THIRTIETH BIRTHDAY WRAPUP...
(including a mini-review of the Dawn of the Dead Ultimate Edition DVD boxset)
As I tried to drill into your head throughout September, last Saturday was my thirtieth birthday. (Interestingly enough, Montreal blogger Paul Jané, who runs the more consistently political
All Agitprop, All the Time blog, also
is a fellow member of the October 2nd club.) Since we're in the final stages of selling our house in Pincourt to move to Ottawa around New Year's, we had to have a building inspector and several other people, including Justin M. from my grade school (now a Re/Max agent), come around to our place on Saturday morning to assess the condition of the house for mortgage purposes (for the people buying the house; we'll just be renting a place until we can get proper jobs). So, I had to get up inhumanely early for me, 8:30 a.m., to get out of the house by 9:30 a.m. so that I could accompany our two big dogs as my mother drove us around for a couple of hours. (Yes, almost two decades ago, I did use to wake up on Saturday at 6:30 a.m. to watch the hour long
Robotech block on WVNY-22 (ABC) from Burlington VT, but, back then, I usually went to bed before 10 p.m. But, eh, I watch TV very, very late now, and, since we have 24/7 children's stations, Saturday morning just doesn't have the same cachet as it used to.)
We took our dogs to the same vacant lot in Baié d'Urfé, near the Hydro Quebec substation and the railroad tracks, we took them the previous Saturday to run around for 15 to twenty minutes. Luke actually "performed", so my mother had to scoop it up. I was kind of in the mood for an Egg McMuffin, as I haven't had a McDonald's breakfast since the era when I was at that computer animation college which had an ungodly schedule that forced me to be at some classes by 8 a.m. (and I often had to stay at that place overnight while working on assignments that, despite my best efforts, still looked crappy and unfinished), but, yes, since I was handling Luke's chain and rope, my hands were probably contaminated in a minute way, so, if I wanted to eat at McDonald's, I would have had to get out of the car and wash my hands in the washroom first, and, if I had gotten out of the car anywhere where there were enough people around to excite the dogs, they would have gone running. And even if I did take a chance with potential fecal contamination from my dogs and got my Egg McMuffin, hash browns, and a breakfast Coke from the Beaconsfield McDonald's drive-thru, the dogs would have gotten so rowdy when we're at the drive-thru that the chances they wouldn't knock my food and drink out of my hands and all over the back seat of our Hyundai Sonata was minimal.
So, after the dogs had their little run and tug of war (their leashes were both tied to the same rope), we drove up Chémin Saint Marie road and then tried to find our way through the rabbit warren of suburban streets of Beaconsfield and Kirkland between Saite Marie, parallel to Highway 40 and Elm, parallel to Highway 20, and then down Woodland, across highway 20, to Beaconsfield boulevard to take a couple of books back to the Beaconsfield Library, however, when we got to the library, we notice a soccer game being played on the main Beaconsfield soccer field across the street from the library/town hall complex, and the library parking lot was completely jammed, and, with our dogs, parking on the much larger community centre parking lot a little way up City Lane and then walking to the library wasn't really a viable option, so we had to abort that little mission. We drove east along Beaconsfield boulevard and then took Saint Charles boulevard all of the way north to Gouin boulevard, the long road that follows the entire northern coastline of Montreal island, and drove west along Gouin, enjoying the lovely scenery of the Lake of Two Mountains near Cap Saint Jacques park, which my mother got melancholy about since we have such beautiful scenery within 15 minutes drive of our house but we won't be able to drive there often once we're in Ottawa, and then continued along after the point where Gouin becomes Senneville Road. taking in all of the big mansions on leafy estates. My mother asked me then if I wanted to go to McDonald's anyway, but, at that point, it was past 11 a.m., and I don't think they serve breakfast after 11:30 a.m., so it wouldn't have been worth it.
After that, we went home and I started watching the
Dawn of the Dead boxset I received:
I'm not reviewing
Dawn of the Dead as a film, but, needless to say, I think it's the best horror movie ever made and is also great as a dark comedy.
