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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 8, 2016 16:03:09 GMT -5
MarkInTexas With regard to 1977, the issue may be clouded by non-US releases. I'm planning to look at an unusually high number of films from the UK, Netherlands, Israel, Italy, Greece, Japan, Germany, and France, which likely didn't have the Friday convention.
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Post by Desert Dweller on Dec 8, 2016 22:33:59 GMT -5
I noticed on Box Office Mojo that a lot of movies seem to open on Tuesday if it is July 3rd. That is very interesting.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 14, 2016 12:27:01 GMT -5
Dir. Joel Gallen
Premiered December 14, 2001
Not Another Teen Movie is the only parody film I’ve ever seen with “Movie” in the title, and while I didn’t consider it good when I first saw it, I certainly felt that it suffered from the association with the accidental “Movie” movie brand. Rest assured that neither David Zucker, nor Marlon Wayans, nor Seltzer and Friedberg were involved in the making of this film, and it’s better for it. Fittingly, however, Not Another Teen Movie is, much like an actual teenager, way too insecure about what it’s doing.
Set at John Hughes High School, Not Another Teen Movie borrows heavily from Hughes’ films from the 1980s– particularly The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink– but the actual plot is most heavily influenced by 1999’s She’s All That. Popular football star Jake Wyler (Chris Evans) has discovered that head cheerleader girlfriend Priscilla (Jaime Pressly) has left him for mysterious wannabe auteur Les (Riley Smith, ripping off Wes Bentley in American Beauty). In response, Jake bets cocky friend Austin (Eric Christian Olsen) that he can make a new prom queen out of Janey (Chyler Leigh), who is supposedly the ugliest girl in school because of her glasses and ponytail.
But there’s more. Janey’s younger brother Mitch (Cody McManis) is desperate to get himself and his friends laid– despite being freshmen. One of Mitch’s friends (Samm Levine) is obsessed with trying to be Asian. Foreign exchange student Areola (Cerina Vincent) walks around naked and is always accompanied by subtitles despite always speaking English. Jake’s obese football buddy Reggie Ray (Ron Lester) has only a few concussions left before he dies. There’s a guy (Kyle Cease) who keeps slow-clapping at inappropriate moments. Perhaps the funniest element of the film is the fourth-wall-breaking Token Black Guy (Deon Richmond) who exists solely to say things like “damn,” “shit,” and “that’s wack!” Granted, not all of it works, such as the stand-in for Pretty in Pink’s Ducky (Eric Jungmann) whose character never goes anywhere, or Randy Quaid as Janey and Mitch’s shell-shocked father. But overall, it’s certainly an entertaining flick.
It’s also fun to see a smattering of familiar faces long before they were famous. One of the meager pleasures of doing this project includes going back and reading reviews of these films from the time, and it was hilarious to read Nathan Rabin brushing off Chris Evans as the poor man’s Freddie Prinze, Jr. Josh Radnor is around, so is Jon Benjamin, and so is Sam Huntington. And there are a bunch of cameos, but not too many and they never draw too much attention. Evans is a delight, by the way– really, everyone is; it certainly looks like it was a lot of fun to make.
Altogether, Not Another Teen Movie should be good, but there are two major problems. Most of the scenes are strong, but the filmmakers occasionally tack on forced physical and gross-out jokes that recall the “Movie” movies at worst and feel out of place at best. The other problem is that many of the films being referenced, such as Drive Me Crazy, Varsity Blues, The Perfect Girl, or Cruel Intentions, were fresh in the public consciousness in 1999-2000 when the script was written, but are not remembered as classics of the genre, if they’re remembered at all. And it doesn’t totally ruin the movie, but it’s a major impediment. Perhaps Not Another Teen Movie should’ve taken a cue from stereotypical teen TV shows of the time and learned that it was okay to wait.
Sign This Was Made in 2001 Besides everything? The football players’ padding is really bulky.
How Did It Do? Not Another Teen Movie grossed $66.5 million against an impressively modest (for the time) $15 million budget. It got mostly negative reviews from critics, earning 28% on RottenTomatoes, but even most critics who didn’t like it found something nice to say. Perhaps it’s a testament to how far parody has fallen that I’m willing to cut it some slack; it’s certainly not Mel Brooks or anything; but at the very least I didn’t squirm through it like I have with most of these movies. Then again, low bar.
Next Time: The Royal Tenenbaums
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Post by ganews on Dec 14, 2016 13:04:12 GMT -5
Not Another Teen Movie
Dir. Joel Gallen
Premiered December 14, 2001I have been defending this movie ever since I saw it in the theater, seven months out of high school. I don't find the references terribly dated, except of course they are, because they do such a thorough job of picking at every teen movie you could think of up to the time. It gets at the evanescence of the teen movie; the references are specific but the tropes are so pervasive they can never be truly dated. I had never seen a Brat Pack movie at that point, knowing just enough to recognize Molly Ringwald's face. I hadn't even seen half the 90s movies referenced, except for pop cultural osmosis. (The near-stunt casting of actors resembling the roles parodied helped, too; one of the best sight gags is an old lady in the Drew Barrymore roll.) The movie does such a solid job remixing characters and tying up storyline ends. And the gross-out humor is actually appropriate, given that the source material includes pie fucking, explosive diarrhea, cum and urine drinking (and that's just two America Pie movies); gratuitous nudity/lurid camerawork; and incest. Really, you can just go to the TV Tropes page list. |
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 14, 2016 13:20:10 GMT -5
Not Another Teen Movie
Dir. Joel Gallen
Premiered December 14, 2001I have been defending this movie ever since I saw it in the theater, seven months out of high school. I don't find the references terribly dated, except of course they are, because they do such a thorough job of picking at every teen movie you could think of up to the time. It gets at the evanescence of the teen movie; the references are specific but the tropes are so pervasive they can never be truly dated. I had never seen a Brat Pack movie at that point, knowing just enough to recognize Molly Ringwald's face. I hadn't even seen half the 90s movies referenced, except for pop cultural osmosis. (The near-stunt casting of actors resembling the roles parodied helped, too; one of the best sight gags is an old lady in the Drew Barrymore roll.) The movie does such a solid job remixing characters and tying up storyline ends. And the gross-out humor is actually appropriate, given that the source material includes pie fucking, explosive diarrhea, cum and urine drinking (and that's just two America Pie movies); gratuitous nudity/lurid camerawork; and incest. Really, you can just go to the TV Tropes page list. Serves me right; I've only ever seen the TV edit of American Pie. |
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 15, 2016 12:42:39 GMT -5
The Royal Tenenbaums
Dir. Wes Anderson
Released December 14, 2001
"Royal Tenenbaum bought the house on Archer Avenue in the winter of his 35th year. Over the next decade, he and his wife had three children, and then they separated.”
