BEFORE: Well, here goes, just two films left after tonight, so I'll definitely make Christmas on time, then comes a couple weeks of inactivity during which I'll have to re-total up all the appearances from the year and write some kind of wrap-up post. I've got about a month of down-time at one job, and the other one could close up shop at any time, so umm, Happy Holidays? This is the kind of thing that not only stresses me out, but sends me right to the job-hunting sites to look for some kind of way out. Hail Mary plays only, though, for some reason, I guess I'm just not good at job hunting.
Regrets, surely because although this film was advertised with "This Christmas..." on the poster, I think the film itself has nothing to do with Christmas. So getting to the end through "Christmas in Paradise" would have been a better fit, I just didn't have enough slots to do that. Bummer. But really, this "Clifford" film was put on the list last December, and I couldn't get to it even though it linked to "The Nutcracker and the Four Realms", so that means today's film got postponed from one December to the next, and if I can do that, I can postpone "Christmas in Paradise" the same way. That film becomes the goal for next December, so let's see if I can get there in 12 months - I guess this is just how things work here at the Movie Year.
John Cleese carries over from "Father Christmas Is Back".
THE PLOT: A young girl's love for a tiny puppy named Clifford makes the dog grow to an enormous size.
AFTER: Sure, I know this film is based on a beloved classic children's book, but I don't know, it kind of made for a weird film. The story is all over the place, it feels like they didn't want it to devolve into a chase scene where everybody just drives all over town, but yet that's exactly where it ended up going. What's the story structure here? It's just girl gets puppy, puppy gets big, problems ensue, girl loses giant puppy and then girl gets giant puppy back. But that's just too simple somehow, so they had to keep throwing more and more obstacles in the way of that storyline just so we'd feel more relieved at the end when everything works out OK.
So the obstacles that exist for very little reason include the irresponsible uncle, the evil CEO of the corporation trying to solve world hunger, the building super who doesn't allow pets, the magical illegal pet dealer who keeps setting up shop in different places around town, the bumbling veterinarian, the neighbor who's a wanna-be magician, the other neighbor who has an artificial hand, the other OTHER neighbor who's an older Russian woman that obsessively drinks condensed milk, and the other other OTHER neighbors who are ethnically diverse and in mixed marriages and are all along for the ride but given very little to do.
Look, I know it's a KIDS movie and therefore it doesn't have to make much sense, but it's just so damn clunky, and if you're an adult then it kind of offensively doesn't make any sense at all. I need answers for why things happen - like how did the puppy grow so damn big overnight? Supposedly it's because Emily loved him SO much, but come on, how is that a thing? The false narrative from the chemical company, that the dog is their property and escaped from an experimental lab almost makes more sense. If the dog was being given radiation treatments or got bitten by a radioactive, umm, bigger dog, that seems more plausible to explain his rapid growth - only NITPICK POINT, how does creating a giant dog in a lab solve the world hunger problem? Are they suggesting that hungry people should start eating giant puppies? Wouldn't it make more sense to create a giant chicken or a giant turkey before you move on to making giant dogs? So the evil company CEO's rationalization that the dog belongs to him isn't believable, but then again, it doesn't have to be, because he's lying, as all CEO's do.
Then there's so much family drama in this young girl's life - her mother is English and has the kind of job where she has to go to Chicago on business trips, so her John Krasinski-light screw-up of an uncle who lives in a delivery van has to take care of her for a few days, but hey, at least he gets to live in a real apartment while he does that and sleep in a real bed. And all he has to do is take care of Emily, which he's apparently terrible at doing, and has no real personal connection with her, also no authority over her behavior. She's also being bullied at school by the "mean girls" who call her out for being white trash or "discount store" or something. Sure, this is the kind of life led by a little girl that could really be enhanced by a puppy from a magical exotic pet dealer that suddenly becomes 10 feet tall.
The rest of the film is then filled with futile efforts to HIDE this giant animal, which, let's face it, just isn't going to happen, and then dealing with the after-effects once they all realize that there's just no way to get around town unseen with a giant puppy, not in these days of social media when everyone posts photos and videos of what they see on a constant basis. Then the whole thing devolves into one big chase scene, and also it's determined that putting Clifford on a container ship to China is somehow the answer to all of their problems, forcing a tearful goodbye that gets reversed five minutes later, so what was the damn point? But everything gets solved when Emily finally finds her voice to explain to the police and the crowd of followers that it's OK to be different. Umm, sure, that was the answer all along, why not just explain the problem again to the curious mob, and they'll understand it this time, and then you get your apartment back and your deadbeat uncle gets a job and the bullying stops, only that's not the way the world works.
Well, I suppose things could have been worse - I could have watched "Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile". I don't have kids, I don't enjoy most movies made for kids, so why the hell do I keep watching movies made for kids? I really should stop doing that.
NITPICK POINT #2: The mother's trip home makes no sense, she calls from her taxi and says she's "headed to JFK" when she really means she's coming HOME from JFK, as she's in all of the scenes in NYC after that. Didn't anyone notice that her dialogue on the phone call is wrong? Also, do we really want to teach kids that they don't have to explain to their parents where they are or what they're currently doing, and that the best plan is to always hang up on your mother when she calls to check on you?
NITPICK POINT #3 & 4: The whole movie takes place over just a few days, during which the main characters get evicted, and in real life, any eviction process takes months, not days. (Don't ask me how I know this...). But in those same few days, Clifford the Giant Puppy never eats, and you would think that a giant dog would have a very big appetite. We never see him poop, either, maybe because he never eats anything? We do see him urinate, though, and that's a giant mess, then they address the fact that there's going to be another problem with poop later, but thankfully we never see it happen. But at some point it's inevitable, right?
Also starring Jack Whitehall (last heard in "Night at the Museum: Kahmunrah Rises Again"), Darby Camp, Tony Hale (last seen in "Being the Ricardos"), Sienna Guillory (last seen in "Love Actually"), David Alan Grier (last seen in "The Big Sick"), Russell Wong (last seen in "Escape Plan: The Extractors"), Izaac Wang (last heard in "Raya and the Last Dragon"), Kenan Thompson (last seen in "Hubie Halloween"), Tovah Feldshuh (last seen in "A Walk on the Moon"), Paul Rodriguez (last seen in "Linda Ronstadt: The Sound of My Voice"), Russell Peters (last seen in "Supercon"), Keith Ewell (last seen in "Trust Me"), Bear Allen-Blaine, Horatio Sanz (last seen in "Zeroville"), Rosie Perez (last seen in "Fearless"), Alex Moffat (last seen in "80 for Brady"), Jessica Keenan Wynn (last seen in "Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again"), Siobhan Fallon Hogan (last seen in "The Professor"), Ty Jones, Mia Ronn, Madison Smith, Madison Morris, Yasha Jackson, Mateo Gomez (last seen in "In the Heights"), Khari McDowell, Raymond Neil Hernandez (last seen in "An American Pickle"), Neil Hellegers, Karen Lynn Gorney, Barney Fitzpatrick, Jackson Frazer (last seen in "Maggie's Plan").
RATING: 4 out of 10 very loud and aggressive sheep (a very common NYC fixture, of course)
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