BEFORE: OK, I've got a couple days off now before I have to return to the very crowded, very busy festival. Which is fine, I can't hog all the shifts, and I need the break, physically and mentally. I may sneak into Manhattan today on a stealth mission to watch a certain big-budget sci-fi franchise movie before it disappears from theaters, but I'm not paying for popcorn, I'm going to sneak in some from home. I'm on a budget - but that film will play a crucial linking purpose for me at the end of the month.
Sandra Oh carries over again from "Over the Moon". One other actor also carries over, but I only needed one.
THE PLOT: Fourteen-year-old Jason Shepherd has a reputation for stretching the truth. So when abig-time Hollywood producer steals his class paper and turns it into a smash hit movie, no one believes Jason's latest tall tale.
AFTER: Yeah, I figured that once I hit June and started looking for movies about fathers, and people's relationships with their fathers, some would turn up. It's inevitable, and it's not just the chain or my subconscious working stuff out, it's just such a common theme - school films, too, they keep turning up everywhere because everyone goes to school, duh, and if I can keep most of those films contained to May/June or September, then I'm fine with it. Summer break is for documentaries and movies about going to camp or going on vacation. I have spoken.
The reason I'm counting this as a Father's Day film is that young Jason kept stressing that the most important thing for him to do was to win back his father's trust, after telling so many lies about homework and chores and whatever else. So apparently he doesn't give a crap about what his mother thinks of him, he's really focused on how his father perceives him. His teacher, either, though if he could get his teacher to believe in him he might not have to finish summer school, and that would ALSO solve his current problems, but OK, keep focusing on Dad, I guess. I think having your teachers believe in you is important, I spent years being a straight-A student who almost never got in trouble, and this paid off when I got to high school and my teachers and the school staff completely trusted me, to the point where I could skip the last couple periods and walk right out of the building, past the office, and everyone just assumed I had a valid reason to do so. Now, I never skipped a class, I only left early if I had a study hall period at the end of the day, but my point is that nobody ever checked to see if that was the case, they just let me go home early. People with straight-arrow reputations can actually get away with more...
But let's focus on Jason Shepherd, who is forced to do a homework assignment FOR ONCE or he would lose 1/3 of his grade in English class, so he buckles down and writes a story as required. But then after getting a lift in a limo from a Hollywood director and accidentally leaving his essay behind, he learns that Hollywood is filled with the worst kind of people, who will steal your ideas (if they're good) and make sure you don't get credit for them. Yeah, that tracks. I mean, if filmmakers weren't required to list the people who worked on the film in the credits, or face prosecution by not telling you that Charles Dickens wrote "David Copperfield", I bet they just wouldn't. "Wait, we don't have to PAY Dickens? He's dead? Well, then why should he get a writing credit?"
I learned what kind of a director I was working for early on, when I began working for this notable animator in 1993 he was working on a live-action film in between cartoons, and we got this whole feature finished and we were working on the credits - I found a document in our files that was a signed agreement between him and an actor who demanded that his name appear in the credits a certain way - it had to be the only name on the screen at the time and be visible for no less than 30 seconds. My boss had signed the piece of paper, agreeing to these conditions in exchange for the actor playing the role, signing a release and (I assume) getting paid. But when it came time to create the "scroll" for the credits, suddenly the director found these terms unacceptable, because it would make the credits take up too much time, slightly - plus there were like 40 or 50 other actors we had to list. So the director said, "Well, we're not doing THAT even though I was holding a piece of paper that said he was legally bound to do so." That's what you call a red flag, and that kind of prepared me for the next 30 years of working for the man, always struggling to get him to do things the "right" way. Eventually he stopped listening to me, so I stopped working there - wait, that might not be in the right order.
Filmmaking is a collaborative effort, and you would think there would be room for everyone to get the credit they deserve for their work, but if you look at any film on the IMDB there are actors listed as "uncredited", meaning they only wanted to recognize the efforts of SOME people, and really, that's across the board. The guilds will only award two or three of the writers on a film, even if 37 people contributed to a screenplay - and the visual FX companies employ dozens, hundreds of people even who never make it to the final credits. Why, it's almost like there are two or three people at the top of the food chain who want to take credit for everybody else's work...