The four disks are in a "gatefold"-type case which folds up and is put into a sleeve with the bald "peeking" zombie head that is the signature image for this film and
Dawn of the Dead written in embossed red metallic letters, and a silhouette of the four main characters on the back (behind the peel-away sheet with the information about the set). As you unfold the gatefold, there are two-tone (red-on-black) images of three of the zombies from the film, an image of the four main characters ready to fire, an image of George A. Romero himself, and the four DVDs, each of which has some sort of publicity image from the film on them and a picture of one of the cast members behind them.
Inside, there's a booklet presenting the features of this DVD edition vaguely in the form of a mall guide, complete with maps of Monroeville Mall (though with store names not included) and a 22-page mini-comic book covering the first third of the film that's really just an ad for the complete graphic novel from IDW Publishing.
The movie itself is spread over three disks, which each contain a different cut of the film: Disk One has the 127-minute theatrical cut of the film, with four different audio options besides the commentary track (5.1 DTS Surround, 5.1 Dolby Surround, 2.0 Dolby Surround, and the original monaural soundtrack), Disk Two has the 139-minute extended edition of the film and mono sound, and Disk Three has the 118-minute European edition of the film in 5.1 and 2.0 Dolby plus mono. I just have a normal Sony Trinitron television with no additional speakers, so I can't really tell you how different each audio option sounds. The transfer is very good; it still looks like a low-budget film shot in the 1970s, but it was cleaned up very nicely and I don't see much in the way of annoying, picture-ruining, "edge enhancement". Honestly, I'd be hard-pressed to tell you the difference between the Theatrical and Extended cuts; I think the extended version mostly has longer versions of the same scenes, with about the only additonal thing I noticed being a shot that showed that the zombies could indeed get around the trucks to bang on the glass doors, but it's safety glass, so, with the truck there, they couldn't get enough leverage to actually break the doors.
There are various trailers, TV spots, and radio spots from the United States, on disk one, and the United Kingdom and other European markets, on disk three, as well as various sorts of images and biographies. The king of all special features for any DVD as far as I'm concerned is the commentary track, and we're treated to three excellent ones. The first one is a Director's Commentary George Romero, who tells us all about his creative process and what it's like directing with input from make-up creator Tom Savini and Assistant Director Chris Romero, moderated by DVD Producer Perry Martin. The second one, also moderated by Perry Martin, is from producer Richard P. Rubenstein and it's a dry commentary track that will bore a lot of people unless you're actually interested in the logistics of filmmaking, like raising money, making a schedule, getting insurance to shoot at a mall, and so on, but I am increasingly interested in the business side of show business, so this sort of thing is very interesting to me. The third disk has commentary from cast members David Emge (Stephen Andrews), Ken Foree (Peter Washington), Scott H. Reiniger (Roger DeMarco), and Gaylen Ross (Francine Parker) and is much more laid back and fun, so relaxed in fact that David Emge apparently fell asleep for a little bit of it and they have to wake him up. They also point out some of the more absurd elements of the film, like how Peter knows how to perform an abortion (which police academy teaches that?).
