I’m skeptical of whether this movie will be a waste of an hour and a half or so of my time or not, since ‘The Bee Movie’ was awful. It made me decide that Larry David was clearly 99% of the comedic and creative drive behind Seinfeld.
And now, after watching the trailer, I’m…still skeptical? I mean, it’s going to be on Netflix May 3, so it’s pretty much a certainty that Mrs. solost and I will get around to watching it at some point from sheer inertia, if no other reason.
A few observations about the trailer:
It looks pretty. Taking place in 1963, the sets and clothing are a sort of elevated, brighter, almost cartoony version of the look and general aesthetic of the early 60s.
Holy bejeebers, is it star-packed. Well, at least plenty of actors and comedians you will recognize. Seinfeld certainly got the call out, and convinced plenty of Hollywood to come out and play.
Did I laugh during the trailer? Not once. There were two parts where I…I won’t say I almost laughed, but I thought to myself “decent joke”. The first was a sight gag: the CEO of Quaker Oats was an actual Quaker, in full Quaker Oats logo beard and costume. The second was when Seinfeld and some other Kellogg’s execs were meeting with President Kennedy for some reason, and Melissa McCarthy’s character showed Kennedy a proposed drawing of a Pop-Tart. Kennedy says “that’s worse than my son John-John’s drawings, and I seriously think there’s something wrong with him”. I don’t know, the line reading in the Kennedy Boston brogue was amusing to me.
“Crudely drawn picture of the new invention” gag, “list of obviously terrible names for the new invention” gag….how much of this film isn’t ripped off from The Huducker Proxy?
That is a list of so called comedians I find painfully unfunny most of the time.
Led by Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Bobby Moynihan & especially Fred Armisen.
Was that the CEO, though? The trailer features several people dressed up as company mascots, including Tony the Tiger and Snap/ Crackle/ Pop. (Chef Boyardee was a real person) Even if the character IS the CEO. it’s not necessarily his normal clothes in-story.
Here’s an AVClub review of the movie. The The link preview text and the ‘C’ grade the review gives the movie pretty much says it all, and is about what I would have expected after watching the trailer:
Whoah, that was a brutal review. I’ll still watch the movie, with expectations accordingly lowered and tuned more to ‘irony watch’ settings.
My feeling though is, as pessimistic as I’ve been toward the movie in this thread, I don’t think it’s going to be quite as bad as Mr. Roeper thought it to be. Take this passage:
Snap, Crackle and Pop are depicted not as actors, but as individuals named Snap, Crackle and Pop. They seem to have no normal human alter egos; they’re never out of character. The same goes for Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) and Isaiah Lamb (Andy Daly), aka the Quaker Oats guy. These characters are depicted not as actors playing roles, but as the living embodiments of their respective brands.
The CEO of Quaker Oats being an actual old-timey Quaker I thought was one of the funniest gags of the otherwise ‘meh’ trailer. And, uh, Chef Boyardee was an actual Italian chef-- Chef Ettore Boiardi, spelled phonetically so Americans could pronounce it. Moynihan plays him as a caricature, no doubt, but he was a real person, and was pretty much a living embodiment of his brand.
So I’m not saying I think the movie will be very funny, or that Roeper is necessarily wrong, but that feels like an unnecessarily mean-spirited review of someone who’s a bit humor-impaired.
The overall reviews are somewhat negative, but not as scathing as the Chicago Sun Times.
Tarot, another movie coming out this weekend, is actually getting even more trashed. It is apparently quite bad. It has 7% positive on Rotten tomatoes and a 35 score on Metacritic.
Unfrosted has 46% positive and a 43 on Metascore.
Nothing to be happy about, but Unfrosted appears to be competent, but Tarot is bad for even a “one weekend box office” horror movie.
The History Channel’s The Food That Built America had a show about the war between Post, who invented the concept, and Kelloggs, who promoted the hell out of an imitation and reaped the victory.
I keep waiting for someone to mention this. It aired January 2023, and all accounts insist that the film was in the works already, but TFTBA is already so camp that it wouldn’t take much to beef it up into a glorious face.
Dropped on Netflix today. Saw a bit about it on TV this morning. Seinfeld’s first time directing and starring in a full length movie. Stupid idea. He can’t sell the idea. Saw this thread. Pulled it up on Netflix. Watched for 7 minutes. Done watching. It must get better because it’s not possible to make a movie that stays that bad for more than 7 minutes.
Horrible ratings and reviews on both IMDb and RT. Supports my belief that the Seinfeld TV series was a fortuitous and mostly accidental confluence of brilliant writers and performers and little to do with Seinfeld himself. Seinfeld was right in believing that he could never do it again, but wrong in believing that he could actually go on to successfully write and direct a movie.
I decided that I had to see how bad it was, and just now watched it. It wasn’t good. I would say that there was absolutely nothing funny about it, except there was a brief Mad Men crossover buried deep in it that I enjoyed.
Hear me out. It’s incredibly silly. Incredibly. I mean, this whole thing feels like a children’s movie for the most part. It’s zany, wacky, goofy, and is mostly just joke after joke. I see it is rated PG-13, but it is almost G-rated or PG at most for about 99% of it.
My son was laughing a lot because whole thing is just so zany and silly. I smiled here and there, but really it isn’t all that funny and I have no idea what Jerry Seinfeld was hoping for when he made it. It’s just a very silly goofy comedy that feels like it is from another time.
I can’t even rate this one, but I can disagree with the Chicago Sun Times who said it is one of the worst movies of the decade. Bizarre? Yes. Atrocious? Not really.
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