Sitting in the Cinema Village East on Monday evening eating birthday desert number two (banana pudding) with two friends up for some last minute birthday hanging (Matty and Jori), Cinecultist got to thinking about children's movies. Those live action family friendly tales, some featuring Don Knotts, that occupied our not-so-state-of-the-art VCR while growing up. The trigger to this nostaligic musing? A pretty sweet trailer for the movie version of a tv show we lurved as a kid, Dukes of Hazzard (is it just us or is the casting of Sean William Scott and Johnny Knoxville kinda inspired?), and then the travesty that was the Will Ferrell version of Bad News Bears with soccer, Kicking and Screaming.
Really, we can't stress how god-awful this film was. It's the sort of movie going experience that causes CC to loose faith in the whole thing. Shoddy editing (Hello? 180 degree rule? Continuity? Heard of them?), a soundtrack straight out of 2001, a inexplicable sub-plot about coffee addiction and a script that makes the brilliant Will look like a piece of dead wood on screen; this thing as a trainwreck. The saddest part is that it felt like a terrible kids feature that would be foisted on an unsuspecting babysitting Cinecultist. You think you're sitting the children down for 90 minutes of harmless, perhaps fun distraction but instead you just want to claw your eyes out from the pain.
At this point it would be oh so easy to lapse into some nearing-30-god-my-childhood-entertainment-was-so-choice ruminating but we'll spare you. You've see the Brady Bunch movie and the Starsky and Hutch movie and the trailer for Herbie Fully Loaded, you know what this looks like. Instead we'll just sign off with a worry for the future cultural well-being of the little children. Don't do this to the kids, Will Ferrell and producers et al! Think of them and their fragile little personalities forever warped by Kicking and Screaming being in the world! It's worthy of a telethon or something.
Posted by karen at May 18, 2005 9:16 AM