Two documentaries are included on the fourth disk,
The Dead Will Walk, which is interviews shot for this box set with the case and crew, and
Document of the Dead, a documentary shot mainly in 1977-78 during the filming of
Dawn of the Dead at Monroeville Mall with a portion shot in 1989 tacked on to the end. I'm not sure if I've ever talked about my problem with modern behind-the-scenes documentaries on DVD, and why I increasingly don't bother watching them. Prior to the introduction of DVD, most behind-the-scenes documentaries were shot mainly for members of the entertainment press, and, occasionally, the very rich high-end viewers who bought the "Special Edition" versions of major films on CAV-format LaserDisc
1 which usually cost at least a hundred dollars, and that's in American greenbacks, not Canadian "Monopoly Money", and which came in boxes often well over an inch-thick, just to hold the film, which was spread out over two to four discs, and then another disk with the behind-the-scenes stuff. While I wouldn't want to give the impression that no care went into production of behind-the-scenes documentaries prior to DVD taking over the home video market in the late 1990s, the fact is that, at the time they were made, the movie studios believed that only a handful of people would ever see these things and, as a result, they didn't put too much money or effort into their production. As a result, you got documentaries that are very rough, very unpolished, usually edited and narrated in a completely amateurish way. The female narrator in the "old" documentary, Roy Frumkes'
Document of the Dead, has a monotonous "You're listening to the
Delicious Dish, on National Public Radio" sort of voice straight out of a student film. And I love that kind of behind-the-scenes documentary because it feels completely honest and natural, with nothing going on backstage feeling "staged". And, since it was produced to be viewed primarily by people within the entertainment industry, there is no pandering to a general audience, so it can dissect and discuss George Romero's cinematic technique, using scenes from primarily
Martin, a vampire movie Romero did prior to shooting
Dawn of the Dead, as well as a few scenes from the original
Night of the Living Dead, in a level of detail which would be mind-numbingly boring if you're not really, really interested in actual technique. The bulk of the film is footage shot in 1977 and 1978 with George Romero doing his director stuff and talking about the film in natural-sounding conversations, walking around the set, and Tom Savini doing his gore S/FX thing with latex, buttons, fishing lines, "squibs" (tiny explosive charges), and prophylactics filled with red dye. Not that this documentary is faultless; a segment from the 1989 portion of the film showing Romero and Savini's team setting up a practical effect for the film
Two Evil Eyes wherein a diamond-shaped trophy-like thing I think is supposed to be a clock-radio impales a sleeping bare-chested hunk, where, for each take, and there are several, they have to patch up the fake chest with latex, or whatever material they use for the skin, drags on much, much too long, but, overall, this is a fascinating look at both the film itself and the general process of moviemaking.
My problem with most behind-the-scenes documentaries shot these days is that they are glib puff-pieces that are basically just extensions of the press junket, down to filming the interviews with the director and actors, using the exact same sets or hotel rooms in which they film the junket interviews with the soft lighting and the fixed camera angle with the actor sitting in an armchair, with the round pedestal table with the vase and the fake flowers and the movie poster on the wall, talking to the unseen interviewer, usually the entertainment reporter from network affiliate stations from various large and medium-sized markets or from syndicated entertainment news programmes like
Entertainment Tonight or
Access Hollywood, who asks a few scripted questions to which the actor gives the same scripted answer he's already given dozens, if not hundreds, of times that day. The problem with those type of interviews is that, since the actor has to pretty much memorize his answers and only has a few minutes per reporter to give them, the answers they give are usually short, superficial, dumbed-down for the general audience, and not terribly insightful. It's all sickengly artificial. Worse than that, I find the fakeness is seeping into the actual behind-the-scenes footage which is all shot now with the full knowledge that hundreds of thousands, if not millions or even tens of millions for the big summer movies, would see it on DVD, so even everything that you see happening "off camera" feels like it's staged for the second set of cameras and the actors are in press junket mode every second they're not acting in the actual film, and, as such, they don't feel like they're being casual but rather actors playing characters who share their names, like Arnold Schwarzenegger playing himself towards the end of
The Last Action Hero. Even the ostensibly spontaneous moments with the actors goofing around and "being themselves" come across as being staged.
