“Unfrosted,” a sweet new slice of Boomer porn now streaming on Netflix, is a one joke wonder about the corporate shenanigans behind the creation and marketing of Pop-Tarts®, the first successful shelf stable fruit jelly pastry product.
Writer/director Jerry Seinfeld stars as Bob Cabana, the product developer behind some of Kellogg’s greatest hits. When we join the story it’s 1963, in cereal’s ground zero, Battle Creek, Michigan, home to Kellogg’s and their largest rival Post.
Breakfast is defined by milk and cereal—”The magic of cereal is that you’re eating and drinking at the same time,” Cabana says.—but change is in the air. “It’s the 60s, “ says Marjorie Post (Amy Schumer) head of rival Post, “things are moving fast. There’s always a surprise in the box.”
When Cabana discovers two kids dumpster diving for discarded Post “goo,” a syrupy sweet treat they are developing for their new product, the holy grail of breakfast foods, a handheld fruit pastry.
As a corporation, Kellogg’s owns breakfast in America. They outsell Post and regularly clean up at the Bowl and Spoon Awards where they dominate the competition, winning statues in categories like “Easiest to Open Wax Bag.”
Fearing Post will get the jump on the new market, that they have “broken the pastry barrier,” Cabana flies into action. He recruits Donna Stankowski (Melissa McCarthy) a NASA scientist-turned-breakfast-food-designer to create a new breakfast treat.
But getting it to market is a long, convoluted process that involves everyone from Nikita Krushchev (Dean Norris) and President John F. Kennedy (Bill Burr) to Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan) and Tony the Tiger (Hugh Grant as mascot actor Thurl Ravenscroft).
“Unfrosted” is a silly ode to Pop-Tarts®. Slaphappy and over-the-top, it does not allow facts to sully the storytelling. Seinfeld pitches the performances and story at a very heightened level, like an “SNL” sketch stretched to feature length. He has nothing on his mind other than a scattergun approach of going for the jokes. The result is a hit and miss joke-to-laughs ratio, but Seinfeld has assembled an all-star comedic cast who know how to squeeze the laughs out of the material.
Gags about the Zapruder film and an unusually playful Walter Cronkite may fly over a younger audience’s collective heads, but should hit the mark with Boomers.
Ultimately, like the snack it is based on, “Unfrosted” is empty calories but may provide a sugar rush.
You don’t expect a healthy dose of existentialism from a family friendly musical, but the new Netflix animated film “Leo” is not your normal family friendly musical.
Adam Sandler voices Leo, a 74-year-old lizard facing his own mortality. He has lived most of his life in a Central Florida fifth-grade classroom terrarium with his best pal, curmudgeonly turtle Squirtle (Bill Burr). It’s a pretty cushy existence. They are fed and looked after as they spend school year after school year observing the student’s behavior.
The action begins at the beginning of a school term. “Another year,” says Squirtle, “another batch of fifth grade head cases.”
The new year brings with it a new substitute teacher, the hard-nosed Miss Malkin (Cecily Strong). She calls the laptops the kids use “toys,” bans them from the classroom and is not averse to whipping a Ninja star at a misbehaving student. “In a classroom,” she says, “sometimes the old ways are the best ways.”
She also implements a new school project. “I hope everyone has met our class pets, Leonardo and Squirtle,” she says. “This year, every student has to take home a class pet.” In an exercise to learn responsibility, the kids must feed and care for Leo and Squirtle, and return them the next day healthy and happy.
When Leo learns the life expectancy for lizards is 75 years, he feels like the clock is ticking. He decides to make the most of the time he has left, break his lifelong rule, and let the children hear him speak. When the kids take him home, he becomes a service reptile and teaches them life lessons. “It’s about sharing my 74 years of wisdom to help these kids with their issues,” he says, “like breaking up with a drone or having hand me down pants.”
He helps the kids and in return, they give him purpose.
“Leo” is a simple, sweet natured film that plays like a mash-up of “Billy Madison” and “Charlotte’s Web.” It is asinine and sublime in equal measure, an entertaining mix of Sandler’s trademark low-brow humor and poignant life lessons for kids and parents.
The songs are spirited, and often quite funny—Sandler does Sondheim lite with “Don’t cry/it’s really annoying”—and while they may not stick in your head after the closing credits roll, the tunes support the film’s themes of listening and learning. The best of the bunch being “Extra Time,” a funny song that convinces a rich, entitled girl that she is not all that.
The voice work is fun. Sandler does Sandler, both silly and sensitive, and finds a good comedic foil in Burr, while the rest of the cast, including Strong, Jason Alexander, Jo Koy, Kevin James and two Sandler family members, daughters Sunny and Sadie, hand in lively performances.
“Leo” presents a kinder, gentler Sandler than the one who got into an on-screen fight with beloved game show host Bob Barker in “Happy Gilmore.” It could sit on the shelf next to the comedian’s last film, “You Are So Not Invited to My Bat Mitzvah,” in that it’s a movie that understands young people and how they think. Tackling everything from helicopter parents (or, in this updated version, Drone Parents), insecurity, bullying and coping with divorce, it’s an after-school-special style story that encourages kids to talk about their feelings, and teachers and parents to hear them. It could’ve been preachy, but the messages are delivered with a smile on the face, and a song on the lips.
