"Oh great," you think. "another guy giving it a high rating for this beep just to be contrary. Ah-yawn." Well, maybe. It depends on your perspective, and I'm sincere in my belief that there's something about this movie that transcends it's own badness. From the look of the TV spots over a decade ago, it seemed like it was so horrible, by all accounts, that it SHOULDN'T exist! Anyway, me and my brother relived Ed-mania on premium cable the other night, and something odd struck me. Is it possible that this movie is a satire on what Hollywood thinks the lowest common denominator enjoys? Sports? Check. The show Friends? Cast member that the sports bar crowd fancies as their ideal self is in tow. A primate dressing like a person? We'll do you one recursion better. A person dressed as a primate dressing like a person.
The Chuck Jones cartoon sound effects are there, transforming the shock of violence and injury into temporary and absurd conditions. The spirit of the Munsters, a satire on immigrants living in American suburbia, arises in unnecessary fast-tracking film techniques to make this world more cartoon-like and "sped up" during moments of intensity.
The American ideals are constantly lampooned upon, sometimes in ways we're so used to living here that we don't immediately notice them. It's very telling throughout the picture, but I'll only focus on some of the final scenes, which is everything that follows a car chase (I mean, after all, car chases are part and parcel in crazy American life).
A girl child prays to God at the eve of the "big game" to spare the life of the chimp in the hospital bed. As soon as she lays the chimp's pitcher mitt on his lap to go blithely get a drink of some apple juice (or something, I was distracted), the heart monitor begins to beep in steady rhythm and the once comatose chimp recovers and is eager to go to the big game. This entire drama, from the setup to the climax, is about twenty seconds in length. We didn't know beforehand that the chimp was so badly frozen in the truck that it would resign him to a hospital bed, and that cognitive dissonance is just as intentional as the scene where the chimp watches late night TV and plays with his food, I assure you.
Before the final pitch of the big game, a distressed Matt LeBlanc wipes the sweat on his brow and calls for a time out. He runs to the stands and steals a kiss from the attractive woman, and turns to the chimp. The chimp licks his finger tip and knowingly "chalks up another" as Matt LeBlanc shows his dental work and nods in sinister agreement. As he heads back to the mound, he is now destined not to blow the game at all. The woman and a girl child stand in awe as their hair blows in the wind in one half of the shot, and the other half of the angle incorporates the American flag flying high and proudly. Now we have a nuclear family, including a family pet. Except the pet is not a pet. And the girl is not her daughter. Yes, those conflicts with the ideal are intentional. It's pointing out an absurdity that even the misfits can pull themselves together and be the ideal if we so choose, but only in movies.
There are many ways to take the symbolism in this movie, and all of them are deeply cynical and rightfully critical of white culture and Hollywood, alike. Unfortunately, this film will only be preaching to the converted just as Beavis and Butthead also did in the same era, while sterile and boring masses take it at face value. The roman a clef to that show was that what they were saying itself was not the joke, but the fact that THEY THEMSELVES found it funny. The further recursion was that the kids who took the show at face value were looking in the mirror while looking in the TV--sitting on their couch, looking dead ahead at B&B sitting on the couch.
I only go off on that tangent to say that Ed is doing a similar thing, but not getting the same kind of recognition for it because it's a few steps ahead of even this time and offers us no crutch of the "mirror stage". That is, with the no-brow ironic movement starting to wane and with the introduction of the "new sincerity" movement where there is NO shred of irony, this is a very hard movie to place because the intent isn't spelled out for us. Were the movie makers being sincere in the way Ed Wood was sincere, and just didn't know they were making a terrible movie children would hate? Were they trying to be ironic, and try to make a farce of the Hollywood conventions in the hopes that the audience would go through an hour and a half deprogramming session? Or what is most likely in the children's market today--try to make a quick buck off in the risky market of imitating more successful movies, in hopes that parents would accidentally pick their movie up thinking it was a Disney Home Video movie? These are three dangerous prongs to dance on, because nobody has time to think about these things except for young adults that play XBOX Live too much. So the movie is a Chinese puzzle box, in this way...and I have the sneaking suspicion that the Ed team planned that all along.
Trust me, if you smoke a few bowls this will all make sense, man.
The Chuck Jones cartoon sound effects are there, transforming the shock of violence and injury into temporary and absurd conditions. The spirit of the Munsters, a satire on immigrants living in American suburbia, arises in unnecessary fast-tracking film techniques to make this world more cartoon-like and "sped up" during moments of intensity.
The American ideals are constantly lampooned upon, sometimes in ways we're so used to living here that we don't immediately notice them. It's very telling throughout the picture, but I'll only focus on some of the final scenes, which is everything that follows a car chase (I mean, after all, car chases are part and parcel in crazy American life).
A girl child prays to God at the eve of the "big game" to spare the life of the chimp in the hospital bed. As soon as she lays the chimp's pitcher mitt on his lap to go blithely get a drink of some apple juice (or something, I was distracted), the heart monitor begins to beep in steady rhythm and the once comatose chimp recovers and is eager to go to the big game. This entire drama, from the setup to the climax, is about twenty seconds in length. We didn't know beforehand that the chimp was so badly frozen in the truck that it would resign him to a hospital bed, and that cognitive dissonance is just as intentional as the scene where the chimp watches late night TV and plays with his food, I assure you.
Before the final pitch of the big game, a distressed Matt LeBlanc wipes the sweat on his brow and calls for a time out. He runs to the stands and steals a kiss from the attractive woman, and turns to the chimp. The chimp licks his finger tip and knowingly "chalks up another" as Matt LeBlanc shows his dental work and nods in sinister agreement. As he heads back to the mound, he is now destined not to blow the game at all. The woman and a girl child stand in awe as their hair blows in the wind in one half of the shot, and the other half of the angle incorporates the American flag flying high and proudly. Now we have a nuclear family, including a family pet. Except the pet is not a pet. And the girl is not her daughter. Yes, those conflicts with the ideal are intentional. It's pointing out an absurdity that even the misfits can pull themselves together and be the ideal if we so choose, but only in movies.
There are many ways to take the symbolism in this movie, and all of them are deeply cynical and rightfully critical of white culture and Hollywood, alike. Unfortunately, this film will only be preaching to the converted just as Beavis and Butthead also did in the same era, while sterile and boring masses take it at face value. The roman a clef to that show was that what they were saying itself was not the joke, but the fact that THEY THEMSELVES found it funny. The further recursion was that the kids who took the show at face value were looking in the mirror while looking in the TV--sitting on their couch, looking dead ahead at B&B sitting on the couch.
I only go off on that tangent to say that Ed is doing a similar thing, but not getting the same kind of recognition for it because it's a few steps ahead of even this time and offers us no crutch of the "mirror stage". That is, with the no-brow ironic movement starting to wane and with the introduction of the "new sincerity" movement where there is NO shred of irony, this is a very hard movie to place because the intent isn't spelled out for us. Were the movie makers being sincere in the way Ed Wood was sincere, and just didn't know they were making a terrible movie children would hate? Were they trying to be ironic, and try to make a farce of the Hollywood conventions in the hopes that the audience would go through an hour and a half deprogramming session? Or what is most likely in the children's market today--try to make a quick buck off in the risky market of imitating more successful movies, in hopes that parents would accidentally pick their movie up thinking it was a Disney Home Video movie? These are three dangerous prongs to dance on, because nobody has time to think about these things except for young adults that play XBOX Live too much. So the movie is a Chinese puzzle box, in this way...and I have the sneaking suspicion that the Ed team planned that all along.
Trust me, if you smoke a few bowls this will all make sense, man.