And new documentaries about older movies made now specifically for the release or "double-dipping" re-release of the DVD version often suffer from the tendency of talking about the continuing popularity, whether cult or mainstream, of a film as though it was some sort of amazing phenomenon, and, as someone who is allergic to excessive hyperbole, especially for things I like, it rubs me the wrong way. Plus, these things always have tributes to "the fans" which I know are well-intentioned, and I'm not saying they're insincere, but it encourages fanboy navel-gazing amongst all of the Ain't It Cool News dot com Talkback fankiddies when, ultimately, we didn't do anything special other than that we watched your film and liked it enough to buy it on DVD. I don't need to be thanked, I already know I'm great. And these documentaries frequently say condescending bullshit like, "This film would have never become popular if it wasn't for you, the fans!" Well, yes, that's kind of the point of calling something "popular", isn't it? Getting back to the
Dawn of the Dead boxset,
The Dead Will Walk is by no means even close to the most egregious example of such retrospective documentaries I have ever seen, but, still, you get the junket-type interviews, this time with backdrops I think are colourful king-sized bedsheets pinned to a wall and a few tacky horror props spread around, and, sometimes, they commit the cardinal sin of actors taped independently of one another finishing each other's sentences. Most of the information in the interviews is redundant, already covered in the commentary tracks on the three versions of the film, though the interviews with the Italians like Producer Dario Argento and Claudio Simonetti of "The Goblins" are worth watching. Also, you get to see how old everyone looks, with David Emge looking the most... umm... "advanced", while Scott Reiniger looks almost like he's the older brother of Robert Patrick, the T-1000 from
Terminator 2: Judgment Day and agent Doggett from the later seasons of
The X-Files.
Ken Foree, while bald now, still looks very good for a guy in his sixties (he's aged about as well as Chuck Norris, who is around the same age), and Gaylen Ross has aged quite gracefully and is still recognizable. And George Romero himself, who is briefly seen at the beginning of the film itself as the director of the TV station, has glasses that almost look like two five-inch television screens.
My biggest pet peeve with the "new" documentary about
Dawn of the Dead is that it is preceded by a ten-second "spoiler warning" (which you can't skip through!). Like I've told you all many times before, I think this business of spoiler warnings has gone way too far. It used to be that you didn't simply blurt out a major twist like how Bruce Willis's character is actually a ghost for a reasonable, limited amount of time after
The Sixth Sense was released, but these days, the anti-spoiler crybabies want you to wallpaper anything you write about any plot details, no matter how minor the detail is or how old the movie you're writing about is, with massive spoiler warnings, even if it's in a location, like, say, an article that will obviously be discussing details of a movie where anyone with any sense of discretion should be able to tell that spoilers will be discussed without seeing the "magical S word". 90% of spoiler warnings are the equivalent of "Do not drink" labels on cans of paint, and I refuse to play that game for the sake of not spoiling things for those people who lack the discretion to keep themselves from getting spoiled in the first place. Who is the spoiler warning for? The people who bought the DVD? But it's a four disk set containing three slightly different cuts of the same film, so I don't know who would buy this thing besides those of us who were obviously already big fans of
Dawn of the Dead. I'm not one who believes in blind buys for movies, but, if you're
that desperate to buy
Dawn of the Dead completely blind, there are editions of the film that are only about half the price as the
Ultimate Edition. Maybe it's meant for those people who rent "blind" from online rental services like Netflix, but, even in that case, I think the idea that a supplemental disk for
any movie would contain spoilers is a "Well, duh!" proposition. So, in my view, having a spoiler warning on disk four of the most expensive DVD edition of a movie you obviously really, really liked if you were willing to spend so much on it is pointless and a new low for basic common sense.
The other extras on disk four are home movies made by Robert Langer, an extra who played a zombie and who shot around the mall, including many shots of Tom Savini creating zombie effects, often having to innovate from scratch, and you also see an incident where the special effects guys used a little too much explosives and shattered a couple of mall windows, and someone else's video footage of a recent tour of Monroeville Mall with Ken Foree and David Emge and the guy who played the escalator zombie. Monroeville has been heavily-renovated since the 1970s and only a couple of the stores seen in the film, most notably JC Penney's, still exist at the same location. Also, a minor pet peeve of mine is when you buy a bare-bones DVD and then you later "double-dip" and buy the special edition, which is complete except for one tiny thing the "bare bones" has which the special edition lacked, but this edition also has the "If you're fashion-minded, watch out! Big time shopping is finally here at Monroeville Mall." commercial with the very Seventies drawings and music that is found on the old Anchor Bay bare-bones disk, so you can sell the old one or give it away or use it as a beer coaster or whatnot.
