Phrase of the Moment:
¤ Phrase: "Did you hear something?"
¤ Usage: *cats crash through the room engaged in noisy mortal combat*
Flux: "Did you hear something?"
Malaya: "Nope."
¤ Synonyms: N/A
¤ Notes: This one is a little game Malaya and I play where in one of the cats makes a loud or pathetic noise, and I ask if she heard it, and she says no.  Dusty used to be the cause of this, with his frequently yowling or noisy/clumsy TV-mounting attempts, but now that we have two cats who frequently chase each other around and make a lot of noise doing it, the saying is more all purpose.

Over the months it's become ritualized to the point that any time we hear any loud, interrupting noise, at home or elsewhere, I can say, "Did you..." and she'll immediately reply, "Nope." -- January 14, 2004

Malaya and I went out Saturday for Valentine's Day celebration type stuff, and I was going to write about that. But I didn't.

I also had plans to write about two movie trailers, both of which I think are pretty poo, but for different reasons.  But I didn't.

However, all is not lost.  I will write up the V-day stuff tomorrow, and I did write about one movie trailer.  However it went very long, turned into a whole discussion of why the product that inspired the movie is now so suck, and led me into reading all sorts of weird fan and anti-fan sites about this and that.  And as a result, it's damn near 7am and Malaya just woke up for work and I want to go to bed after a quick Hell Flayer Jungle run with my bowazon, so I'll be writing about the second movie trailer tomorrow, and perhaps even posting it then, unless I get all carried away with miscellaneous other bullshit and don't get to it again.

Which isn't at all out of the question.

Since the movie trailer/comic strip discussion below is so long, and I don't have any news written already, I'm not going to do any now.  My, isn't this a day of disappointments and denials?

I do have the following quick little story though, which is entirely autobiographical.

Playing some side by side D2 a couple of nights ago, I found a large charm and said out loud, "Funny how they called the medium-sized charms large." 

Malaya goes, without missing a beat, "Must have been a man who named them."

She then proceeds to giggle for about five minutes.

No wonder they don't allow women to work in the gaming industry.

While movie trailers are meant for promotional purposes, they're also of great use to people like me, who read about and read reviews of and know something about most every movie that comes out, but who don't actually want to see 95% of them.  I'll gladly sit through 2 or 3 minutes of a trailer, ideally on my home computer so if it's death I can just bail on it. Sorta sucks when you're stuck in a theater and that new 2.5 minute cheese fest for some stupid new kid's cartoon comes on, and you're stuck sitting through the whole thing.  For this reason I'm very glad that they generally group the trailers by genre, and run them on similar films.

I blog about trailers on occasion, but I could do it a lot more. I often think that I could do a full blog on movie trailers every week, since I always have opinions about them, usually strong ones (opinions) and I'd cover 3 or 4 trailers with half a dozen paragraphs each.  Plus it would be a good blog feature since everyone reading it could watch the trailer also (some more easily than others) and form their own opinion and compare/contrast that with my take.  Perhaps some day in the future when I've got comments of some sort working on the site, and it can be a more interactive thing. Also, it assumes that readers who are reading these blogs actually want to read what their fellow readers think about things. That's not necessarily so, and why (along with my galloping megalomaniacal ego) I don't feel any need to have actual forums on this site.  It's not like I'm hosting some sort of "black champagne community" site; there is no community.  It's Flux and his bullshit, broadcast world wide.  Often with cat photos.

Anyway, it's not like I'd be doing informative movie trailer blogging; I'd nitpick and criticize and joke and even occasionally praise one, and it would be a humor or review feature, not an information segment. There are plenty of other sites that handle that sort of thing.

So to recap, I could, I should, and I sometimes do. And today is one of those days, but only since I'm motivated by one of the worst trailers I've ever seen, and the movie it's taken from which rapes one of my few remaining happy childhood memories.

Yes, it's Garfield!  I first saw the Garfield trailer some months ago, and was surprised to see the link.  I'd never heard that they were making the movie, and when I saw the trailer link I was instantly filled with great trepidation. I was curious to see the trailer, since I knew nothing about the project, but I dreaded it at the same time. I didn't know if it was 2d animation, 3d animation, live action with lip synch animals ALA Look Whose Talking, or what. As it turns out, it's the worst of all possible worlds.  It's live action everything... except Garfield.  He's some sort of Roger Rabbit-esque computer animated anthropomorphized cat-thing, "interacting" with live humans and trained animals, but he looks bad.  Really bad.  Hulk/Gumby bad. Not like a cat, but not like a human either.  He does look a bit like the 2d cartoon version of himself, but the cartoon version works okay since it's only seen with the cartoon versions of mice, humans, dogs, spiders, etc.  When you put it in next to real humans and dogs, it's just disturbing. And fake.

