9 Lives (2016)
On this episode, Mike had to endure the 2016 family comedy-fantasy, Nine Lives, directed by The Addam’s Family’s Barry Sonnenfeld and starring the now-ostracized superstar actor, Kevin Spacey. While the movie isn’t a “purr-fect” match for Mike, or anyone for that matter – it has a lowly 14% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, was it so bad it made him “fur-ious?” We’ll learn his thoughts about this cinematic “cat-strophe” and then dig our claws into our bottom five children’s films; a list of cinematic hairballs that made us “hiss-sterical,” both as parents and as kids. After that, we’ll paws and reflect during a game of kick two, pick two where – out of four movies given – we must pick the two that are the cat’s meow while casting the other two into an eternal litter box. Finally, Mike will sharpen his whiskers when he reveals the movie I will have to watch as penance for all of these horrible puns come our next episode. But before all of that happens, let’s curl up with the trailer to the movie Rolling Stone gave zero out of four stars, “Nine Lives.”
Mike, this one had to have been a struggle. And I have to wonder, what in the actual Hell was Barry Sonnenfeld thinking when he took on this project? A movie in which Kevin Spacey plays an unlikeable business mogul who magically has his soul transported into a cat when he falls off a building.
Sonnenfeld’s career is a goddamn minefield. He’s got some solid offerings with the two Addams Family films starring the perfect Morticia and Gomez in Anjelica Huston and Raul Julia and he helmed the three Men in Black movies that actually matter. Add to that Get Shorty and a producing career that includes Out of Sight and Enchanted, and you’d think all’s quiet on the western front. Then, BOOM. Wild Wild West, a notorious bomb starring Will Smith that ending his box office win streak, RV, a painfully unfunny film counted among Robin Williams’s last screen credits and, this. THIS. A talking cat movie that arrived a solid 15 or so years after the novelty wore off of CG being used to make animals talk. So… what the fuck?
I saw this in cinemas with my oldest son and, hilariously, neither of us really remember it. So part of the reason I gave you this was to see if you recounting it would jog my memory.
What do we do about Kevin Spacey? He’s never been proven guilty, but the aura around him is that he is a very bad dude that has used his fame, money and influence for reportedly very questionable things.
I watched one of my favorite movies ever a few nights ago, Love & Death by Woody Allen, an artist who has been convicted of pretty heinous shit, although like Spacey, he has managed to avoid being found guilty for his alleged abuses.
In the case of Allen, we see his love for young women in many of his films so it’s easy to imagine him being a bit repulsive in real life – especially as he married his ex’s adopted daughter, Soon-Yi Previn who is 35 years younger than him. When they were married, she was 27, he was 62.
I still like a lot of Allen’s work, but over time I watched less and less of his stuff, especially after these stories accusing him of sexual abuse came out from his biological daughter, Dylan after he married Previn. Too weird.
With Spacey, I had to dig a bit to figure out what was going on. Spacey plays smarmy, often terrible characters, and his well-known persona on the David Fincher-produced political drama, House of Cards, is a selfish, powerful and dangerous man you love to hate. Was Spacey telling us who he is?
Bottom Five Children’s Films:
5.) The Apple Dumpling Gang (1975)
Dir. Norman Tokar
Horrendously unfunny, dusty, old, dumb Disney live-action garbage starring Don Knotts, Tim Conway, Harry Morgan and Bill freakin Bixby – this thing was already a has-been flick when I saw it in 1980 at a preschool and knew, then and there as a five year-old, that bad slapstick is the lowest form of comedy there is. Honestly. I loved Don Knotts on Three’s Company, but in this weird comedy-western hybrid, his appearances – as well as Conway’s – were momentary bright spots in an endless wasteland of terrible, Benny Hill-style tomfoolery, without Benny Hill’s little gifts of British eye-candy. What else do you expect from the director of The Cat From Outer Space and, oh God, the childhood-ruining Where the Red Fern Grows. I mean, this guy clearly knows comedy!