The prologue of The Royal Tenenbaums is a great moment in the history of film. It opens like a storybook– one of many within the film– explaining the long and complex history of the precocious Tenenbaum family ensconced in an imagined, distinctly secondhand version of New York, perhaps the version the director imagined as a child in Texas, watching Hannah and Her Sisters and reading the works of J.D. Salinger which would one day inspire this very film. It is a New York bereft of landmarks, but it certainly feels more like the real thing than the cold and affectless City of Don’t Say a Word or Serendipity. And as Alec Baldwin’s narration builds over a cover of the Beatles’ ever-escalating ballad “Hey Jude,” it becomes clear that Wes Anderson, the then up-and-coming director of Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, has made something altogether bigger.
And make no mistake: with its sprawling plot, an expansive A-list cast introduced in the fashion of a dramatis personæ to Ravel’s famous string quartet, sweeping cinematography, and an eclectic soundtrack to rival that of Goodfellas; The Royal Tenenbaums is big. Even as Anderson has become more ambitious in his filmmaking, perhaps only Moonrise Kingdom approaches this film’s unaccountably epic scale.
The trouble begins when disgraced lawyer Royal Tenenbaum (Gene Hackman) hears of his estranged wife Etheline’s (Anjelica Houston) intention to fully divorce him so that she can marry her doting accountant Henry (Danny Glover). Distraught by the news and ever the trickster returns to his wife claiming to be dying from stomach cancer, itself an announcement that invites the reunion of their three children:
- Chas (Ben Stiller), a business whiz and father of two recently traumatized by the death of his wife in a plane crash who has become overprotective of his sons and obsessed with safety.
- Margo (Gwyneth Paltrow), the emphatically adopted off-Broadway playwright whose life is mostly shrouded in secrets unknown even to her mother or her pop-scientist husband (Bill Murray).
- Richie (Luke Wilson), a former tennis pro who has gone into self-imposed exile at sea following a nervous breakdown on the court, only to realize that he harbors romantic feelings toward his own sister Margo, a fact which he unwisely confides to his childhood best friend, popular Western novelist and psychedelic drug enthusiast Eli Cash (Owen Wilson).
Wes Anderson has never struggled to differentiate himself from his influences, but his love for J.D. Salinger and other New York-set midcentury literature is forcefully in the open. More than that for me however, Anderson’s adoration for the films of Martin Scorsese really comes through here; be it through the soundtrack (featuring two songs each by The Clash and The Rolling Stones, no less), his uncommonly intimate yet unmistakable depiction of New York City, or his mysterious ability to turn the human drama of a single family into a seemingly world-conquering epic. Meanwhile, the majority of the cast give amongst the best performances of their careers, Gwyneth Paltrow emphatically so. Most who read this review will have already seen The Royal Tenenbaums. As for the rest of you: get on it.
Sign This Was Made in 2001
Richie’s bushy beard and grandpa glasses are meant to look unattractive, whereas today they are quite stylish.
Additional Notes
Anderson and company have great fun with the meta elements of the film. With the notable exception of Royal, every adult member of the Tenenbaum family and their inner circle has either written or been the subject of a book, and/or has been featured in music, in magazines, or on television– and we are treated to all of it, with a level of detail that feels ever so realistic but never quite real. Anderson goes so far as to parody The Charlie Rose Show in revenge for an incident in 1998 in which Rose interviewed Anderson about his previous film Rushmore without having seen it, and made up facts about the film to give the impression that he had.
How Did It Do?
Earning $71.4 million at the box office, The Royal Tenenbaums was Wes Anderson’s highest-grossing film until 2014, when it was finally eclipsed by The Grand Budapest Hotel. The film also got a “certified fresh” 80% rating on RottenTomatoes, and Anderson and Owen Wilson received an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. Furthermore, The Royal Tenenbaums firmly established Wes Anderson’s aesthetic, and for the next decade was usually the first thing people thought of when his name was mentioned.
Even before the September 11 Attacks, Kumar Pallanna, who here plays Royal’s partner-in-crime Pagoda, balked at having to stand in front of the Statue of Liberty in a shot that seemed set up to highlight the monument. Despite this, The Royal Tenenbaums is inescapably proud of its setting. It’s a fantastical New York, borne of film and literature rather than immediate contact, but it feels more real and more loving than any other film set in that season during this period– it was the seventh film to be set in the city since the attacks, but one of a tiny minority to have actually been shot there, and it shows. In the wake of the attacks, most movies and TV shows would kill to get a slice of that kind of authenticity.
Next Time: Vanilla Sky
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Post by ganews on Dec 15, 2016 13:14:40 GMT -5
The Royal Tenenbaums
Dir. Wes Anderson
Released December 14, 2001 Wes Anderson's best movie and the best thing Owen Wilson and Gwyneth Paltrow have ever done. I wish Gene Hackman had retired after this one instead of "Welcome to Mooseport". One literary reference you left out: the setup for Margot, Richie, and Eli is directly lifted from The Mixed-Up Files of Basil E. Frankweiler, a kid's novel I read somewhere in elementary school. Also, the BB shown embedded in Ben Stiller's character's hand is actually in Anderson's hand. |
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 16, 2016 17:04:02 GMT -5
Vanilla Sky
Dir. Cameron Crowe
Premiered December 14, 2001
For approximately one week, Vanilla Sky was the laughingstock of Hollywood, enough so that (1) my 6th grade spelling test that week used nothing but sample sentences mocking the film, and (2) Chuck Klosterman was compelled to write an encyclical defending it. Critics who liked it, such as both Roger Ebert and Richard Roeper of At the Movies, praised it to high heaven, and one of my current roommates assures me that the film is brilliant when viewed while intoxicated on a diarrhea-inducing Amazonian psychedelic drug called ayahuasca, but such boosters are firmly in the minority. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that an attempt by Cameron Crowe, the crown-prince of warm fuzzies, to chase the reality-warping craze popularized by The Matrix would invite mockery, but it’s not undeserved.
After wresting control of his late father’s publishing company from the dreaded “Seven Dwarves,” David Aames (Tom Cruise) is at the top of his game, a wealthy bachelor helping his author friend (Jason Lee) achieve literary greatness while hopping into bed with fairweather friend Julianna (Cameron Diaz). One day, however, he is introduced to the breathtaking Sofia (Penelope Cruz), and the two fall in love at first sight. Or so we are told, as Cruise and Cruz have no chemistry despite the fact that the two actors were dating at the time.
Returning from Sofia’s apartment, David is approached by Julianna, who has been stalking him, and she gives him a ride he won’t soon forget, driving off a bridge at high speed, crashing, and killing herself while severely disfiguring David’s face. Because he is in a coma, he is unable to receive reconstructive plastic surgery (this is not a problem at all in real life) and must wear a “regenerative” mask that supposedly mimics his own face, but in reality exists only to evoke both Eyes Without a Face and Phantom of the Opera.