There are a lot of things I hate about this trailer and the movie in general.  So let's sort them by issue.

How it looks

The special effects basically suck. He doesn't really look there; not like Gollum did.  He looks like a cartoon someone drew into the frame, and he looks, well... cartoonish.  Like the Hulk did, but at least Hulk he had the extra burden of trying to be human-like.  He didn't make it. As for Garfield here, he could look like pretty much anything.  We want a fat orange cat, but there is so much margin for error in that definition that it's hard to see how they went so wrong.  It's like they tried to make him catlike, while still remaining sort of human-like, and also wanted him to be cartoon-like. And I guess they succeeded, but the problem is that their end product is just unpleasantly ugly, especially in the face shots.

The three pics here are straight from the trailer, in highest quality, and I really hope these are still working effects that have yet to be polished, since they are just ass.  CGI, circa 1994 quality. Notice how blurry he is in every shot, while the other things are crisp and clear?  They're doing Garfield at about 4 FPS, while the rest of the stuff runs at 8 or 12 or 16FPS in the Internet trailer, so they have to blur him between movements, both to make him faster and more cartoonish, and also to save on the amount of cells they need to modify.  He looks really bad in any freeze frame; blurry and pixelish, but you notice it watching at normal speed as well.  It just looks cleap and blurry, rather than crisp and realistic.

I think going the Roger Rabbit way, or even Gollum way, would have worked better. Do something that looks unique and cartoonish, but if the actors work with it, the viewer will buy it. Don't try to make him 90% cat, but then have him bipedal, with human-like posture, and a human face.  It's just ugly, like Mike Myers in Cat in the Hat.  I'd have modified the ears to put them more on the side, like a real cat.  He looks okay in the cartoon with them straight up, as does Odie, but on the CGI version the head just looks squashed and very un-catlike.

There are other animals in the movie as well; other dogs, other cats, and a mouse.  More on those in the story section below, but I'm guessing they'll all be live animals, which will just make Garfield look more out of place as he interacts with them.  And if some others are cartoons also, while Garfield is the only CGI thing in the movie... well that will be even worse.

Cute dog... but playing Odie?  Couldn't they at least have gotten a blonde one, or dyed this one Labrador yellow?

The Cast and Story

Garfield's voice is being done by Bill Murray, which is fine.  I really don't care what he sounds like when his look is so bad, but Murray seems a good choice.  He's laid back and mellow, but can probably summon up some rage when needed.

Jennifer Love Hewitt is playing Liz, the vet, who hasn't been in the daily strip in about 5 years, as far as I know.  I recall reading an interview with Jim Davis (creator of Garfield and and retired for about 15 years, as far as can be told by the strip quality) some years ago, in which he talked about upcoming plot developments, and that Jon and Liz's relationship might start to expand towards marriage. Since nothing of the kind ever occurred, I surmise that the "creative team" (and I use that term very loosely) running the daily strip realized that an actual plot or narrative was a bad idea, since it would mean they needed writers, and that readers would need to pay some attention to it to follow along.

As for the rest of the cast, I'll quote from the synopsis, as presented on the Garfield the Movie website.  (Which I recommend you not visit, since you have to sit through a long and very cheesy introduction with animation almost as bad as the movie itself.)

The film also features the voice talents of Debra Bessing as Arlene, a cute feline who keeps Garfield on his toes; Brad Barret as Luca, the neighborhood Doberman; and Alan Cumming as Persnikitty, another cat with whom Garfield crosses paths.

Also featured are the voice talents of Nick Cannon as Louis, a mouse; Jimmy Kimmel as Spanky, a pit bull with a Bronx accent; David Eigenberg as Nermal, a friendly feline; and Mo'nique as a rat.

What part of this isn't a train wreck?

I don't have any comment on the voice actors, since I don't think that really matters.  I have never spent much time projecting the accents or inflections of the cartoon characters, so as long as no one sounds jarringly awful or out of place, I'm fine with it.  I also don't know what any of the actors sound like, other than Bill Murray, and I mentioned him above.

