversed Kid Flash's color schemes.

4. The show gave Hawkman some kind of claw/glove on his right hand. It could emit beams of some kind. The comic Hawkman fought bare-handed, though sometimes with a mace. And he didn't have a pet hawk in the comics.

5. The Atom wore a plain blue shirt and trunks, broken by a black belt, instead of the comic's red and blue shirt, blue belt, and no trunks on red tights.

6. Green Lantern's costume came out unscathed. But he has this alien buddy Kiro instead of the Inuit buddy Pieface. Never figured that one.

7. We get Wonder Girl and Speedy in the Teen Titans, but we don't get Wonder Woman or Green Arrow in the Justice League of America. Go figure.

This show left me wondering for years whether Filmation got the rights to the characters, but not to all of the costumes. At least when Super Friends came out, they got the costumes right. And they gave us Wonder Woman, too!

Mister Magoo's Christmas Carol (1962 TV Movie)

Alone in the World

[16 December 2001]

Right now I am trying to figure out what to do this Christmas, since the family tradition is a-tremor. The thought of being alone on Christmas deeply saddens me, and I think it goes back to seeing little Ebenezar Scrooge left behind in boarding school while all the other kids had families to go home to for Christmas.

I cried just like Mr. Magoo's older Scrooge did when he saw himself as a kid singing:

When you're alone, alone in the world When you're alone in the world Blown-away leaves get blown in the world Swirled-away leaves get swirled

A hand for each hand was planned for the world Why don't my fingers reach? Millions of grains of sand in the world Why's mine a lonely beach?

Where are the heels to click to my clack? Where is the voice to answer mine back? I'm all alone in the WOOOOORLD!!!

None of the other versions caught this scene the way this one does. Not Bugs Bunny, Bill Murray, Albert Finney, Mickey Mouse. Maybe Alistair Sim, sort of.

Simplistic, yes, but it's the scene that still sticks in my throat as I choke back an adult tear. It's the scene that makes this version, truly unique, all alone in the world.

Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)

When things were rotten....

[20 October 2001]

I swear I read all the newspaper reviews of Men in Tights, saw all the TV interviews and have just combed all the Internet critiques. And NOBODY has made an obvious comparison with this movie.

Folks reach far back to Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles or not-so-far back to Spaceballs. They bring up non-Brooks films such as Monty Python and the Holy Grail and Hot Shots.

But am I the only one who remembers that Mel Brooks actually parodied Robin Hood PREVIOUSLY? He produced a TV series in 1975 titled "When Things Were Rotten." It is amazing that nobody, not even Roger Ebert, has compared Brooks' earlier foray into Robin Hood lore with the most recent one.

So I guess it's up to me. The earlier treatment was, of course, episodic. This was a one-shot film. The earlier one drew from the legend itself while poking fun at TV sitcoms in general. For example, the real legend didn't feature a set of twins -- one working for Robin Hood, the other for the sheriff -- but that's the kind of cute thing that TV does. (When Brooks' writers had an episode explaining how the brothers split up, it was less funny afterward.)

This outing draws a great deal from Hollywood and in particular the Costner pic. Brooks keeps Prince John, a character in the Errol Flynn movie and other treatments, even though Costner removed the prince from his tale.

In the TV show, only the sheriff and his chief lackey spoke with English accents. This time, they make a point of an English-accented Robin.

Both featured Brooksian sight gags and visual puns. But I think they worked better in the TV show. Maybe they were just fresher. Brooks' humor was insane and hilarious when contrasted to the starchy confines of 1970s TV. But now his work is getting stale. There were some cool gags in Men in Tights, such as the quarter-staff fight and the Everlast chastity belt, but far too much of the parody is aimed at a single previous movie. And a good parody goes for general conventions, not specifics.

Rabbi Tuckman, though, was a good touch. Pure good ol' Brooks! Interesting that Dick van Patten, the TV show's Friar Tuck, gets to play the Abbot this time with a similar allusion to Abbot & Costello.

And I think for Brooks, 1975 WAS when things were rotten. Because not enough people were watching his show. It lasted one season. Despondent, he went out to make a Silent Movie and left TV for good....