This is all shown in flashback, using a framing device in which an institutionalized David, accused of murder, is variously probed and examined by fatherly psychologist Dr. McCabe (Kurt Russell). This is odd in itself, because the “framing device” is not established at the beginning of the film. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It would be rather like if Citizen Kane began with Kane’s childhood sequences, only to be told twenty minutes in “oh, by the way, he’s dead now.”
If you’re wondering what any of this has to do with The Matrix, I understand, because whereas that film sets up its premise and universe in the first act in accordance with Screenwriting 101, Vanilla Sky doesn’t even hint at any kind of deception or alternate reality until more than halfway through. And when it’s fully explained– in the third act, mind you, with the help of Noah Taylor and Tilda Swinton– it doesn’t match what we’ve seen so far. David, we are told, has already lived and died. With the assistance of a mysterious corporation specializing in cryogenics, he has entered a coma lasting 150 years, and his memory has been re-written from a point shortly after the accident.
Here is where the questions mount: the first one that comes to mind is why David didn’t choose to re-write his memory from a point before the accident, but there are much deeper problems here. David’s 150-year lucid dream may have explained the oddities that occurred after his memory was re-written, but said oddities are present at the very start, when David is still up and kicking. If we accept what the film has told us, David’s borderline-sleepwalking, his inability to distinguish dreams from reality, and his house party where the late John Coltrane performs as a hologram are all meant to take place in the real world, in late 2001.
Surprisingly (though perhaps only to me), Vanilla Sky is actually a remake of a Spanish film called Abre los Ojos, so I’m not sure how much of the story’s failure can be attributed to Crowe– certainly he chose to adapt the screenplay– but even if we are being so charitable as to fault the original, Vanilla Sky constantly tiptoes to the brink of incompetent filmmaking. Sure, there are never any microphones in the shot, but scenes are frequently blocked with the actors’ backs to the camera, obscuring the action. Sure, there are no missing frames, but the dialogue constantly feels like the audience is entering halfway through the conversation– which, in a vain attempt to recapture the magic of Crowe’s Jerry Maguire, mostly comprises anchorless platitudes. And sure, the characters are not ciphers, but they are breathtakingly uncharismatic and impossible to care about. Easily the most only likable character is Dr. McCabe, who of course is imaginary.
Defenders of Vanilla Sky have every right to feel as they do. But for me, the film is a mindless, awkward, unimaginative, and inert piece of movie product that fails to entertain the viewer in any way, and cannot provoke anything beyond the crushing regret of wasted time.
Sign This Was Made in 2001
Product placement for JVC, which was a trifle anachronistic even then.
Additional Notes
- Both The Royal Tenenbaums and Vanilla Sky entered wide release on December 14, 2001. Both feature parodies of Charlie Rose.
- Had Vanilla Sky not come out before Southland Tales, “I’ll tell you in the next life when we are both cats” would be the new “pimps don’t commit suicide.” Both phrases are repeated over and over throughout their respective films as if they are deep and meaningful.
- Take note, Cameron Crowe lovers (and haters): this is the one with Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” the Cameron Crowiest of Cameron Crowe soundtrack songs.
How Did It Do?
With a worldwide gross of $203.4 million, Vanilla Sky was the third-highest grossing film of December 2001, and the 19th of the year. The film has its share of defenders, but not enough, as RottenTomatoes puts the critical consensus at 42% fresh.
Cameron Crowe, whose first four films Say Anything, Singles, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous are still remembered fondly, never recaptured the magic of his heyday, trying way too hard with the famously faulty Elizabethtown, We Bought a Zoo, and Aloha.
Like many films released in the fall of 2001, Vanilla Sky largely signified the end of a trend. The reality-questioning craze at the turn of the millennium, which had just begun to find some semblance of substance with films like Richard Linklater’s Waking Life, was crushed like a bug under the weight of the nation’s aggressively raw post-9/11 aesthetic, and aside from the reviled Matrix sequels, ceased to be made. That Vanilla Sky still managed to be a hit suggests that, in a more peaceful world, it would have seriously affected the direction of the genre. Yech.
Next Time: My mom and I butt heads in a special review of The Shipping News
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Post by Deleted on Dec 16, 2016 21:25:44 GMT -5
I don't get people who say Rushmore is a better film than Royal Tenenbaums. It is more intimate, but RT is everything great about Anderson and he is on the top of his game. Which isn't to say everything he's done afterwards isn't great, just that RT is his magnum opus and I'm surprised at how many people don't actually agree.
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Post by MarkInTexas on Dec 18, 2016 9:48:58 GMT -5
Although Crowe says that there is no official explanation, there are a lot of clues that the entire movie is a lucid dream, even the stuff before the accident. Of course, it's kind of silly to debate what's fictional in a movie that's entirely fictional.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 18, 2016 14:36:52 GMT -5
The Shipping News
Dir. Lasse Hallström
Premiered December 18, 2001
Based on the novel by Annie Proulx, The Shipping News is a fairly sweeping story. Working as an inksetter in Poughkeepsie, New York, meek underachiever Quoyle (Kevin Spacey) is hoodwinked by philandering lowlife Petal (Cate Blanchett), who marries him and gives him a daughter (Alyssa Gainer) before running off and trying to sell their child into slavery. In the wake of this, and his parents’ murder-suicide, Quoyle is visited by his aunt Agnis (Judi Dench), who invites him to return with her to the family’s long-abandoned ancestral home in Newfoundland.
Arriving there, the film is unsparing in its depiction of Newfoundland as a hard and wild place. Agnis resolves to have the family home, once dragged across the sea ice from a nearby island, restored after decades of abandonment. Quoyle meanwhile is upgraded from inksetter to journalist at the local newspaper, where he gains prominence as reporter of the titular shipping news, butting heads with his crusty office rival (Pete Postlethwaite) to the delight of his fatalistic boss (Scott Glenn), while feebly attempting to woo a local single mother (Julianne Moore). Along the way, however, Quoyle discovers that his family has a history going back centuries that is disturbing to say the least.
When I sat down to watch The Shipping News for this review, it wasn’t the first time. My mother loves this film. I, meanwhile, have some serious problems with it. So I thought it would be interesting if we both took on the review, Siskel & Ebert-style.
Monty: First, let me say that I don’t hate this movie. It’s significantly better than most of what I’ve had to watch for this project, which is unfortunately saying less than I’d wish. I’m just disappointed, because the film does some things really well and others very poorly.