The plot, from what I can determine from the trailer and this synopsis, is trying too hard.

True, it's hard to imagine a 90 minute movie based on Garfield. The strip, at least for the past 15 or 20 years, has sucked and been perpetually the same. It's not really any different from most of the other unfunny comics in the paper today; it's just the most famous/popular. To quote from a brilliant speech by Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes:

And then we have established cartoonists who have grown so cavalier about their jobs that they sign strips they haven't written or drawn. Anonymous assistants do the work while the person getting the credit is out on the golf course. Aside from the fundamental dishonesty involved, these cartoonists again encourage the mistaken view that once the strip's characters are invented, any facile hireling can churn out the material. In these strips, jokes are written by committee with the goal of not advancing the characters, but of keeping them exactly where they've always been. So long as the characters never develop, they're utterly predictable, and hence, so easy to write that a committee can do it. The staff of illustrators has the same task: to keep each drawing so slick and perfect that it loses all trace of individual quirk. That way, no one can tell who's doing it. It's an assembly line production.

If you read the early years of Garfield, you'll know what a difference there is between them and what we've had since the 90's. The strip started in 1979, and while the early art work is pretty lame, the writing is interesting, and it's actually got a plot. Things happen.  And it's not just that they've been recycling the same 5 jokes every strip for the past decade, and they were new back then. Sure, it was funny the first time Garfield knocked Odie off the table, or ate lasagna, or shredded a houseplant, and the novelty is long, long, long gone. But back then, he was doing it with some style, and maliciously.  He was an asshole. Cynical, bitter, cruel... like a real cat.

I liked him early on, and read virtually every Garfield for probably the first 24 years it existed. I've only not read them for the past seven months while living with Malaya, since we don't get the paper and while I read several daily strips on the internet, Garfield certainly isn't one of them.  In fact I just went and read the last two weeks worth in the Ucomics archive, and got bored quickly.  Every joke was tired, repeated a dozen times at least in my memory, and it all seemed so pointless.

When the strip began, the papers were full of utter crap (much like today) and all of the strips were cute, sweet, and friendly.  Shit like Family Circus, Zippy, Marmaduke, Dennis the Menace, and so on.  Cute kids/animals, doing the same cute things every day, forever.  The concept of a cat being fat, mean, and sarcastic was original, back when Garfield began. I used to love Garfield, back when it was new and I was about 8, since even at that young age I could see that it was original and different and clever.  He was cruel to dogs (which was fine by me since I never liked the slobbering beasts), made funny jokes, and so on.  I continued to like the strip for several more years, and have original editions of all the collections up through about #12, by which time I had given up on them ever being funny again.  And they never have.

As Garfield grew in popularity, the strip got more and more simple, and various characters vanished.  Lyman was originally Odie's owner, and a friend of Jon who came to live with him suddenly, a few months into the strip.  It was never said if he was a roommate or gay lover or what, but Lyman never did anything of interest other than be Jon's friend (see Rob's black male friend in Get Fuzzy today for a similar character who is equally unnecessary and certainly destined for obscurity).

Liz the vet was an early character of some interest, back in the days when Jon was presented as a real person, rather than just a clownish, human punchline.  Jon would try to date her while Garfield was getting a check up, and she'd deflect his inept charms.  On the few occasions they went on an actual date Garfield ended up going along, and Jon's pathos as he tried so hard and failed was amusing.

Nermal was a common character early on, and he was a super cute kitten, loved by everyone. Basically the opposite of Garfield, and Garfield was cruel and nasty to him, giving a vicarious thrill to all of us who have ever hated the pretty. Later on Nermal became smug and snarky and smirking, and so deserved his mistreatment that all of the edge vanished from it.  He's hardly in the strip at all anymore, as far as I know.

Replacing them were various other characters, none of whom have ever done anything interesting.  There are cartoon mice who make fat cat jokes, talking spiders who get squashed, and a big dumb neighborhood dog who is the target of dumb jokes, unless the strip requires that he be smart to make a joke on Garfield.

But the biggest constant of the strip is consistency, just like that Bill Watterson quote above.  Nothing should ever happen, none of the characters should ever grow or change, and no one should ever do anything that might hurt the marketing and licensing properties.  Thus does a strip remain forever mediocre.

The only real mystery to me is why they're making a movie now.  At this point, the strip has sucked ass for longer than most of the fans of it have been alive. Were they just waiting for the CGI to become affordable enough for their discount production to proceed?