So really, who would be surprised if a director took a story written by a kid and made it into a movie, while giving himself or his assistant the writing credit? I sure wouldn't. There's a guy on Instagram who makes songs out of stories his young daughter writes, and he's way more honest about it than a Hollywood director or producer would be. Marty Wolf is the director of a film called "Whitaker and Fowl", where a cop's partner turns out to be a chicken (named Whitaker, duh). It's a nod to films like "Turner and Hooch", maybe, only much stupider. So when the "Big Fat Liar" drops into his lap, it's a chance to make something that has much more depth, even if a kid wrote it, and something more imaginative as well.
One day after summer school (which Jason was forced to take because he didn't hand in that essay) he and his platonic girlfriend Kaylee go to the movies and see a teaser trailer for "Big Fat Liar", and now he's convinced he knows what happened to his essay, thanks to the rat-fink director who obviously stole his story. So Jason risks everything when his parents go on vacation (thankfully his adult sister would rather hang out with her new boyfriend then spend 5 minutes keeping track of him) to somehow get plane tickets to L.A. for him AND Kaylee (umm, NITPICK POINT, I think you have to be an adult to buy a plane ticket) and go and confront the director in person. SURELY once he's confronted face-to-face, the horrible director will see the error of his ways, give credit where credit is due, and call Jason's father to straighten the whole thing out.
Yeah, that doesn't happen - the horrible person continues being horrible and in fact BURNS the original draft of the screenplay. So Jason and Kaylee prank him by figuring out his daily routine of swimming and showering before going to work, and they chemically turn his skin blue and his hair orange. (umm, go Knicks? Mets?). Then they prank call his office and tell him the location of his meeting with the head of the studio has been changed, so he ends up at a kid's birthday party instead, and everyone assumes he's a clown and the kids beat him up. Look, I hate clowns as much as everyone else does (except for Puddles Pity Party) but this is a bit of a narrative short-cut in addition to being NITPICK POINT #2: there are no clowns with blue skin, really white is the only acceptable color for clown make-up, also it's not a given that kids are definitely going to beat up a clown at a party, there might be a couple good kids out there who could resist the temptation to give a clown the proper beat-down they deserve.
(You might think there would be a NITPICK POINT about Jason and Kaylee working and sleeping in the studio's prop house, making all their plans to get revenge work with the help of the studio's costumes and equipment, and they're never spotted on camera as intruders or kicked out by security guards. But we know this is possible, because it's how Steven Spielberg started his career, he got off the Universal studio tour in the very same way and just helped himself to an office. Anybody can do it, go ahead, give it a try, just go to a movie studio and don't ever leave, you could be the next Spielberg.)
Life gets worse for Marty Wolf when Jason messes with his car, causing all of the controls to go weird and random, leading to a fender-bender with a monster truck that leaves Marty's car crushed by the Masher. And STILL he won't make the phone call - though at this point he pretends to, he's really calling his own security, though, and making sure that the two kids are not only removed from his office, but taken to the airport the next morning and sent back to Michigan.
Before that can happen, though, Marty's overworked, under-paid and pissed-off (relatable!) assistant, Monty, steps in and prevents the kids from being shipped back to the Midwest or turned into L.A. landfill - and they hook up with the limo driver/aspiring actor that Marty had fired, as well as many other tormented or unfairly dismissed (and possibly sexually harassed) former employees who also bear grudges against Marty Wolf. After Marty went out of his way to get the financing to make his movie, the studio head did warn him that if only made ONE mistake, he'd be fired and cancelled. So all of those ex-employees team up on the first day of the shoot to give Marty the WORST day of his life, to not only ensure that he shows up late on the set, but also reveals on camera that he stole the movie plot from a kid. As a bonus, Jason's parents were told by him to fly to L.A. and get driven to the set, so they also get to hear Marty's confession, and Jason's father's faith in him is restored. Umm, NITPICK POINT #3, he probably should STILL be in trouble for ditching summer school, flying across the U.S. with no permission or adult supervision, and spending a fair amount of time making an adult man's life a living hell. Nah, I guess we're going to sweep all that under the carpet, because Jason's getting credit for writing the movie! He's 14 and he's got a screenwriting credit! Unfortunately now he's probably going to go to film school and become just another asshole writer/director himself. Sorry, that's just how I see it.