The biggest problem, I think, is that it can’t balance being an adaptation with being a film. I didn’t read the book, but I get the distinct sense that it was much longer than the movie strictly has room for. For example, I do know that Quoyle in the book has two daughters, and the mashing of them into one character without considering the age difference between them is conspicuous. Moreso, it’s how much the movie leaves in that bothers me. I get why screenwriter Robert Nelson Jacobs wanted to keep so much detail from the book, but the book had the luxury of unlimited writing space to flesh these details out. The film doesn’t.
Most of the characters are relatively well-developed; oddly enough though, the biggest cipher is Quoyle himself. I described him above as a “meek underachiever,” and we don’t get much of a sense of him beyond that, so his character arc comes off as rather hollow.
Mom: I loved the book. Loved it. But my friends at the time who also loved it didn’t like the movie. I don’t usually care for adaptations, so I don’t know why I liked it– though in the last decade or two, I think most books have been written to eventually be movies.
It’s breathtakingly beautiful visually. It’s story-driven. The acting is good. It has an air of mystery, history, magic, it’s funny, it’s tragic. The characters are round and fully realized, even somewhat Dickensian and Joycean, except Quoyle himself– though that’s original to the book, and it bothered me when I read it. It doesn’t bother me as much anymore. Quoyle’s attributes seem to fit his ancestral setting and his fatherly boss and aunt help him realize some strengths. He has friends for the first time in his life.
The daughter, Bunny, is confusingly tall; though that does happen in life, it was confusing in the movie. I need to read the book again, it’s been ages. I tend to be partial to movies when the setting is a character, which Newfoundland is here, with the prosaic mystery of the ocean.
Monty: I understand your love for the imagery here. Film is a visual medium, after all, and Lasse Hallström has a good eye for that. The whole thing reminded me of a very plot-heavy John Sayles movie. But you need– I need– some room to breathe. The film might have benefitted from beng just a bit longer, especially at the start, or could’ve opened later into the story, with Quoyle’s marriage. The first act is very rushed.
At first I was wary of Hallström, who before this directed Chocolat and The Cider House Rules, and tried getting some whimsy out of this film. Honestly, that wasn’t as much of an issue as I expected/remembered. My biggest problem with this movie started with the opening credits, when Irwin Winkler’s name showed up. If that name sounds familiar, it’s because Winkler directed the previous month’s Life As A House, and though he only produced The Shipping News, his fingerprints are all over it in the way the movie tries to mine a very dark, troubling story for warm fuzzies. I guarantee you that it was his decision to undercut Hallström’s stark visual conclusion with a pat voiceover.
Mom: I am a more receptive than you because film is not my art form. I can critique visual art because I am better at analyzing it. Oddly, I remembered the beginning of this film as longer; when we watched it I was surprised at how short it was. I don’t think audiences would have accepted a longer movie. It’s a nuts and bolts thing.
Monty: Well, studios certainly thought audiences didn’t have the patience for a longer film, but we now know they were wrong. Prestige films today rarely have run times under two hours. The same is true of big-budget effects films and even some comedies. But that wasn’t the case yet. The Shipping News came out December 18, 2001. The movie that ended up changing that paradigm came out the next day.
Signs This Was Made in 2001
Very little. Proulx’s book was published in 1993, and I kinda wish the setting had stayed in 1993 if only because of a historical in-joke: Agnis says the house has been abandoned for 44 years, meaning that she left in 1949, the same year Newfoundland was annexed by Canada. Previously, Newfoundland had been a nominally independent British Dominion, and given the number of Newfoundland flags in the film (and total absence of Canadian ones), the viewer gets the distinct impression that the province still yearns romantically for self-determination.
How Did It Do?
The Shipping News grossed $24.7 million against a $38 million budget; the first film of December to lose money. Critics were lukewarm, resulting in a 55% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes. Those who liked the film were partial to the newspaper scenes, which of course they were; while those who disliked it found it bland and found the main character to be ill-defined.
Lasse Hallström has since continued to make a large number of middlingly-received middlebrow films; the sole exception being 2007’s The Hoax, which was critically lauded and of course buried by the studio with a winter release. Irwin Winkler, my apparent nemesis for this project, did similarly, directing De-Lovely (2004) and Home of the Brave (2006) before loosening the reins and returning to his 1970s form, producing such acclaimed films as Creed (2015) and this year’s Silence (2016), and executive producing The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). I can’t stay mad at you, Irwin! And author Annie Proulx would fare far better when her novella Brokeback Mountain was adapted by Ang Lee.
Although The Shipping News was never going to be a blockbuster, it definitely suffered from only having a single day to make any money.
Next Time: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 19, 2016 13:24:26 GMT -5
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
Dir. Peter Jackson
Premiered December 19, 2001
Trying to remember the lead-up is like trying to remember not being able to read. Once it arrived, it was as if it had always been there. But I will try.
The only times I could have seen the trailer would have been just a month earlier, during my screening of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, or all the way back in July, when I went to see Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. I did manage to see Rat Race and Monsters, Inc. in between, but I doubt the trailer I saw was attached to either of those. In any case, there was surprisingly little build-up. Aside from a smattering of toy commercials on TV and tie-in tchochkes at my school library, that trailer was all I knew of the film before attending the opening-day screening for my twelfth birthday.
That it was my birthday may have been the only reason I ended up seeing it. I had yet to read the books, and I could rarely bring myself to go to more than five films in a year, but going to the movies for my birthday had already become something of a tradition, and if that had been reason enough for me to sit through Bicentennial Man and Dungeons & Dragons, there was no question that I would see this.
How could I not? One of my best friends couldn’t wait for it, and though I knew nothing of it, the trailer promised high adventure on a level none of us could ever have experienced on the big screen. Until then, all the great milestones in film had come before our time. On occasion, Jaws or Star Wars or Jurassic Park could return to theaters, but they could never be new to us. In the closing weeks of 2001, though, everyone could kinda feel it coming. The kid world was like Boston, 2004: this is gonna be our year.
December 19. My friends, my parents, and I arrive at the Pacific Theaters Hastings Ranch, buy tickets, and take our seats in the main hall. The lights dim. The trailers come and go: The Majestic, Panic Room, a teaser for Attack of the Clones that’s just heavy breathing, the requisite inexplicable ad for The Los Angeles Times. Then the opening logo arrives, otherworldly music begins to echo into the theater, and the prologue begins. I have come to this story as a newcomer, but already the words find meaning: “The world is changed. I feel it in the water. I feel it in the earth. I smell it in the air. Much that once was is lost, for none now live who remember it.” At this, the title arrives: The Lord of the Rings. And movies will never be the same.