All in all, for all the things you can see, Anchor Bay's Ultimate Edition of
Dawn of the Dead is the greatest multi-set special edition of a single film I have ever experienced, and is now tied with the
Toy Story: Ultimate Toy Box in terms of being my favourite movie DVD box set in my possession.
END OF REVIEW
I also received the
Star Wars Trilogy boxset, but I've only seen the first disk, so, if I feel like doing a DVD review of that, it won't be for a while.
Anyway, on Saturday evening, I went around to a "Mexican Night" party over at the house of one of my mother's church friends. They had about a dozen people there and I talked with them a bit, though I was a little melancholy that I was no longer in my twenties. There were appetizers like these pastries with cheese on them thant I think were called "cheese puffs", but not the same as cheesies like Cheetos, and nachos, and some other thing with goat cheese and olives. For dinner, there was meat and taco shells and burrito wraps and various other ingredients, so I just made myself a couple of burritos, since I wasn't really in a taco mood. After supper, the people holding the party did a Mexico quiz, which we self-graded, and my parents and I swept the top three... quite honestly, I might add. My prize? Three Ferrero Rocher chocolate-hazelnut balls, which I have a funny story about, but I'll write that in the next paragraph. Then there was a surprise; since it was my birthday, some people got plastic eggs filled with metal confetti and poured it over my head while they sang "Happy Birthday", and I got a very fluffy cake, like a softer version of a spongecake, and a card signed by everyone there. That was nice! They were going to do the Mexican hatdance, but my parents didn't want to leave too late, so we left. That was a nice way to end a somewhat melancholy birthday.
Unfortunately, the next day, I decided to try one of those Ferrero Rocher chocolates. Funny thing is, the past couple of times I ate Ferrero Rochers, which is a rare occasion (I'm talking about experiences going back to at least the autumn of 2002), my throat got all sore and swollen and I had difficulty swallowing, and this alimentary ailment lasts for about half an hour or so before going back to normal. I wrote it off as some sort of illness or maybe a bad batch of Ferrero Rochers, but, on Sunday, I wasn't feeling sick for a change before eating the Ferrero Rocher, but, seconds after putting it in my mouth, the swelling and soreness returned, so, this time, I went on the Internet looking for information, and, yup, Ferrero Rochers contain hazelnuts and hazelnut proteins are apparently a major allergen, so I guess I do have some sort of tree nut allergy after all, which is a little weird, since I can eat peanuts and chocolate containing peanuts or almonds, like Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, peanut M&Ms, Oh Henry, and Crispy Crunch (a Canadian chocolate bar which is chocolate-covered peanut brittle) without any problems. So, I guess what I was feeling was mild anaphylactic shock, but nothing serious enough to see a doctor about. I don't want to know what would happen if I ate the other two at once, though. It's a goddamn shame, since I liked the taste and I think there was a time when I could eat Ferrero Rochers without incident.
Monday, I received my quarter-annual gift from the benevolent
Receiver General of Canada,
the Honourable Scott Brison, and the Deputy Receiver General,
David Marshall. And what did they send me? My GST/HST rebate check! Woo-hoo, $56 Canadian! I'm almost certainly going to go downtown this weekend and get another volume of
Super GALS!, or, dare I dream, maybe they'll actually have a volume or two of
Kimagure Orange Road in stock, because it's about goddamned time that someone take me (back) to "Summer Side"!
