Before seeing the Fantastic Mr. Fox* last week I was treated to a duet of trailers featuring some of the dumbest shit I've ever seen. The first was Tooth Fairy, in which The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) plays a hard-nosed hockey player who gets in trouble with some sort of tooth fairy syndicate for telling kids that the tooth fairy doesn't exist (or something like that), and gets punished by being forced to become a tooth fairy for some fixed period of time, like community service. Being a tooth fairy, it appears from the trailer, involves shrinking, wearing little translucent wings, applying some sort of invisibility dust, and spending a lot of time avoiding cat attacks and getting smacked in the nuts. As if this weren't offensive enough, there's a cameo by Billy Crystal, obviously desperate for cash, as some tooth fairy version of Miracle Max. I shit you not. This movie concept should have been the premise for one of those pre-film commercials intended to get you to turn your cell phone off. It hurts me, deep in my core, that someone bought this pitch.
However, the second trailer was an even lower blow, in that the movie is not only offensive and utterly unfunny, but there is just no need for it. I mean, as stupid as it is, at least a tooth fairy movie fills in some tiny vacuum in the vast continuum of movie concepts. But this: a sequel of an 80's cartoon show remake? Yes, I'm talking about yet another Alvin and the Chipmunks movie, this time called a "Squeakquel" (for those of you who aren't clinically insane, that's a combination of "squeak" and "sequel"). Apparently the first one was so good and made so much money that they just had to regurgitate one more incarnation of this awful, humorless, childhood-memory-destroying abomination. This time, the CGI-rendered chipmunks are in high school! That means classes (I assume there will be a chemistry experiment gone awry), bullies, dances, football practice (!) and, regretfully, teenage-girl chipmunks, also musical performers, and each specified to fit the characteristic features of Alvin, Simon (glasses) and Theodore (fat). And that's not all. We have to watch these female chipmunks undulate and sing a helium-voiced version of Beyonce's "Single Ladies." Why do they have to mix nostalgic material with modern popular culture references? Squeakquel looks like a real life version of that SNL parody, Bambi 2002.
WHY GOD, WHY?!! This trailer has singlehandedly ruined chipmunks, Jason Lee, the 80's, cartoons, CGI, Beyonce, and high school, all in one shot. Shame on you, Jason Lee. Shame.
* Aaron's review of which was entirely accurate, though perhaps a smidgen too glowing IMO.
1 comments:
I don't know what hurts my soul more: The fact that these movies even exist, or that whenever these trailers run people go into fits of hysterical laughter like audience members on America's Funniest Home Videos. It is really sad any way you dice it.
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