The film’s prologue shouldn’t work, but does, and I can’t figure out quite how. The chosen narrator is the Elf Queen Galadriel (Cate Blanchett), which is not an obvious choice, but one that justifies her importance– or lack thereof– later on. She describes how a series of rings were made for the leaders of the races of elves, humans, and dwarves, but how the dark lord Sauron (Sala Baker) created his own ring to control the others. The human prince Isildur cut the ring from Sauron’s hand, but kept it for himself, drawn in by the ring’s power to tempt. Eventually the ring was lost, recovered by a lowly creature of mysterious origins named Gollum (Andy Serkis), and taken then by the Hobbit Bilbo Baggins (Ian Holm). This is where the story really begins.
Bilbo, now looking impressively good for the ripe old age of 111, is preparing to leave the Shire, the diminutive Hobbits’ arcadian homeland, to live with the dwindling elves in Rivendell, and is holding a going away party. Bilbo naturally leaves his ring, which can turn mortals invisible while worn, to his young nephew Frodo (Elijah Wood). After some years, the ring piques the curiosity of the grandfatherly but imposing wizard Gandalf (Ian McKellen, in the role that made him a household name), who confirms that this is Sauron’s ring, thought lost for three thousand years, and sends the humble Frodo to take the ring to Rivendell on the grounds that he is not powerful enough to be entranced by the ring’s dark magic.
Gandalf seeks assistance from and is betrayed by the greedy high wizard Saruman (Christopher Lee), who begins breeding a new race of abominable orcs. Meanwhile, Frodo is joined on his journey by best friend Sam (Sean Astin), cousins Merry (Dominic Monaghan) and Pippin (Billy Boyd), and a mysterious man called Strider (Viggo Mortensen) who is actually Aragorn, heir to the throne of Sauron’s rival kingdom Gondor, as they flee the pursuit of Sauron’s ghoulish servants, the Nazgûl.
Arriving at Rivendell, Frodo discovers his travels are far from over, as he and his new companions are joined by Gandalf and representatives from the realms of men, elves, and dwarves (Sean Bean, Orlando Bloom, and John Rhys-Davies, respectively) in a quest to destroy the ring at its source, Mount Doom.
There’s a lot of movie right there, but before getting into the specifics of the film, I first want to talk about what made the books work. I’ve said before that Tolkien’s prose is often too dense, but he made The Lord of the Rings particularly satisfying in two ways that are frequently lost in other fantasy. First, the story is very mortality-centric. People get hung up on elves and wizards, with their magic and eternal youth, but Tolkien is most interested in telling a human story– this becomes much more prevalent in subsequent volumes of both the books and the films, which get progressively less whimsical, but never less compelling. The author is very emphatic about the coming of “the world of men” in a way that I feel is emblematic of the Catholic faith that put him in contrast with his contemporaries: the magic is leaving the world, and that’s good. Tolkien’s second bit of genius builds on the first, and I believe reflects on his background as a veteran of the First World War. He doesn’t fall prey to easy storytelling contrivances like the Chosen One; Frodo will take the ring because he’s unimportant. And of course he places all of this in a huge and very well-thought-out world that manages to incorporate a lot of detail that other authors don’t typically bother with. To say the least.
For the most part, Jackson and the other screenwriters knew what to cut, and wisely avoided any serious departures from the book. Gone is Tom Bombadil, to the despair of Tolkien purists and the delight of everyone else. Aragorn, Gimli, and Boromir are more well-rounded than in the original text. Some events are compressed, but overall it’s a remarkably faithful adaptation. The biggest innovation is that it is elf maiden and Aragorn’s fiancée Arwen (Liv Tyler) who rescues Frodo at the end of the film’s first half. While I admit it makes more sense to have a character who’s in the rest of the story perform this act rather than a forgettable one-off, everything involving Arwen, in all of the films, is weirdly out of place. Though I suppose that’s Tolkien’s own fault for not weaving her more organically into the story. And on a non-adaptational level, Jackson’s career-long fixation with choppy slow-mo sometimes takes me out of the experience (by contrast, his horror-comedy cinematography is bizarrely effective). But that’s about it. The performances are stellar; the pace makes you stop caring that it’s four hours long; and the art direction, costumes, makeup, sets, props, and both practical and digital effects go above and beyond anything before or since. And that’s where the film really starts to matter.
To understand why The Lord of the Rings was so influential, we need to go back to 1993 and the film that got us into this situation in the first place: Jurassic Park. To the viewer in 2016, Jurassic Park is a still a great film; a dynamic mix of action, suspense, and levity with likable, identifiable characters centering around identifiable themes that, in addition to being good in its own right, pretty well captures the look and feel of the time in which it was made. But Jurassic Park at the time was mostly praised for its groundbreaking use of CGI. In an era when a film like that could still be an Oscar contender, it was only nominated (and won) in technical categories. So the various studios reacted by trying to use CGI, but doing so as a cost-cutting measure– resulting in inferior effects– and doing so at the cost of all else. What made The Lord of the Rings such a big deal in 2001– hell, what still makes it a big deal– is that it not only used a broad range of effects, from age-old practical props and camera tricks to state-of-the-art CGI, with utmost skill; but that it never took the focus off the story and characters. Stephen Spielberg understands that. J.J. Abrams understands that. George Miller understands that.
Compare with the previous month’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. That movie was fairly uninspired and would almost certainly fall flat if seen by someone who hadn’t read the book, but its target audience all had, so it only needed to hit the major plot points and not screw up too badly in order to succeed. By contrast, The Lord of the Rings, while generally familiar to the wider culture, wasn’t something everyone had read, and more importantly wasn’t new. It thus needed to work a lot harder to please an audience comprising both Tolkien fans and newcomers.
It mostly succeeded. The cinematography, visual effects, and design are beyond reproach; the film is always compelling an amazingly tense. My only issue visually is with the editing, as Jackson’s apparent enthusiasm for slow-motion is a bit silly. The adaptation process is a bit more mixed, but exemplary, as I feel most of the changes were for the better. The film doesn’t convey that the time between Bilbo’s party and Frodo’s departure is actually 17 years, nor does it include the character of Tom Bombadil, but in those respects I take issue with Tolkien himself rather than the film. Likewise, Arwen’s new role bringing Frodo to Rivendell seems odd and out-of-character, but it makes more sense from a storytelling perspective than a random book character who never factors into the rest of the story. In most other film franchises, this might only serve to make the world seem small and overly convenient (superhero films have been especially fond of this since Tim Burton’s Batman), but here, with dozens of characters who do come back, it doesn’t stand out.
Indeed, most of Jackson’s changes to this first volume are for the better. Aragorn’s insecurity over his birthright and Boromir’s complementary anxieties about his father’s rule are a welcome addition to characters that were frustratingly lacking clear motivation in the books. Merry and Pippin would have to wait for the final film to get their due, and Legolas and Gimli would arguably get flatter in the later films, but without strong characters, the movie wouldn’t have worked.