Dudley Do-Right (1999)

Didn't the directors ever see a Dudley cartoon?

[7 October 2001]

Who started this trend of turning '60s cartoons into new live action? I'd say Spielberg with The Flintstones. That one, at least, worked. But it was, sadly, the camel's nose under the tent.

Did Hugh Wilson even WATCH any Dudley Do-Right cartoons as a kid? Did he rent videos or catch the Cartoon Channel? None of that shows.

The classic scene of the cartoon, Snidely tying Nell to the tracks ... is STILL a cartoon here. They didn't even try to render the credits it in live action as with The Flintstones.

Dudley, a blonde in the cartoon, was a brunette actor. He smiles a lot, has a big hero's chin, and is sort of dim but not such a stumblebum.

And Nell, a redhead in the cartoon, was a blonde actress. But wait ... Sarah Jessica Parker isn't REALLY blonde. She had to color her hair or wear a wig and STILL got it wrong.

Nell in the cartoon was content to live at the camp. But she was NOT stuck between Dudley and Snidely. Rather, she was stuck on HORSE!! And what happened to Horse's Mountie shirt and hat? This one in the movie was just a regular saddled horse.

Inspector Fenwick in the cartoon is the camp commandant, a fist-pounding boss, not a soft-spoken retiree. And he wears the red uniform, just like Dudley. Was Hugh Wilson being "accurate" by having someone of the inspector's rank wear black? Why bother being accurate on this obscure point if you can't get the obvious things right?

The real Snidely Whiplash has green skin. I forgive Alfred Molina for not donning greasepaint through the film. But at least we get a scene of him with a green face in the mudbath. Snidely is the ONLY character they got right.

Other problems: The cartoon very obviously took place during the Klondike or Yukon Gold Rush days. The player-piano score gave it away. We;re talking late 19th century. They would NOT have helicopters, cars, tanks, etc.

I remember, back in the '60s, the trend was the turn our beloved live-action heroes into cartoons and see them REALLY soar. Gone were the expenses of having to string George Reeves up on wires to have Superman fly. Now we could see Superman really fly and take on actual comic-book supervillains instead of always gangsters. And we got the Lone Ranger, Batman and eventually Star Trek in toon form and they all worked by doing things that would have been way too expensive in live action.

Don't any of the directors remember that these cartoons were made for a reason? Too expensive to film live!

Spielberg made The Flintstones work as nostalgia because he has the cash to be exacting in detail. For Hugh Wilson and all the rest, the lesson is simple: Watch the cartoon, note recurring themes, and most of all, don't do the show if you ain't got the dough!

Starship Troopers (1997)

Read the book

[29 September 2001]

I read Robert A. Heinlein's novel in 1978. And that's what you should do. If your library doesn't have it, surf on over to IMDb's companion site, Amazon.com, and buy Heinlein's Starship Troopers.

THEN you will wonder, as I do, how in this day of visuals over plot the most haunting visual of the book never makes it into the movie.

Heinlein shows the reader scene after scene of the Troopers jumping down from space platforms to planet surfaces in their "mech" suits, part spacesuit, part tank. The sight of thousands of mech-suited Troopers dropping out of space, filling an alien sky, would give your average ground-dwelling humanoid the chills.

This is THE scene from the book. Heinlein gave it to the director on a silver platter. But do we get to see it in the movie? No! So if they can't even get Heinlein's imagery right, you know they just tossed out his philosophy, plot and characters.

True, many other SF movies are similarly mindless and superficial. But most of them weren't based on something good.

If you want the real story, read the book. And you, too, will wonder why.

The Jetsons Meet the Flintstones (1987 TV Movie)

Mixed feelings

[23 September 2001]

The publicity all says, "Elroy invents a time machine...." But in reality there is time for two separate Jetson and Flintstone plots to develop before Elroy starts tinkering. Jetson faces a job loss because of a security leak at Spacely Sprockets, while Flintstone IS fired because he skips work on an overtime assignment.

So there is a reason for this plot, which I didn't expect. Bravo.

But some things bugged me. Both shows were satires of our society, but in different ways.