Finally, my brother, Nick, came home for Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. He didn't get me any birthday presents yet, but I did mention that, besides the DVDs I asked for, I wouldn't mind receiving an old Sega Dreamcast, so he brought his own Dreamcast back from Toronto. You see, he was in England at university for about two years a couple of years back, and he left his Dreamcast at home, so it was kind of like "my" system and I bought several games for it, including, among others,
Ferrari F-355 Challenge, a supertough driving simulator with gorgeous graphics,
Metropolis Street Racer, the original game in the series which became
Project Gotham Racing on the X-Box (it has London, Tokyo, and San Francisco in gorgeous detail, but the cars aren't nearly as exotic as they are in
Project Gotham Racing),
Sonic Adventure 2, which I liked pretty much as much as the first
Sonic Adventure,
World Series Baseball 2K1, where the Montreal Expos won't ever leave town, and
Mobile Suit Gundam Side Story 0079, which is an impressive mecha simulator, though you could only pilot a GM (RGM-79) or a "Guncan" (GRC-80), not the Gundam RX-78 proper, however, he moved back to Canada at the end of 2001 except now he was at University of Toronto and he took his Dreamcast with him. So I had a lot of Dreamcast games, but nothing to play it on, and there is this one emulator I found except I could not get it to work properly on any of my computers because it pretty much requires
Windows XP and I don't have it, and I tried installing it on the computer I have with
Windows 2000, but it needed a bunch of graphics-related DLL files to work and I don't think we have the proper hardware. The game I was most looking forward to playing again, was
Crazy Taxi, a pixel-perfect port of the popular Sega Naomi-board arcade game wherein you pick up and drop off as many fares as you can in a coastal city loosely modeled on San Francisco within a limited timespan while Offspring's "All I Want" plays in the background. I don't have that game but Nick does, and he brought back a whole pile of his Dreamcast games, however,
Crazy Taxi was not among them. Nick explained to me that his friend had borrowed it a long time ago and never gave it back, which I find a little intolerable.
Bottom line, America? Nick's friend should give
Crazy Taxi back to Nick or just send it straight to me at my house in Pincourt.
(Hmm... that reminds me: they should do another installment of "Pierre Bernard's Recliner of Rage" on
Late Night with Conan O'Brien at some point, since it's been a couple of weeks, and I appreciate the spikes in Google hits.)
1 For those of you non-LD fans, CAV is the LaserDisc format which allowed instant access to any frame and had the sharpest picture, with the downside being that each side of the disc could only hold thity minutes of video compared to the much more common CLV LaserDiscs, which had a slightly less-sharp picture and which you couldn't freeze-frame without special equipment but which allowed for up to an hour of video per side.
THE FAT ALBERT MOVIE...
The trailer for the big screen retread of the classic 1970s cartoon series Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids is online. This film was directed by
My Big Fat Greek Wedding's
Joel Zwick (ooh, he was also one of the lead directors for
Perfect Strangers1) and stars
Kenan Thompson in a fat suit as the title character.
It would appear that they went the
Brady Bunch Movie route and made it self-parody. (Though my film school brother enjoyed both
Brady Bunch movies a lot.)
Since I'm such a fan of the Japanese cartoon series
Super GALS!, which, if you ignore the obvious differences in style and culture, has many episodes that follow the
Fat Albert template, probably unintentionally, almost perfectly, with a benevolent gang of good kids going around solving crises-of-the-week amongst single-appearance classmates, I was kind of hoping that they would duplicate the goofy earnestness of the original series rather than just have characters that look like the cartoon but whose purpose is just to point out how "stupid" and "naïve" the original cartoon was for cynical nostalgics.
I love seeing parodies of things I liked as a kid, but I think often the best parodies are the ones that play it mostly straight, with the best example I've ever seen of that concept being the episode of
South Park from last year entitled
"All About Mormons" wherein the "story" scenes were told almost completely straight, with the only comical exaggerations being the really, really credulous townspeople and the "DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB-DUMB" chorus, since, to a non-Mormon, Joseph Smith's claims are absurd enough in and of themselves
2 and presenting what he said and did in a straightforward way is actually a lot funnier than it would have been if they had made up a bunch of stuff about Smith just for a chuckle.
Likewise, both
Charlie's Angels films, which were intended to be comedies, are also heads and shoulders above most other TV retreads simply because McG made them as though they were just feature length episodes of
Charlie's Angels from an alternate reality where
Charlie's Angels never went off the air. He didn't need to introduce a bunch of jaded modern onlookers going "Ha ha, the stuff they did on this show was so stupid, I can't believe people enjoyed this!" since it's patently obvious that a detective agency with beautiful women who are impossibly perfect in terms of undercover infiltration of the milieux
3 in which the criminals or whoever they are monitoring operate, being able to learn all of the skills necessary to be convincing in their roles seemingly in just a few minutes (and, when needs be, fabricate elaborate disguises including masks with all sorts of small animatronic features), is completely ludicruous, McG didn't need to add much, besides a few kickass dance sequences, to make it funny. The
Charlie's Angels films were so straight-faced with their parody, making fun of other overused recent action movie conventions especially
The Matrix's "Bullet time" and the disguises from the two Tom Cruise
Mission: Impossible films, that a lot of people, critics and movie forum posters, hate them for being so derivative, which means they missed the point of the joke.