It is difficult, however, to assess The Fellowship of the Ring as a film unto itself. Even Tolkien himself envisioned his story as a single volume (broken up only for marketing purposes), so it’s almost unfair not to do the same for the movies. Nor is it easy to assess the film as people first saw it in 2001– Jackson’s Extended Cut was widely available afterward, and must be considered the definitive version, so it is this that I have been revisiting. The Fellowship of the Ring is frustratingly open-ended. I remember sitting in the theater, not having read the books, and being genuinely surprised that Frodo never even got to Mordor. However, Fellowship still must be considered the best film of 2001.
In the bigger picture, The Lord of the Rings series is one of the great epics of cinema. Kevin Murphy in 2001 decried that the age of CGI had turned film into a product rather than an experience. In the unthreatened stasis of the late 1990s, before movies could be pirated, Hollywood was never challenged to ignite viewers’ passions. But when times changed, the challenge was issued, and The Lord of the Rings, however serendipitously, answered it.
How Did It Do?
On a budget of less than $100 million, The Lord of the Rings: the Fellowship of the Ring achieved a worldwide gross of $871.5 million. It was nominated for thirteen Oscars and won four, and currently holds a 91% rating on RottenTomatoes. The remaining two films in the trilogy, The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) would surpass it in each respect.
Probably every year, some filmmaker tries to make the next Star Wars. Peter Jackson succeeded. The Lord of the Rings trilogy fundamentally transformed filmmaking as an art and as a business. The films dramatically raised the bar for visual effects while bringing the fundamentals of story, character, setting, and theme back into the foreground. It also normalized the three-hour movie, invented the Instant Franchise, and solidified Hollywood’s dependency on recognizable properties over the next decade. “Sometimes,” to quote critic Chad Rocco, “a movie does something so well that it ruins everything.”
Not only was the Lord of the Rings series the next Star Wars, it was, to date, the last. Fifteen years on, we are largely still living in the world that The Lord of the Rings made. At the time of this writing, eight of 2016’s ten highest-grossing films are sequels, remakes, or adaptations. Three of them are well over two hours in length. Even Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time, which came out in 2009 and was an “original” story, did nothing whatsoever to change the course Hollywood has taken since Jackson filmed what Tolkien called “unfilmable.”
Is that because of when it came out? Probably. The September 11 Attacks demolished Americans’ already-flagging interest in empty spectacles of wanton, emotionless, poorly rendered destruction. Into that vacuum, The Lord of the Rings gave us something new; a lot of new things, actually: a straightforward story of good vs. evil, a cleverly subtle morality tale about the power of powerlessness, a great big new world to play in, good scares, good laughs, good action, and more than anything a new, previously unexplored focus on friendship. It can’t be said for sure that 9/11 made the United States as a nation more united, but I felt it, and for a while so did the whole world. Russia was on our side. Iran was on our side. What were we, in those few months, but a fellowship of our own?
The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring entered wide release at 12:00 AM Eastern Time on December 19, 2001. The first screening concluded at 2:58. At that moment, the Dark Age of Hollywood was over.
But the year was not.
Next Time: A Beautiful Mind
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Post by Ben Grimm on Dec 19, 2016 13:43:23 GMT -5
My oldest friend and I had gone, about a year earlier, to see 13 Days because it had the Fellowship of the Ring teaser attached to it, and this was a time pre-decent-internet-video. I think the movie came out of nowhere to some people, but there were others of us who had been waiting for it for ages.
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Post by ganews on Dec 19, 2016 14:21:23 GMT -5
These movies are perhaps the highest interest gap between myself and my wife, who hates Merry and Pippin and still isn't good a movie that run over three hours. I say "these", but I've never succeeded in getting her beyond just the theatrical release of the first one.
I had read The Hobbit, the LOTR trilogy, and the Silmarillion while I was in middle school (the last being my favorite at the time, as I was always a big fan of mythology). It was my first "adult" multi-novel series, even if they weren't really written for adults; at any rate it was damn long. I liked them but have never re-read them. I didn't know anyone who played Dungeons and Dragons, much less who had read the books, except for my mother who apparently had read them by candlelight during a winter power outage the year before I was born.
Somehow I had seen the Ralph Bakshi animated version. I have no idea how, but I can still remember the deep voiced chorus singing over Frodo, "the corruption of the Riiiiiiing". I found out somewhere around the Jackson movie releases that the animated movies were bad, but I have a suspicion that I were to re-watch them now I'd enjoy the hell out of them.
I know exactly where and when I saw this movie, at the theater next-over from my home town, with my friend on our first Christmas break from college. It was just, so great. It was also the first time I felt visceral disgust at another movie patron who hadn't planned ahead by going to the bathroom first or was too weak to hold it. When I returned to college, I went to a one-off meeting of Tolkien lovers to talk about the movie and pick over its differences from the book. I didn't even know such people existed before. It was surely the first group of more than three people I had ever been around who approximated the kind of geekiness I find here, at AVC, and seemingly all over now.
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Post by Powerthirteen on Dec 19, 2016 15:01:34 GMT -5
I gotta disagree. As a dorky 15-year-old I thought the Extended Cut was the greatest thing in history, but I've never gotten the impression that the longer versions were perceived as the "normal" copy for personal ownership instead of as the Tolkien nerd special. And now, as a reasonably intelligent adult, rewatching the LotR movies, all three of them are better as theatrical versions, especially Fellowship, which is of course also the best of the three. Its success as a tight adaptation of a sprawling book set a bar that the later installments would fall short of precisely because Fellowship's own success would lead Peter Jackson's baser instincts to sabotage them with bloat (and the Hobbit movies, which,  ). |
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Post by Powerthirteen on Dec 19, 2016 15:03:17 GMT -5
I know exactly where and when I saw this movie, at the theater next-over from my home town, with my friend on our first Christmas break from college. It was just, so great. It was also the first time I felt visceral disgust at another movie patron who hadn't planned ahead by going to the bathroom first or was too weak to hold it. When I returned to college, I went to a one-off meeting of Tolkien lovers to talk about the movie and pick over its differences from the book. I didn't even know such people existed before. It was surely the first group of more than three people I had ever been around who approximated the kind of geekiness I find here, at AVC, and seemingly all over now. I was 14 and went to a midnight showing December 18, 2001 with my two nerd buddies, one of whom stood in line for an hour with a package of Oreos, a full bag of potato chips, and a 2L bottle of Pepsi all "hidden" under his jacket. It was the greatest movie event of my young life. |
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Post by Desert Dweller on Dec 20, 2016 0:01:53 GMT -5
I came down with strep throat on the 18th. Had been planning to go on Opening Day. However, I was contagious for two days. On the 21st I finally got to go. I took all the neighbor kids, ranging from 9 to 14. I took 5 kids with me. Let their parents have a kid-free weekend afternoon.
