BEFORE: Christopher Walken carries over again, but for the last time, and Jack Black will now be the link for the rest of November.
THE PLOT: A man becomes increasingly jealous of his friend's newfound success.
AFTER: I've definitely got a loose theme going here, because one key plot point in "The Stepford Wives" was that the husbands were all very jealous of their wives' career successes, and the fact that they earned more money. Then in "The Family Fang" you could say that the parents in the family, who were moderately successful outsider video pranksters, were jealous of the mainstream success of their children, who were a professional actress and a published author. And then in "Jersey Boys" I saw the petty jealousies that worked to tear apart the Four Seasons. Tonight that concept got taken to the extreme, as one friend becomes wildly successful, creating envy in the less successful other friend.
After a wild invention of a spray that makes dog poo miraculously disappear, so that no pet owner ever has to pick it up again, this man makes a fortune overnight. The less successful friend had a chance to invest in the product, but chose not to, thinking that the product was not possible, then not marketable, and then of course he finds that he missed the financial opportunity of a lifetime. Suddenly everyone has bought multiple cans of this product, while a fringe group gathers to protest and ask the semi-serious question, "Where does the poo go?"
This is a teachable moment for your kids, too, if you want to get them thinking about environmental issues. What happens to the things we throw in the trash, what happens to the things that we flush down the toilet? They all have to go SOMEWHERE, it can't just be a case of "Out of sight, out of mind" like it was for previous generations. So the lesson here is that it's not easy to get rid of things, even if it feels like it. Yes, there's a big floating plastic mass the size of Delaware in the Pacific Ocean, but even if we clean that up and get it out of the ocean, where's it going to go THEN? There was a news story a few years ago about dried human waste that was being hauled away from New York City by train, and brought to other states like Arkansas or Oklahoma, I think at some point to possibly used for fertilizer, but at some point it became too much, umm, stuff and they had no use for it, so it was just lying on train cars in rail yards, stinking up the place. Then there was the famous garbage barge of 1987 that set out to sea from Long Island, and couldn't find any landfill space for its tons of garbage, not in North Carolina, not in Florida, not in Mexico or the Bahamas. Finally it was returned to Brooklyn to be incinerated, having run up transport costs close to $1 million.
So as a society, we're rapidly running out of places to PUT our trash. That incident with the garbage barge led to more recycling laws being implemented in New York, but what happens when even THAT'S not enough, and all the landfills eventually fill up again? I'd be very surprised to find out there's a plan in place for that.
Apart from that veiled ecology lesson, there's not much to recommend here, except the other lesson that if you don't find a way to get rid of envy, that it will make you feel "less than", and then turn into resentment, and you may find yourself hating the people who were once your friends. Or I guess that message would have been a little clearer if not for the psychotic drifter, the missing horse and the malfunctioning carousel. Plus it's a shame that we'll never find out if one character's state Senate campaign was successful, or what flan is made of, or who won the bowling tournament. That's my way of saying there's a lot going on here, and not all of it connects or serves a purpose, it's just sort of all over the place.
Also starring Ben Stiller (last seen in "The Meyerowitz Stories (New and Selected)", Jack Black (last seen in "Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage"), Rachel Weisz (last seen in "The Lobster"), Amy Poehler (last seen in "The House"), Sam Lerner (last heard in "Monster House"), Ariel Gade, Connor Matheus, Lily Jackson, Hector Elias, Maricela Ochoa (last seen in "Mercury Rising"), Tom McCleister (last seen in "Million Dollar Baby"), Blue Deckert, John Gavigan, Terry Bozeman.
RATING: 3 out of 10 employee review forms
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