To expand on my earlier point, I regard Jerry Seinfeld as a sort of idiot savant – brilliant in a very narrow sphere of comedy, and otherwise a useless arrogant jerk whose smirks at his own jokes are just annoying, and who couldn’t act worth a shit in his own series. That he became a billionaire from all the royalties from this frivolity (and denied his fellow creative contributors their fair share) really pisses me off. OTOH, that his directorial debut is being so widely panned is karma!
I intend to watch this movie, if only out of a sense of duty. I enjoyed the “Seinfeld” show, and “Curb Your Enthusiasm” so I feel obliged to give it a chance. But I have no high expectations. It seems like a miserable idea for a full-length movie, and only a fair idea for a 5-minute SNL type sketch.
I can not emphasize the words “jokes” and “silly” enough. It’s just gags and quite child-like, honestly.
I bet Jerry Seinfeld likes Top Secret!, a movie that is nothing but gags and jokes…but is about 1000X better than Unfrosted.
On NPR today one critic said it was mildly funny with 3 of 5 jokes being kinda funny. So if you are jerry fan, I think it will be a GO. But not for me.
I wouldn’t watch it sober.
Nick, I’ve tried everything: the embassy, the German government, the consulate. I even talked to the U.N. ambassador. It’s no use, I just can’t bring my wife to orgasm.
It’s now well known that Unfrosted has been widely panned by critics, well-deserved karma for Seinfeld’s arrogant pomposity. I just wanted to add that I checked its review on Roger Ebert dot com. Ebert, of course, is no longer with us, having passed away I think in 2013 and dearly missed as one of the best movie reviewers ever, but his site carries on with reviews by other critics. They continue his legacy with the four-star rating system that he and Gene Siskel established. The general idea is that anything less than two stars should be avoided. Unfrosted gets half a star, which is probably too generous.
When the movie first started, I was strongly reminded of Pushing Daisies. The movie itself is not all that good, but I liked the scenery and the colors. And I’ll agree it’s a bit like an overly long SNL skit.
Discourse just told me that you already linked to the review I was going to post. I find this review fits my experience rather well, especially this statement:
But like the prize inside, or a maze on the back of the box, Seinfeld’s caravan of side characters are what make the movie.
It would interesting to watch the same movie and just cut out all of Seinfield’s lines.
Friday night we had watched Say Anything for the first time. I asked my husband which movie he liked better and he agreed with me that Unfrosted was better than Say Anything. Unfrosted doesn’t hit the “so bad it’s good” bar.
That site gives Say Anything four stars. 
I often find that that site doesn’t match my own opinions.
Say Anything is a classic 80’s teen RomCom and one of my favourites of the period, but then again I was in my last year of high school when it came out and I could wholly relate to it.
Unfrosted, was as pointed out upthread, an overly long SNL bit.
Nope, this is not to my taste. I don’t like Pop Tarts either.
I liked it. It’s not a good movie per se, but I enjoyed it. At its worst it’s just an airplane style farce that misses the mark, and at it’s best it’s a baby boomer’s love letter to his childhood, like an old issue of Mad magazine you found at your grandparents house brought to life. Self indulgent, not nearly as funny as it thinks it is, and Seinfeld cannot act, but light and silly and harmless.
I lasted about 15 minutes. I guess I don’t share Seinfeld’s fascination with breakfast cereal trivia of the early 1960s.
A better movie with high production values, absurdist humor, arch side characters, and mid-20th C nostalgia is The Hudsucker Proxy.
I watched it. Wow. So much thrown at the wall, and nothing really stuck. So many genres or events parodied— the space race, the mafia, the Cold War, the Manhattan Project. So many opportunities for creating humor that fell as flat as a Pop-Tart. It felt like a promising framework for a comedy movie with plot device placeholders, meant to be filled in with actual jokes and humor later on, but they never got there.
There was even a parody of the Jan 6 insurrection when the protesting mascots start to riot, that just felt out of place for this movie and generally in bad taste. Too soon, Seinfeld!
About the best I can say for it was that it did have a kind of fun nostalgic vibe. I was mildly amused at the ‘Mad Men’ sequence. But overall it was a try-hard fail fest. I’d rate it lower than the AVClub review I posted, but not quite as bad as the brutal Chicago Sun-Times review posted upthread.
Whoa, whoa. Siskel and Ebert established the four-star movie review system?
I thought their system used thumbs, and a maximum of two.
I don’t know if it was unique to them, but I recall Ebert once explaining why he used the four-star system rather than the more conventional scoring out of five, ten, or a hundred.
That is certainly what they are known for and had trademarked. I thought the four-star system was widely used.
I believe he would have preferred to have no score and simply let people read his reviews, but people want a quick-reference to his general opinion, so he had to put some kind of star rating on movies. He poitned out its flaws. Quite famously, he rated Benji: The Hunted higher than Godfather Part III, I believe.
Never saw Benji: The Hunted but movies getting higher ratings than Godfather III aren’t uncommon.