I find straightforward mocking of old television series to be better in small doses anyway, like in
Saturday Night Live sketches, on
Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law, or the
Scooby Doo portion of Kevin Smith's
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, with everyone high on pot and Velma being an obvious lesbian, funnier than the entirety of the *first* live-action
Scooby Doo film, because, once you get past the ambiguous marijuana use and the ambiguous lesbianism and the "How do these kids afford the van and the stuff and the ability to travel anywhere whenever they like?" and the "Why are they scared of monsters when they always find out it's just the other guy from the beginning of the episode, like the owner of the old amusement park, in a costume?", there really isn't that much unintentionally amusing about
Scooby Doo, since it is just a kid's cartoon which you can enjoy for what it is or not enjoy because you've long outgrown it. (The second
Scooby Doo film used actual villains from the series and looked much better, like they got most of the sarcastic post-modern irony out of their systems in the first one, but I was busy with studying... okay, I was busy with procrastinating from studying... and never got around to watching it.)
Getting back to the trailer, I'd say it does look like it looks like another postmodern trashing of a show from a more "innocent", or, at least, less irony-saturated era, however, at the end of the trailer, Albert actually meets the real Bill Cosby in person and is surprised that Cosby looks so old compared to the Bill Cosby of thirty years ago from the junkyard segments, and, if Bill Cosby was involved with this retread, it does give me some degree of confidence that the purpose of this film is something other than just pissing all over the legacy of the cartoon, so it could just be that most of the bits with the actual "send-up" of the cartoon were shown in the trailer, and, overall, the film will be much more positive. I know that Bill Cosby is someone who is gravely concerned about the negativity and gangsta stereotyping in so much of the pop culture that young people, especially black youth, consume, and, if the guy still has some say in what goes on with the animated franchise he helped create, I don't think he'd let them make it too dumb, and, if it is dumb, then Cosby would have been duped by the producers, since I don't see him willingly agreeing to participate in the wholesale trashing of his own cartoon.
All I'll say is I'll wait and see until just after Christmas; I'll be at the house of my sister and her boyfriend on Christmas Day (and I'm not too comfortable with that idea, to be perfectly honest, but we'll be in the middle of moving so it's not like I have any other choices) and the movie being released on Christmas that I'm looking forward to more than any other is still, obviously, Wes Anderson's
The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.
At least this film promises to answer some questions about Dumb Donald's hat, because, really, what is that thing? When I was a little kid, I thought he was some sort of octopus with a human torso and limbs.
N.B.: This entry is a slightly-modified and heavily-expanded version of this post I did at Rotten Tomatoes.
1 Now that I've pointed out that Joel Zwick was a director for Perfect Strangers, if you're like me, you're probably wondering if he directed "The Men Who Knew Too Much", that really fucked up two-part November "sweeps" episode from 1990 that was shot on film on location in Los Angeles and which started off with Larry and Balki in a car chase with mobsters. Nope, that episode was directed by Richard Correll, another sitcom director whose only film, according to the IMDb, was the 1990 comedy Ski Patrol.
2 Though that episode wasn't a Mormon-bashing episode; as with everything that Matt Stone n' Trey Parker do, you need to look at the whole picture and not just take a few scenes out of context; the Mormons in the episode were presented as being sincere and honest and very dedicated to the family, and, ultimately, the message of that episode was one of tolerance, since what Mormons believe isn't any more increduluous than most other religions.
3 The proper plural form of "milieu" in French is "milieux", not "milieus".