4.) Storks (2016)
Dirs. Doug Streetland and Nicholas Stoller
While Nicholas Stoller’s resume includes a wonderful Pixar short called “Presto” about a magician’s fed-up Bunny, Doug Streetland’s career as a director definitely connects the dots to this obnoxious, loud, unfunny, loud, frenetic, loud mess of a children’s movie about where babies come from. Stoller is the director behind the two Neighbors movies starring Seth Rogan and Zac Efron and Get Him to the Greek with professional shit-heel Russel Brand. The movie is the first children’s movie I’d ever seen that made me realize I was getting too old for children’s movies. I was cranky and frustrated by it, the visuals were far too busy and the action far, far too chaotic and difficult to follow. I used to say Nolan’s Batman action scenes were shot in confuse-o-vision, a term I stole from some episode of MST3K. This whole movie was shot in confuse-o-vision! All this said, it had these pretty funny wolf characters, one of whom was voiced by Jordan Peele who said “I agree. I agree. I agree,” a line from the trailer that was tolerable due to its short running time. I still repeat that damn line these many years later.
3.) Snowflake: The White Gorilla (2011)
Dir. Andres D Schaer
Called Floquet de Neu in its native France, I honestly think this flick miggt have been ok in its original language and I would watch the original with subtitles. The US-dubbed version though? No. Just… NO. Christopher Lloyd, Ariana Grande and David Spade collect paychecks for horrendously awful voice over work, but I will say, the man Keith David, he of John Carpenter’s The Thing and They Live – as well as the voice of the cat in Coraline – brings it as the alpha gorilla. It’s a story that tries to teach kids about racism, but the dubbing. It’s… it makes the over the top acting so much worse, nigh unwatchable. This is the kind of thing that would have been played on an endless loop in Guantanamo.
2.) Norm of the North (2016)
Dir. Trevor Wall
I wish I could tell you about anything that happened in Norm of the North, but all I really remember was falling asleep in the movie theater, periodically waking up to check on my son to ensure he was still seated beside me, then trying to refocus on what was happening onscreen until, only a moment later, I fell asleep again. I know Rob Schneider did the voice of the lead character, a polar bear named Norm that gets trapped on a melting ice sheet that he rides to New York City. It’s like an awful version of Happy Feet, which in and of itself wasn’t great. But this was worse. It was so much worse. Although now I wonder if my current bout of insomnia might be cured. Perhaps there is a reason for this film afterall? I know too that Heather Graham leant her voice to the flick as well. I have no memory of her. Just a general feeling of ill-will toward the filmmakers and, perhaps, my son, who seemed to wholeheartedly be enjoying himself.
1.) Home Alone 2 (1992)
Dir. Chris Columbus.
I like almost everything Chris Columbus does. One of the writers behind The Goonies, Gremlins and the very underrated John Candy-Alley Sheedy comedy, Only the Lonely, Columbus is best known as the director of the two Christmas Chronicles movies starring Kurt Russell as the best version of Santa Claus ever, the first two Harry Potter adaptations, the Robin Williams classic Mrs. Doubtfire, and most notably, the original Home Alone. His instincts so often seem so good, as do those of perhaps even better-known Writer-Director John Hughes with whom Columbus often collaborated. So what in the ever-loving name of Maureen O’Hara happened when the pair reteamed to recapture the magic of 1990’s Home Alone? What HAPPENED? This joyless, unfunny, cold-hearted and ultimately infuriating sequel to what I consider one of the best moviegoing experiences of my life is the single most disappointing movie I’ve ever almost seen. And I say “almost” because I actually walked out of the cinema. Me, at 18 years old, a film student looking to relive the winter magic of the original Home Alone which made me laugh and cry while at the theater, alone… this time, I was left feeling truly alone. And to see the wonderful, incredible Tim Curry debase himself by accepting the role as an inept and rude hotel manager? I prefer to think he was blackmailed into it. Ugh. This movie is one of the first times I ever saw Donald Trump on the big screen and I recall thinking to myself, god this is horrendous. This pandering bullshittery. This flatulent consumerist retread. This heartless fuckstickery. Trump belonged in this in a much bigger role while Curry? He should have been anywhere else. Anywhere but here, on the screen in Somerville, Massachusetts, where a dumbstruck teen learned that nothing is precious and everything bows to the promise of the dollar.