One of the inspirations for Snow Day is the 1983 classic A Christmas Story, also narrated by the hero, also with a kooky dad, also with a dream (a BB gun rather than a girl). But that was a real story, a memory that went somewhere and evoked rich nostalgia. Snow Day is an uninspired assembly of characters and story lines that interrupt one another, until the battle against Snowplow Man takes over just when we’re hoping he will disappear from the movie and set free the teenage romance trapped inside it.
Acting Observation: Chris Elliott comes from a rich comic heritage (his father is Bob of Bob and Ray), but where his dad treasured droll understatement, Chris froths with overacting. There’s a scene toward the end where he’s tied to a children-crossing sign and laughs maniacally, like a madman, for absolutely no reason. Why is this funny? He has gone mad? Always was mad? It is funny to hear him laugh? We look curiously at the screen, regarding behavior without purpose.
Observation Two: Chevy Chase has been in what can charitably be called more than his share of bad movies, but at least he knows how to deliver a laugh when he’s given one. (When his career-driven wife makes a rare appearance at dinner, he asks his son to “call security.”) After the screening of Snow Day, I overheard another critic saying she couldn’t believe she wished there had been more Chevy Chase, and I knew how she felt.
Third Observation: Through a coincidence in bookings, Snow Day and Holy Smoke, opening on the same day, both contain Pam Grier roles that inspire only the thought “What’s Pam Grier doing in such a lousy role?” A year ago, she was in another lousy teenage movie, Jawbreaker. Is this the payoff for her wonderful performance in Jackie Brown (1997)? What a thoughtless place is Hollywood, and what talent it must feel free to waste.
Son of the Mask
(DIRECTED BY LAWRENCE GUTERMAN; STARRING JAMIE KENNEDY, ALAN CUMMING; 2005)
One of the foundations of comedy is a character who must do what he doesn’t want to do because of the logic of the situation. As Auden pointed out about limericks, they’re funny not because they end with a dirty word, but because they have no choice but to end with the dirty word—by that point, it’s the only word that rhymes and makes sense. Lucille Ball made a career out of finding herself in embarrassing situations and doing the next logical thing, however ridiculous.
Which brings us to Son of the Mask and its violations of this theory. The movie’s premise is that if you wear a magical ancient mask, it will cause you to behave in strange ways. Good enough, and in Jim Carrey’s original The Mask (1994), the premise worked. Carrey’s elastic face was stretched into a caricature, he gained incredible powers, he exhausted himself with manic energy. But there were rules. There was a baseline of sanity from which the mania proceeded. Son of the Mask lacks a baseline. It is all mania, all the time; the behavior in the movie is not inappropriate, shocking, out of character, impolite, or anything else except behavior.
Both Mask movies are inspired by the zany world of classic cartoons. The hero of Son of the Mask, Tim Avery (Jamie Kennedy), is no doubt named after Tex Avery, the legendary Warner Bros. animator, although it is One Froggy Evening (1955), by the equally legendary Chuck Jones, that plays a role in the film. Their films all obeyed the Laws of Cartoon Thermodynamics, as established by the distinguished theoreticians Trevor Paquette and Lt. Justin D. Baldwin. (Examples: Law III: “Any body passing through solid matter will leave a perforation conforming to its perimeter”; Law IX: “Everything falls faster than an anvil.”)
These laws, while seemingly arbitrary, are consistent in all cartoons. We know that Wile E. Coyote can chase the Road Runner off a cliff and keep going until he looks down; only then will he fall. And that the Road Runner can pass through a tunnel entrance in a rock wall, but Wile E. Coyote will smash into the wall. We instinctively understand Law VIII (“Any violent rearrangement of feline matter is impermanent”). Even cartoons know that if you don’t have rules, you’re playing tennis without a net.
The premise in Son of the Mask is that an ancient mask, found in the earlier movie, has gone missing again. It washes up on the banks of a little stream and is fetched by Otis the Dog (Bear), who brings it home to the Avery household, where we find Tim (Kennedy) and his wife, Tonya (Traylor Howard). Tim puts on the Mask, and is transformed into a whiz-kid at his advertising agency, able to create brilliant campaigns in a single bound. He also, perhaps unwisely, wears it to bed and engenders an infant son, Alvey, who is born with cartoonlike abilities and discovers them by watching the frog cartoon on TV.
Tim won an instant promotion to the big account, but without the Mask he is a disappointment. And the Mask cannot be found, because Otis has dragged it away and hidden it somewhere—although not before Otis snuffles at it until it attaches itself to his face, after which he is transformed into a cartoon dog and careens wildly around the yard and the sky, to his alarm.
A word about baby Alvey (played by the twins Liam and Ryan Falconer). I have never much liked movie babies who do not act like babies. I think they’re scary. The first Look Who’s Talking movie was cute, but the sequels were nasty, especially when the dog started talking. About Baby’s Day Out (1994), in which Baby Bink set Joe Mantegna’s crotch on fire, the less said the better.
I especially do not like Baby Alvey, who behaves not according to the rules for babies, but more like a shape-shifting creature in a Japanese anime. There may be a way this could be made funny, but Son of the Mask doesn’t find it.
Meanwhile, powerful forces seek the Mask. The god Odin (Bob Hoskins) is furious with his son Loki (Alan Cumming) for having lost the Mask, and sends him down to Earth (or maybe these gods already live on Earth, I dunno) to get it back again. Loki, who is the god of mischief, has a spiky punk hairstyle that seems inspired by the jester’s cap and bells, without the bells. He picks up the scent and causes no end of trouble for the Averys, although of course the dog isn’t talking.
But my description makes the movie sound more sensible than it is. What we basically have here is a license for the filmmakers to do whatever they want to do with the special effects, while the plot, like Wile E. Coyote, keeps running into the wall.
Sorority Boys
(DIRECTED BY WALLACE WOLODARSKY; STARRING BARRY WATSON, HARLAND WILLIAMS; 2002)
One element of Sorority Boys is undeniably good, and that is the title. Pause by the poster on the way into the theater. That will be your high point. It has all you need for a brainless, autopilot, sitcom ripoff: a high concept that is right there in the title, easily grasped at the pitch meeting. The title suggests the poster art, the poster art gives you the movie, and story details can be sketched in by study of Bosom Buddies, National Lampoon’s Animal House, and the shower scenes in any movie involving girls’ dorms or sports teams.
What is unusual about Sorority Boys is how it caves in to the homophobia of the audience by not even trying to make its cross-dressing heroes look like halfway, even tenth-of-the-way, plausible girls. They look like college boys wearing cheap wigs and dresses they bought at Goodwill. They usually need a shave. One keeps his retro forward-thrusting sideburns and just combs a couple of locks of his wig forward to “cover” them. They look as feminine as the sailors wearing coconut brassieres in South Pacific.