I loved it! Loved it. I think I ended up seeing it 4 or 5 times in the theatres. I own both the theatrical and the extended cuts. I got my own dvd player for Christmas that year. The Extended version of Fellowship was the very first dvd purchase I made. Still completely love it.
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Post by Deleted on Dec 20, 2016 10:36:27 GMT -5
I saw this in theaters when it came out. I went with a few friends. I liked it at the time, but didnt come to love it till later on. When the movies were being released fellowship was my least favorite of the three. I didnt like all the buildup, it felt more like a prologue than anything. Now though? I absolutely love it and think the extended edition is the best of the trilogy. Just seeing this group of characters come together and how the world builds, and the ending is great. And the balrog is amazing, boromir is handled perfectly. Just so much to love.
As a whole the trilogy is amazing and the most impressive achievement of the decade it was released. Some parts have not aged well, but to make LOTR come to life was an impossible project made possible.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 21, 2016 14:27:24 GMT -5
A Beautiful Mind
Dir. Ron Howard
Premiered December 21, 2001
A Beautiful Mind is a...difficult movie to parse. It’s not a bad movie, but having seen the film twice now, I keep wishing it was better.
The film is a biopic of mathematician John Forbes Nash, Jr., the Nobel-winning pioneer of game theory, which is used in areas as diverse as sports, business, and international diplomacy. Arriving at Princeton as a Carnegie scholar for mathematics, Nash (Russell Crowe) is reclusive and obsesses over his search for “governing dynamics” while his roommate Charles (Paul Bettany) attempts to revive his spirits. Eventually, Nash wins over his colleagues with his realization of the Nash Equilibrium.
Years later, Nash and his colleagues Sol and Bender (Adam Goldberg and Anthony Rapp) work at the Wheeler Lab at MIT. Nash struggles with teaching mathematics but is entranced with spirited student Alicia (Jennifer Connelly), who pursues Nash aggressively and eventually becomes his wife. On occasion, Nash is called upon to help decode Soviet messages for the Pentagon, but despairs that he isn’t taken more seriously. That changes when the mysterious government agent William Parcher (Ed Harris) approaches Nash to find coded messages in newspapers and magazines.
Except that none of it is real– Nash has been descending into paranoid schizophrenia, and both Parcher and his old friend Charles are illusions. In the 1950s, psychiatric care is young and comparitively primitive, and Nash’s treatment makes it difficult for him to do his life’s work...
The film diverges from Nash’s life in some important and surprising ways– he never did contract work for the Pentagon, nor did he ever go back on medication in the 1990s, and his schizophrenia manifested after college– and leaves out a surprising amount. Minnie for one found the Nash equilibrium in the film to be disappointingly oversimplified, though she still loves the film. And these are the things that keep me at an arm’s length. However, there’s much to be said for the human story at the center. Russell Crowe does some of his best work here, especially as the movie goes on, and Ron Howard’s direction is excellent as ever, despite my wishes that he took things a little deeper.
How Did It Do?
A Beautiful Mind grossed $313 million dollars against a $58 million budget and critics gave it a 75% fresh rating on RT. I was very interested in what Dr. Nash himself had to say about it, but couldn’t find any statement from the late mathematician. Most notably, the film won the Oscar for best picture. It’s an unobjectionable choice if not my first, and at least moved the Oscars back in a more substantive direction. I have no doubt that the choice was influenced by the attacks.
Next Time: How High
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 22, 2016 22:20:16 GMT -5
How High
Dir. Jesse Dylan
Premiered December 21, 2001
How High is actually the last film I saw for this series, and in discussing it and previous stoner film The Wash with others, I have typically gotten two responses:
1. “Oh, boy! How High is the actually good one!”
2. “You can’t watch a stoner movie without getting high!”
Regarding the latter comment: that is a terrible plug for a movie. Rapper Daren Jackson once said “usually, when somebody tells you you’d have to be high to enjoy this, it’s not a compliment.” I’ve smoked occasionally, and it’s become an increasingly unpleasant experience, so I’m going to take a rain check. Besides, it’s unreasonable to expect people in the theater to be high in 2001, at the peak of the War on Drugs. Regarding the former comment: I’m sorry. I really wanted to like this. I kept hearing your praises, and knowing that critics also hated the classic Up in Smoke, I was more than prepared to give this movie the benefit of the doubt. But I watched it, and it sucked.
In How High, drug dealer Silas (Method Man) receives the ashes of his former customer Ivory (Chuck Davis) and decides to use them as fertilizer for his latest crop of weed. Hoping to become the first member of his family to go to college, Silas meets fellow aspirant Jamal (Redman). Together they smoke the weed, which summons Ivory’s ghost, who gives them all the answers to their “THC” entrance exams, and gets them a full ride to Harvard. There, Silas charms cutie Lauren (Lark Voorhies) away from stuck-up preppy Bart (Chris Elwood), to the supreme irritation of Lauren’s Oreo father, Dean Cain (Obba Babatundé). They have this white roommate who’s unreasonably torturing himself to join a frat, and there’s this girl who’s the daughter of the Vice President (Jeffrey Jones), and Silas seems to have some genuine potential relating to his work with marijuana, but Jamal is just an asshole. And there’s these two pimps and two prostitutes...
It doesn’t matter. It’s a stoner movie. I saw it last night while drunk and in the midst of a nervous breakdown. I just kinda all around hated it, but not as much as some other movies I’ve reviewed. There were genuine moments of pointed humor; I laughed a couple of times. In that way, it reminded me of Not Another Teen Movie, but more muddled. But that’s kind of a tipping point for me. Sorry if this wasn’t what you expected.
Signs This Was Made in 2001
The superlative “tight” is thrown around liberally. Jamal and Silas are courted for recruitment by Black Israelite representatives of Reparations University. The aforementioned pun on Dean Cain. The use of the term “peckerwood,” which keeps cropping up in stuff from the 90s. Cypress Hill cameos. The phrase “wazaaaap” is uttered.
Additional Notes
- As if I didn’t already know 2001 was a shitty year for movies, Lord of the Rings nonwithstanding, this project made me feel really bad for black people at the time. Obviously, movies should be for everyone, but if there were only three movies in a season starring people who looked like me and they were all shitty comedies that critics openly compared to minstrel shows, I would be pissed off. This is one area where we’ve definitely made progress, and you can see it all over 2016.
- Between this, Black Knight, and any number of pop cultural artifacts going back at least a decade before, 9/11 seems to have killed screenwriters’ taste for characters named Jamal. If you can figure that out, be my guest.
How Did It Do?
How High grossed $31 million against a $20 million budget. I kinda remember this being a bigger deal, but probably that was in retrospect. Watching movies while stoned is definitely more conducive to home viewing. Critics hated it. Not much else to say there. Stars Method Man and Redman tried their hand at a Fox sitcom two years later, Method & Red, but it was quickly canceled. They say How High 2 is coming next year, but even if I was looking forward to it, I wouldn’t hold my breath.