The Flintstones worked because, ha-ha, we knew they REALLY didn't have all those "modern" conveniences and heavy equipment made from animal labor. They really didn't wear tattered versions of our American clothes. And they didn't have TVs made from rock or newspapers made from slate. But it was funny to see them use their available resources to look like us. That was the fun of it.

The Jetsons worked because, ha-ha, we knew we MIGHT have those machines one day. It took our 1960s "modern" conveniences into the future and made them even more so. Jet-propelled grocery carts, automatic tooth-brushers, honeymoons on the real moon. Machines and robots did everything. And it was funny to watch people with more resources look like us.

But I find it hard to mix them. They both ask for different suspensions of disbelief. The Jetsons asks us to accept that we will become so dependent on our machines that we can't even get dressed without them. The Flintstones asks us to accept that we were once doing well enough with rocks and animals. George Jetson might exist one day. Fred Flintstone, however, never did. Maybe there were extroverted, opportunistic cavemen back at the campfires, but no rock televisions. So the Jetson pokes fun at future possibilities, while the Flintstones pokes fun at past impossibilities.

(Spoiler warning) Check this: Rosie at one time uses the time machine to go back into the past to rescue the Jetsons from Bedrock. But she first stops in medieval England, where two jousting knights are on ... horseback, the way knights REALLY fought. But hey, if the Flintstones already had cars, why are the knights reduced to horses?

Really, if the Flintstones were that advanced in Bedrock, what happened? Why the decline?

I mean, by the time of the Roman Holidays cartoon series, we saw that Fred's foot-powered car had developed into Gus Holiday's roadster with actual horses under the hood. What led to the decline next?

I never asked that while watching the Flintstones, but throwing the Jetsons into the same movie brings this question.

Yeah, yeah, I know. It's only a cartoon....

Iolanthe (1984 TV Movie)

WHO and Sullivan?

[11 January 2001]

First, the music and the singing and the costumes and stategecraft were fantastic, everything the previous reviewer said.

But...I sometimes wasn't sure whether I was listening to Gilbert & Sullivan or Sullivan & someone else.

It's very common for Gilbert and Sullivan companies to pop in a few contemporary references now and then. But here they went overboard. The early moviemakers learned that what works OK on stage, such as gag references about the politicos of the day, doesn't always work in the more permanent form of film. Same for video. I might have gotten some of the jokes if it were still 1984 and I were Canadian, but they didn't survive time and national borders.

For instance, in here the Fairy Queen originally sang the praises of one "Captain Shaw." Gilbert didn't explain who that was, and a new viewer might be confused. But informed Gilbertians say it was the Savoy Theater's fire marshal. This could be left alone and explained in the liner notes. It's not a joke anymore, but it is Gilbertia. But nooooo. This production replaces it with what might have been a real thigh-slapper in 1984. She sings about the BBC and someone named "Nolte Nash."

Who?

My point precisely.

Having to explain something Gilbert wrote in the libretto may be worth it as history. Having to explain something a rewrite man wrote for one production surely isn't.

Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls (1995)

Going fully into fantasy

[1 January 2001]

No doubt this film had its hilarious moments, but overall it is inferior to the first Ace Ventura flick.

In the first movie, Jim Carey acted over the top in a real city with a real football team. Miami may be crazy, but not as much as Jim Carey. Reality was Jim Carey's foil. And the joke was on reality. He also had his "down time," when he was real and not so wound up "alrighty then."

In this one, Jim Carey has done away with any resemblance of Ace Ventura to a real person. He's a cartoon character now, not just a zany free spirit. He's thrown away the "off" button. No rest for this guy, even when meditating. But that doesn't mean he's funny just because he's on.

The new movie doesn't take place in the real world, either. It's not Nairobi or Johannesburg or even a real rural Africa, but some fictional Africa where Apartheid seems intact, natives still fight wars with spears and there exists a species of "great white bat." Goofy native customs are made up solely for ridicule. In other words, Jim Carey has given up the first movie's one foot in reality and settled on a stereotypical fantasy Africa.

The problem is that when you don't know how a culture is in reality, it's hard to tell when the culture is being lampooned.