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I
really did not like The Grinch
It
hurt just like a painful pinch
I
would not watch it full of drugs
I'd
sooner eat a billion slugs
Some
things should be left as books
Not
made, half-assed, by H'wood crooks
I
like the spy with rotten teeth
But
this looks vapid, like Yasmine Bleeth
I
really hope it doesn't blow
It's
still my job to frigging go.
The
good news is that Dr. Seuss' The Cat in the Hat isn't
nearly as aggravating as Dr. Seuss' How
the Grinch Stole Christmas.
Hat is almost a full half-hour shorter than The
Grinch,
which is certainly a step in the right direction for a film
based on a book containing just over 200 words.
The Seussified logos identifying the guilty parties
involved (Universal, DreamWorks and Imagine) are pretty neat.
And Hat doesn't feature Ron Howard as a director.
Those
are the positives, and I had to scrape the bottom of the barrel
just to find those few. Everything
else, from the shameless self-promotion (of the film's
soundtrack CD and amusement park ride) to the jarring cameos
(Clint Howard and the suddenly omnipresent Paris
Hilton...without the bored look of sex in her eye this time) are
awful enough for theatres to be mandated into distributing barf
bags at the door. Think
Smashmouth ruined the opening to Shrek?
Wait until you hear them cover the Beatles in Hat.
Here's
the story with the story: Kelly Preston (What a Girl Wants)
plays an Anville single mom-slash-real estate agent with two
kids: The anal-retentive, super-motivated, PDA-toting Sally
(Dakota Fanning, Uptown Girls), and Conrad (Spencer
Breslin, The Santa Clause 2), who
can't stay out of trouble to save his life.
Mom has a big meet-and-greet dinner for work planned
later that night and begs the kids not to mess up the house
before ditching them with a narcoleptic babysitter (Amy Hill, Big
Fat Liar) and splitting for the office.
The
kids are menaced by two different forces.
One is shady neighbor Quinn (Alec Baldwin, Pearl
Harbor), who has been trying both to get into Mom's
pants and send the unruly Conrad to military school (this thread
is pointless and seems to be present only to pad Hat's
running time). The
other is, of course, the titular Cat (Mike Myers, Goldmember),
who shows up, makes a huge mess of things, and gets it all
cleaned up seconds before Mom comes home. At first, the kids
think The Cat is a hoot, but then their nagging goldfish, who
sounds a lot like Mom's germaphobe boss (Sean Hayes, Pieces
of April), eventually drives the idea of severe
punishment through their thick, precocious heads.
Now
let's talk about The Cat. Myers
endows him with the delivery of a flamboyant Borscht Belt
comedian, which, combined with the matted fur and white makeup,
makes him look like a shirtless Robin Williams trying to do a
dual impersonation of Paul Lynde and Grandpa Al Lewis from The
Munsters. I
liked Hat a lot more when he wasn't on the screen, and
that's a really bad thing.
What is it about Gene Wilder's performance in Willy
Wonka and the Chocolate Factory that remains perfect and
timeless, while today's comic "giants" like Myers and
Jim Carrey embarrass themselves trying to take characters that
clearly should be left as two-dimensional drawings and making
them one-dimensional?
As
for the look of Hat, it's almost like Ted Turner hoarked
his colorized vomit all over an entire cookie-cutter village
(and he probably has, somewhere).
This isn't the way Anville is portrayed in the book, and
worse yet, it's already been done to perfection in Edward
Scissorhands. Not
so coincidentally, Hat is the directorial debut of Bo
Welch, a former production designer who worked for Tim Burton on
– tah-dah! – Edward Scissorhands.
It's impossible to tell where the production design (by Minority
Report's Alex McDowell) and cinematography (by Sleepy
Hollow's Emmanuel Lubezki) end and the non-stop CGI
starts, so it's difficult to praise them for their efforts.
I will say this: Anville looks way more real than
Whoville, even though it may, in fact, have been much less real.
The
biggest blame stick should be shaken at (after being used to
brain producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer) the writing crew.
There are three of them credited, and they have a grand
total of zero films under their cumulative belt.
Two have written jokes for the Oscars, and the other for Saturday
Night Live. Not
so surprisingly, their work ranks among the worst of the year.
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mild crude humor and some double entendres |
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