In his first film in five years Channing Tatum trades in the g-strings and dance moves of “Magic Mike” for a dog leash and self-awareness. “Dog,” now playing in theatres, is a pet project of a sort for Tatum, who not only stars but also makes his directorial debut in a movie about the power of the dog to change a life.
Tatum plays Jackson Briggs, a former U.S. Army Ranger sidelined by a traumatic brain injury and PTSD. Cut adrift of the military, in civilian life he is lost, separated from the only world he truly feels part of. He wants back in, but his medical status won’t allow a return to service.
When his best Ranger friend dies in Arizona, Briggs is offered a way back into the military. “You want to get back in the game?” asks Ranger Jones (Luke Forbes). “Prove it. Sergeant Rodriguez was a legend. Family funeral is Sunday outside of Nogales. They want his dog at the funeral. You do this, and you’re back in the game.”
The dog is Lulu, a Belgian Malinois military working dog, who vicious nature worked well in the field, less so back on base. “One minute she’s good,” says Briggs, “the next minute she’s sending three guys to the ER.”
Despite Lulu’s temper, Briggs agrees to drive her down the Pacific Coast from Joint Base Lewis–McChord in Washington to the funeral in Arizona. The unlikely pair head out on an eventful road trip, one that may lead to redemption for both.
“Dog” is a low-key man and his dog movie that quietly examines the after effects of trauma and the healing power of companionship and respect. As the miles tick by, Briggs comes to understand the shared bond between man and dog. Both are figuring out life outside the war zones that were their homes for many years, and both are forever marked by the experience. As their relationship deepens, it’s clear the key to their recovery is mutual TLC.
The movie takes some strange detours along the way—like a long sequence where Briggs pretends to be blind to get a fancy hotel suite or an odd encounter with a cannabis farmer who believes Briggs is an assassin—but the beating heart of the movie is the relationship between man and dog.
Tatum brings his likeable self to a character who isn’t always likeable. The film places Briggs is comedic and dramatic situations, which gives the movie an uneven tone—there are some “ruff” spots—but Tatum levels the field, providing continuity between the film’s goofy and gallant moments. Most importantly, he shares great chemistry with Lulu, who is actually played by three different canine actors. Tatum and co-director Reid Carolin make sure to include lots of close-ups of the Lulu’s soulful eyes, and in those scenes Tatum’s warmth shines through.
“Dog” is not a movie that teaches a lot of new tricks to the dog or to the audience but it does end on an emotional note with a welcome, if well-worn message, of the healing power of companionship.
For six seasons on “Saturday Night Live” Pete Davidson has tempered humour with acute candor to forge a deeply personal kind of comedy based on his life experiences. His new film, “The King of Staten Island,” now on VOD, is his most self-confessional work yet.
Davidson plays Scott, a semi-fictional version of himself, as a directionless twenty-four-year old still living with his widowed mother Margie (Marisa Tomei). When he was seven his firefighter father was killed in the line of duty, leaving a wound on Scott’s psyche that has never healed. He’s so skinny and pale with such large dark circles under his eyes his on-and-off girlfriend Kelsey (Bel Powley) says he “looks like an anorexic panda,” and his patchwork of random tattoos leads a friend to call him a “human sketchbook.” He dreams of one day opening up a restaurant-slash-tattoo parlor but spends most of his time smoking weed and hanging out with his childhood pals.
When Margie becomes romantically involved with Ray (Bill Burr), a firefighter with a hair trigger temper, it forces Scott to confront the past tragedy in his life so he can move forward.
“The King of Staten Island” is an imagined version of Davidson’s life if he hadn’t found comedy and become famous. His father Scott was a member of Ladder Company 118 in Brooklyn Heights and died responding to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That loss has become the bedrock of his work and provides the emotional backbone of this film.
Director Judd Apatow is no stranger to making films with big hearts and dirty mouths. Like his previous films, like “Trainwreck,” he frontloads the story with outrageous laughs that slowly give way to a funny but more restrained resolution.
Along the way Davidson delivers a performance that lifts his patented millennial slacker routine to a new level. He’s a natural performer, charismatic and likeable, with a deep well of emotion that lies just beneath his pothead exterior. He’s a perfect vessel to tell a story about someone experiencing profound loss.
The supporting cast is terrific. Burr embodies the ragehead with a heart of gold, drifting through life while Tomei has an interesting arc as a woman who lets go of the past to find a new future.
The premise of “The King of Staten Island” doesn’t sound like the stuff of comedy but this story of how tragedy effects a family balances humour with heartfelt and humanistic observations in a very winning way.
Richard will host a “JFL42 In Conversation” with comedian Bill Burr on Saturday September 23 at TIFF Bell Lightbox (350 King Street West). Tickets are sold out for this event!
Why Bill Burr?
Because his Monday Morning Podcast is one of the most downloaded comedy podcasts on iTunes
Because we can’t get enough of his hit animated Netflix series, F Is For Family (season 2 out now!)
Because he’s performing 3 shows at the Sony Center! You’re not going to want to miss this
