Hello, Mr. Weingrod. I don't really have a question for you, but I did have something I have been meaning to say to you for quite a while, and I believe it would be best to just put it out there as is with no sugar coating, so here you go:
Space Jam is the worst movie I have ever seen.
It is a position I have not wavered from since I saw it. It is my go-to answer if anyone asks about it. I have mentioned this to many people, including someone who later turned out to be your nephew.
And yes, I have seen such films as Plan 9 From Outer Space and Battlefield Earth. But at least those were watchable in their entertaining incompetence. Space Jam has no redeeming aspects whatsoever.
The conception, pitch, writing, and pre-production of Space Jam must have been less pleasant to watch than the manufacture of sausage and laws combined. It was the end result of corporate culture, an orgy of executives maximizing the potential for profit with nary a care for entertainment value or artistic merit. It's difficult to imagine a movie more transparently shameless (though Hollywood seems to have tried and succeeded with Foodfight!).
'But wait,' you say. 'A cursory glance at your user history reveals you to be a brony!' True, but that is different in ways that are hardly insignificant. First, the My Little Pony franchise employs characters that were specifically designed to advertise a product, so no nostalgia is hijacked. By contrast, outside of Calvin and Hobbes, I can hardly think of any fictional characters to better represent my childhood than those of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. I felt sick watching those characters being resurrected only to be pawns in a feature-length commercial. The likes of the Toy Story franchise and The Lego Movie also get a pass, as their primary characters are original and not piggybacking on characters who had a personality to tarnish.
And, of course, all those entertainments are, well, entertaining, and Space Jam fails in that regard as well. Its most glaring error is that its premise makes no sense, given its characters. How often do they play basketball in the original cartoons? What happened to them being from places like Brooklyn, Paris, and a vast unnamed desert, instead of some sort of alternate universe that can be accessed by an underground portal? (Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which also presented cartoon characters as actors in the cartoons they appear in, at least logically placed them in Hollywood.)
And good god, is it lazy. The plot is insultingly simple as well: Someone's fate depends on whether they win a game. (Bergman did it first, and it's pretty safe to say he did it a HELL of a lot better.) They seek to hire someone exceptionally skilled to help them fight the villains. (Kurosawa did it first, and... well, you know.) If the character of Lola Bunny was any flatter, she could be graphed without a Z-axis. (A love interest for one of the main characters who proves to be a strong and independent woman! That's nice dear, get in back of the line with all the others.) The bulk of the movie seems to be a basketball game with supposedly wacky hijinks, hackneyed greeting-card level inspirational gibberish (The special elixir that turned them into exceptional athletes was just water all along, and they just needed to believe in themselves! That's a new one!), and a showcase of what a great person Michael Jordan is.
I hate Space Jam. I hate its concept, I hate its plot, I hate how it bastardized my childhood, I hate how it keeps receiving undeserved accolades due do a combination of childhood nostalgia and rosy retrospection, I hate how it's probably now the means by which a portion of the new generation is introduced to these characters, I just hate the mere fact that it exists. If I want to see Warner Brothers cartoons updated with a hip '90s sensibility, I'll watch an episode of Tiny Toon Adventures.
On a side note, however, I must say that I found Trading Places pretty funny. Kudos.
Submitted April 08, 2019 at 09:32AM by eutears http://bit.ly/2VvHVeG
