BEFORE: So I've fallen into a routine of enjoying a couple of beers from the beer fridge on Friday nights, usually to take the edge off of a busy stressful week. BUT I've also been working on weekends at the theater here and there, so on some weekends I've had to alter my drinking plans, as oversleeping and not showing up would probably be very bad for keeping that job. This weekend my wife wanted to drive out to Long Island to buy cigarettes and then have lunch and do a bit of shopping, so I moved my beer night from Friday to Saturday, which was fine because I didn't work on Friday and I wasn't on the schedule until Sunday afternoon. So on Saturday, with nothing at stake, I enjoyed a couple strong beers from the Brooklyn Brewery, one was a can of their Black Ops stout, which I purchased during an event there in January, and that beer is 12.4% ABV. So I knew there was a good chance that beer would knock me out, and possibly interfere with my ability to watch "The Garfield Movie". Or, you know, maybe it would make the film watchable, there was really no way to know except to try it and see what happens...
Ving Rhames carries over from "The Wild Robot".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "Garfield: A Tale of Two Kitties" (Movie #1,003)
THE PLOT: After Garfield's unexpected reunion with his long-lost father, ragged alley cat Vic, he and his canine friend Odie are forced from their perfectly pampered lives to join Vic on a risky heist.
AFTER: OK, so I did fall asleep about 30 minutes in to this film, I put only partial blame on the strong beer, an Imperial stout. I must have been asleep for about 15 minutes, but then I woke up and felt fine, I did have to rewind the film on Netflix and try to determine the last plot point that I remembered, but then I was awake for the rest of the film, and even a few hours after that. (Man, if you thought my sleeping schedule was bad before, just wait, with only the one part-time job and an irregular schedule, it's probably about to get a lot worse.)
I speak tonight as (probably) the only adult male with no kids who has watched BOTH of the previous Garfield films - go ahead, try to find another person who will admit that, I dare you. Really, I had no problem with Bill Murray as the voice of Garfield, it just FIT somehow, because the character is noted for his sarcastic, detached, above-it-all yet constantly annoyed by everything attitude, and I think Mr. Murray's voice just worked fine for that. Chris Pratt, I'm really not sold on - he made some kind of push to do a few animated films, I think some actors just want to do voice-work because they perceive it as an easy payday, or maybe they just want to impress their kids, I don't know. But I also wonder if professional voice actors who have spent the majority of their careers in that arena resent the intrusion by top-name Hollywood types who were probably cast just to get an A-list name attached to help sell the film. Look, I've done voice work in movies (that I produced) and almost nobody knows who I am, and honestly, I think I prefer it that way. Sure I could be putting a reel together and trying to get more jobs doing voice-acting, but man, it sure seems like a lot of work. Maybe it's time to just close that door, I had some success at it and that's fine. Recently I was asked to do commentary on two new Blu-Ray releases for animated features I produced back in 1998 and 2001, still waiting for the recognition for that, however.
(Meanwhile, I'm getting job notices from Indeed about hotel management jobs and also catering manager jobs, so I get the feeling that Indeed's matrix just doesn't understand my career goals at all...)
Here's the real problem when making a "Garfield" movie - Garfield's personality was designed to appeal to adults, he's fat and lazy and enjoys Italian food and hates Mondays. He's condescening and rude and hates going to the doctor, these all feel like very adult things. How do you translate that into something that interests kids? They took the tactic here of depicting him as a small kitten in flashbacks, so yeah, I guess kids might identify more with a kitten than an adult cat, plus he's a kitten who feels like his father abandoned him. OK, that's a bit sad, but maybe a bunch of kids out there can relate, they might either have absent fathers or be afraid of being separated from their parents, or they have foster parents, step-parents and maybe they see themselves in Garfield's situation just a bit.
But also Garfield is very active in this film, he leaves the house and he goes on a heist, he does a lot of action-oriented stunts and flies drones, he solves problems and takes action, in ways similar to Tom Cruise's character in "Mission: Impossible". This all kind of goes against his traditional image of being fat, lazy and uninterested in most things - but it does make for a more action-packed movie, I'll concede that point. Still, it's not the Garfield that many of us grew up with, this is like a whole new character in many ways, and it leads to a story that is so far-fetched and unlikely that it starts out at unbelievable and just continues to get more ridiculous as it wears on. Honestly I'm more willing to believe in a future robot that gets stranded on an island and learns to communicate with animals than I am to believe in a Garfield who goes on a mission to steal milk from a dairy farm and then battle a gang of stray dogs and cats on a fast-moving train.