Well, actually the real mystery is why I had any hope at all for the movie, given how awful the strip has been for living memory.  They obviously can't even come up with anything interesting to put into a daily strip, so how on earth did I think they'd fill a 90 minute film with anything worth watching?  It wouldn't seem that hard, given how many archetypal Garfield jokes they've got to work in.  He should insult Odie, knock him off of a table (though this is ruined by it being a real dog, since we can't see him fall and bounce without making children sad), eat lasagna, having trouble waking up in the morning and want to stay in bed, abuse Jon, and overeat.  So you work that stuff in over the course of the movie, and you've still got about 85 minutes to fill.  What to do?

I imagine they're faced with a problem similar to the writers of the Cat in the Hat movie.  Good characters and material for a short book doth not equal material for a feature film.  So they had to insert padding.  Every critic said the way they padded out Cat in the Hat was a disaster, with the stupid sub plots, mom's suitor, etc.  How well with Garfield fare? Given that the movie synopsis lists several characters who have never existed in the strip, and others who are very, very seldom seen, it's not looking good.  I see some sort of artificial crisis, a road trip, and forgettable new characters that aren't even funny enough to make it into the comic strip.

Take the trailer.

Since when do Garfield and Odie dance?  And what's the point in having two animals, one real and one cartoon, jump around in circles on their hind legs, when it's neither funny nor visually amusing? It's like they found out halfway through the movie that the dog they had for Odie was trained to hop on its hind legs, so they figured they'd write in a dancing bit since it would fill 30 seconds and not require any dialogue or jokes. And really, can we outlaw any more movies that feature dancing to that old Bob Seger song?  It's been done, and done, and done. And do they really think that any kid young enough to want to see this movie is going to get the joke, and know that Tom Cruise in his tighty whities initiated it back in Risky Business?

And since when does Garfield do Elvis impersonations, and why is he doing it?  It's not funny, it's not interesting, and kids will have no idea why he's saying "Thank you very much." in that weird hick voice.

The whole trailer is just full of bad, dumb jokes that make adults not want to see the movie, even if they loved the strip back in the old days, when they were kids. *cough*  Meanwhile, kids will just be perplexed by the dated references.

For further example, will any of the kids know that Garfield is doing a bad Elvis impersonation in the mirror? And while adults will know it, why should they want to see it?  It's the crutch of every talent-deprived impressionist on earth.  The whole trailer is like that; the jokes are flat and no adult will find them funny, and they're going to go way over the kid's heads since they're so out of touch with today.  You might as well put a long parody of a scene from Dante's Inferno into the next American Pie movie, for all the resonance it'll have with the target audience.

My basic complaint about Garfield is that it started out witty and intelligent, while using outwardly-cute fuzzy animals to be subversive and intelligent. Since then, especially since it got really popular, it's been going steadily downhill in quality. It's cute and mindless enough for kids, but fails to ever engage an adult's sense of humor, and has long since given up on any attempt to be socially conscious or speak of larger issues or even tug at the heartstrings with any sentiment or emotion in the utterly-plotless, non-persistent, short term memory cartoons. And the movie seems to be set squarely in the current comic strip, with all of the weaknesses and none of the strengths.

A talented creative force could have used the movie to relaunch the strip, to take it back into something intelligent and appealing to adults, with some real jokes and a real plot and some emotional weight to the characters.  Instead the movie is just another cheap marketing ploy with no entertainment value beyond what you get from cute animals and bright colors and bad jokes. And while that's true of much/most of Hollywood product, this one depresses me since it's a property that was once interesting and vital and important, and is now a completely irrelevant, one trick pony.

And in conclusion, this whole thing  makes me "get on my knees" grateful that Bill Watterson has become JD Salinger, has respect for his own creation, doesn't need the money, and isn't dead, which has kept Hollywood from ever raping our childhoods by churning out a dumbed-down, bad CGI, no plot abomination of a Calvin and Hobbes movie. And that The Far Side and Bloom County are utterly impossible to adapt to movie form. And let us all pray that Get Fuzzy will remain high quality for at least another few years, before it goes the route of Garfield and sinks into perpetually-unfunny, highly-profitable mediocrity, and winds up with a real Siamese with CGI lip synch playing Bucky in the movie in about 2009. And if you think that's bad, imagine Satchel being played by Danny DeVito in a dog suit.

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