Marty is unable to work in Hollywood any more, and is forced to work as a birthday clown for real this time, so more beat-downs from kids are coming his way. Years later, of course, he would go on to direct a puff-piece documentary about the First Lady of the U.S. and move to Israel to attempt a show-biz comeback. Don't say it couldn't happen... Look, I know this is a silly, stupid little fantasy film, and really I put off watching it for the LONGEST possible time, but it's still watchable thanks to Paul Giamatti, who is so wonderfully over-the-top here with his aggressive nature. He's calmed down a lot in the last couple decades, so this is really PEAK angry, boiling-over Giamatti.
What doesn't really work here is the structure of the film - in the early parts of the film we see Jason being bullied, beat up by bigger teens, they take his skateboard. Jason learns exactly the wrong lesson from this, because when somebody else (Marty Wolf) has something that he wants, something that could save him from summer school, he becomes a bully HIMSELF in order to try and get Marty Wolf to call his father and explain things. Then when that doesn't work, he becomes an even BIGGER bully and gets a hundred other people to become bullies to get Marty kicked out of show business. This is a terrible message, especially in a film made for kids - if you don't get what you want, just make someone's life miserable until you do, and then if that doesn't work, just go ahead and destroy them.
Directed by Shawn Levy (director of "Deadpool & Wolverine")
Also starring Frankie Muniz (last seen in "Stuck on You"), Paul Giamatti (last seen in "The Holdovers"), Amanda Bynes (last seen in "She's the Man"), Amanda Detmer (last seen in "Drop Dead Gorgeous"), Donald Faison (last seen in "Waiting to Exhale"), Russell Hornsby (last seen in "After the Sunset"), Michael Bryan French (last seen in "I Still Know What You Did Last Summer"), Christine Tucci, Lee Majors (last seen in "The Fall Guy"), Sean O'Bryan (last seen in "Get a Job"), Amy Hill (last seen in "Let's Go to Prison"), John Cho (also carrying over from "Over the Moon"), Matthew Frauman (last seen in "Bounce"), Don Yesso (last seen in "I Love You Phillip Morris"), Rebecca Corry, Sparkle (last seen in "Man on Fire"), Taran Killam (last seen in "A Disturbance in the Force"), Alex Breckenridge (also last seen in "She's the Man"), Ned Brower (last seen in "Not Another Teen Movie"), John Gatins (last seen in "Varsity Blues"), Andre Rosey Brown (last seen in "Space Jam"), Steven Shenbaum (last seen in "Edtv"), Jake Miner, Ted Rooney (last seen in "Somebody I Used to Know"), Marisa Petroro (last seen in "Ford v Ferrari"), Randall Newsome (last seen in "Geostorm"), Michelle Griffin (last seen in "Boomerang"), Mike Smith (last seen in "Equilibrium"), Andrea Sevilla, Tracey Cherelle Jones (last seen in "Don't Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood"), Pat O'Brien (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Brian Turk (last seen in "Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles"), Patrick Falls, Timmy Fitzpatrick (last seen in "Just Married"), Corinne Reilly (last seen in "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde"), Kyle Swann
with cameos from Dustin Diamond (last seen in "Made"), Martin Klebba (last seen in "The Electric State"), Shawn Levy (last seen in "Made in America"), Kenan Thompson (last heard in "Trolls Band Together"), Jaleel White (last seen in "I Could Never Be Your Woman")
RATING: 5 out of 10 famous props in the prop house
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