First, though, Garfield manages to connect with that stray cat father of his, and I don't think that the comic strip has depicted a father for Garfield in all the 87 years that the strip has been published on a daily basis. OK, but the strip has probably explored every other possible thing for Garfield to do or say, so I'm guessing the cartoonist ran out of ideas about 20 years ago, or longer. That's really the best thing I can say about this film, somebody really thought outside the (litter) box and said, we need to get this cat out of the house and up on his feet, and turn him into an action hero, as unlikely as that sounds. Vic seems to be the leader of this weird gang of stray cats and dogs at first, but then the real leader is revealed, a female cat named Jinx, who wants Vic and his son to steal milk from that dairy farm, in return for the years she spent in the animal shelter after she got caught during a previous heist.
So Garfield, Vic, and for some reason the mute dog, Odie, jump on a train and head out to the dairy, and the next morning Jon, Garfield's owner, notices that his two pets are gone, so he checks the whole house (but not outside?) and then calls Find-a-Pet and proceeds to spend the next three days on hold. Is this believable? Like, if I lost my cat I wouldn't call some service, I would run outside and start checking the neighborhood. Just saying. But the writer didn't seem interested in doing anything with this character at all, so sure, by all means, let's have him on the phone for almost the rest of the film.
The heist crew gets more than they bargained for when they learn how difficult it's going to be to break in to the super-high-tech dairy, but outside they meet Otto, the dairy's bull mascot, who has been separated from his wife, a cow named Ethel. Their plans dovetail rather neatly, as Otto knows the dairy farm inside out, so the plans are made to break in, rescue Ethel and also leave with a truck full of milk to deliver to Jinx. This is where the film starts to resemble a "Mission: Impossible" mission, and Ving Rhames as the voice of the planner sending instructions by acorn radio to the agents inside really drives that point home.
NITPICK POINT: Meanwhile the screenwriters prove that they have ZERO idea how a dairy works, because it's all cartoon-like high-tech conveyor belts and moving platforms. Really, a dairy might make cheese and butter, but it would not make fondue in giant crocks, that makes no sense. Fondue is something that a restaurant makes or a person might make at home with cheese. Also I'm pretty sure that a dairy wouldn't slice its cheese with an array of cleavers held by robotic hands, that's all very "Looney Tunes" and just seems very weird. The whole interior of the dairy looks like some kind of nuclear reactor or a missile command center, not believable at all. Giant six-foot blocks of cheese on hooks, moving from room to room. Believe me, I've seen how cheese is made, and guaranteed it doesn't involve this much action. Curdling and fermenting are very non-cinematic processes, though, still you can't just make a dairy work however you need it to work. Stupid animators and their lack of knowledge about mechanical devices...
The whole film just feels like it's firing in all directions, hoping to get lucky and score a hit, or at least come close. Probably a whole team of screenwriters with no idea about how anything works in the real world just made a bunch of stuff up, with the goal of making kids want to work in a cool high-tech dairy one day? I guess the world really needs dairy farmers or something?
Still, I guess you can't argue with success, this film cost $60 million to make and took in $257 million worldwide, so that probably means that more Garfield films are on the way. It would be great if they made a little more sense, but apparently kids aren't that picky about such things. Stupid plot points may bother adult people more easily.
Directed by Mark Dindal (director of "The Emperor's New Groove" and "Chicken Little")
Also starring the voices of Chris Pratt (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Samuel L. Jackson (last seen in "Basic"), Hannah Waddingham (last seen in "The Hustle"), Nicholas Hoult (last seen in "The Menu"), Cecily Strong (last seen in "The Bronze"), Harvey Guillen (last heard in "Wish"), Brett Goldstein (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Bowen Yang (last seen in "Bros"), Snoop Dogg (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Janelle James, Angus Cloud, Jeff Foxworthy (last heard in "The Fox and the Hound 2"), Eugenia Caruso (last seen in "The Witches"), Luke Cinque-White, Dev Joshi, Chana Keefer, Mark Keefer, Edward Montgomery, Mark Dindal (last heard in "The Emperor's New Groove"), Cameron Bernard Jones, Darren Foreman, Timothy Quinlan, Matt Rippy (last seen in "American Assassin"), Alicia Grace Turrell, Eric Loren (last seen in "Memphis Belle"), Melli Bond, Lynsey Murrell, Hannah Felix.
RATING: 4 out of 10 squares of lasagna in a to-go box
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