Next Time: Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
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Post by ganews on Dec 22, 2016 22:49:02 GMT -5
This was another one I saw in the theater with friends; that first winter break from college must have been a long one. I've never smoked pot or wanted to, but I continue to defend this movie. It's got a coherent plot, a lot of excellent cameos, good jokes, decent race send-up, and a handful of unfortunate bits (selling the sex video of the college girls, the stereotype east Asian roommate). Compare that to Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke", which is a handful of standup sketches thrown together, and the latter pretty much sucks (and it's Cheech and Chong's best movie!).
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Dec 22, 2016 22:50:57 GMT -5
The Glass House
Dir. Daniel Sackheim
Premiered September 14, 2001
As previously mentioned, the September 11 Attacks initiated an unprecedented breaking news cycle on every US television network, lasting one hundred hours from the first plane crash into the World Trade Center on Tuesday until early Saturday, and nearly bankrupting the US advertising industry, this being a time when TV ads constituted the majority of their revenue.
Immediately before this, the most heavily advertised film on TV had been The Glass House.
Through all that had happened that week, The Glass House stayed on my mind for exactly one reason: my extremely short-lived crush on actress Leelee Sobieski, for whom The Glass House had been advertised as a star vehicle. Sobieski only ever headlined two movies, both of which came out less than a month after the attacks, so we may count her career as yet another pop-cultural casualty of the changing times.
Possibly it happened when she was promoting this movie, but didn't her career also take a hit because she read really bad slam poetry about 9/11 on Leno, and everyone made fun of her? |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 22, 2016 22:55:28 GMT -5
Will this year actually end?
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Dec 22, 2016 23:15:18 GMT -5
Signs This Was Made in 2001
- This film seems to take place in an alternate history with no Reagan presidency, because public mental hospitals still exist
Actually there are 24 NY State mental health inpatient facilities in operation today. Now granted NYS has way more facilities than any other state (for example California only has about 8-10 (and some of those are just forensic facilities for the criminally insane). |
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 23, 2016 0:02:57 GMT -5
Will this year actually end? |
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 23, 2016 12:07:25 GMT -5
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius
Dir. John A. Davis
Premiered December 21, 2001
Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is the only film in this project that I hadn’t seen since 2001; I saw it in the theater and didn’t particularly care for it. Maybe I was a little too old for it. Maybe it didn’t seem ambitious enough for the big screen. And maybe any movie I saw two days after The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring was destined to be a letdown. But the critics overwhelmingly liked it, so I was curious to see whether they were right, and why I felt so cold toward it.
The titular Jimmy (Debi Derryberry) is a diminutive, immaculately coiffed whiz kid inventor living in a Pleasantville-ified present-day suburb, attempting to fly into space and make contact with alien life with the help of robot dog Goddard and best friends Carl (Rob Paulsen) and Sheen (Jeffrey Garcia)– when he’s not the butt of insults by latent love interest Cindy (Carolyn Lawrence) and bad boy Nick (Candi Milo). His inventions don’t always work, at least not the way they’re supposed to, but his efforts at finding intelligent life turn out to work a little too well, as he draws the attention of a race of semi-liquid invaders (ruled over by Patrick Stewart), who abduct all the adults in town to sacrifice to their massive three-eyed chicken god Poultra. Now it’s up to Jimmy to save the day with the help of his friends and an assortment of spacecraft recycled from carnival rides.
For a CGI-cartoon of the time, Jimmy Neutron’s character designs are refreshingly cartoony (compare with that summer’s Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, which attempted to render live-action film obsolete with its “realism”). The animation isn’t quite up to the task as the characters bounce around like action figures, but the movie does its best to adapt to that limitation. Most importantly, Jimmy Neutron is funny, inventive, and mercifully doesn’t talk down to its audience. It’s plain fun, and reminded me a lot of Futurama– and not just because Billy West fills several minor roles.
It’s a fine film for an elementary school kid, and I suspect that’s why I didn’t take to it. I was twelve by the time this came out, and looking for something a little bigger. At that age, when I saw a bad movie, I usually wrongly blamed myself for “not getting it.” Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius was the opposite.
Signs This Was Made in 2001
Nick has a Tiger Beat parted bowl-cut, the preferred hairstyle of teen heartthrobs circa 1997. Spoiled brat Libby (Crystal Scales) has a flip-phone. The soundtrack features “Pop,” one of *NSYNC’s last singles.
Additional Notes
Was it a legal requirement that at least one kids’ film a year include a cover of “Kids in America?”
How Did It Do?
As alluded to before, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius earned a respectable 75% fresh rating on RottenTomatoes. Surprisingly, it was also the last film of the year to gross nine figures, earning $103 million against a $30 million budget; impressively frugal for an animated film.
Next Time: Joe Somebody
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Dec 23, 2016 18:10:08 GMT -5
The Wash
Dir. DJ Pooh
Premiered November 16, 2001
At one point, they start a bikini carwash service in the belief that they can deduct the girls’ tips from their wages (this is amazingly the case in some parts of the United States, but is not and never has been in California, where the film takes place).
I, for one, am shocked that a a Snoop Dogg stoner comedy got California's labor statutes so wrong! |
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Post by Albert Fish Taco on Dec 23, 2016 19:28:41 GMT -5
This was another one I saw in the theater with friends; that first winter break from college must have been a long one. I've never smoked pot or wanted to, but I continue to defend this movie. It's got a coherent plot, a lot of excellent cameos, good jokes, decent race send-up, and a handful of unfortunate bits (selling the sex video of the college girls, the stereotype east Asian roommate). Compare that to Cheech and Chong's "Up in Smoke", which is a handful of standup sketches thrown together, and the latter pretty much sucks (and it's Cheech and Chong's best movie!). Cheech & Chong's best film is The Corsican Brothers, which granted I probably haven't seen since I was in elementary school, but I watched it countless times on HBO as a youngin' |
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Post by Deleted on Dec 23, 2016 22:17:03 GMT -5
Joe Somebody? Why? Please just let 2001 die in peace.
I do like Jimmy Neutron though, more so the TV series than the movie. It is a premise that is perfect for a tv series. I was surprised at how long inbetween the movie and tv show was though. I think like three years.
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Post by Return of the Thin Olive Duke on Dec 23, 2016 22:21:02 GMT -5
Joe Somebody? Why? Please just let 2001 die in peace. I do like Jimmy Neutron though, more so the TV series than the movie. It is a premise that is perfect for a tv series. I was surprised at how long inbetween the movie and tv show was though. I think like three years. Have you actually seen Joe Somebody? It was a flop. And spoiler alert, there's basically only one good movie left for me to review. But it's a really good one. |
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