Unfrosted is NOT BAD, we…

Just don’t make movies like this anymore.

We all sort of forget that eras are not defined by their best movies, or their worst movies, but the creamy ones in the center. The ones YouTube critics now decry as “movies you forget the second after you watch them”. I know the kind to which they are referring. You walk away going “eh, not bad?” There are so many of these movies, and we just forget they are there.

In fact, so many cult classic, ahead of their time movies are precisely this. Movies that can admirably be called movies, but they’re absent any grand or epic-ness, or deep message that makes us go “oh, wow.”

Unfrosted is that, just a movie. Seinfeld, the mastermind behind it all, is funny, but I’d argue much like his show, the movie is carried by the co-stars. Hugh Grant’s Tony the Tiger in a true-ish story about the mascots going on strike. Melissa McCarthy as former NASA scientist. Not to mention a host of cameos, including a memorably funny sketch involving Jon Hamm and Jon Slattery reprising their roles from Mad Men. The last place you would think to ever see these two again.

What I think is jarring for both Seinfeld fans and detractors is what he made was not Larry David, but more similar to the Scary Movie franchise, and the sea of spoofs they produced over the years. That’s what it is, a spoof. What makes it not quite work is most spoofs pick a central movie, in this case The Founder, while not popular, or maybe Oppenheimer could have served as a kind of nexus of what to parody — but for whatever reason they use, and exaggerate, an actual event with an almost documentary set-up.

However like Roadhouse this year, I can’t hate this movie. I love almost everyone in it.

It ends up being like a very long, but well paced, Family Guy episode — some cutaway gags work, others just kind of fall flat. But there are some really good laughs. “There was a funny mix up” involving an employees death is really funny, in the same fashion as much of Seinfeld’s matter of fact deliver from his famous sitcom. The aforementioned Mad Men sketch lampooned an amazing show perfectly. The death and subsequent funeral played like a Broken Lizard movie.

I understand not liking this movie, because it seems so unlike what you’d expect from Seinfeld. Why, at 70, would anyone start doing something so wildly different from his original grounded sitcom? That’s for him to say. I get people saying it was stupid. It was. I think, ironically given his recent “Anti-woke” (which was deceptively edited from a much larger interview), and associations with Pro-Irsael groups, the movie was “woke” in the sense of a very anti-entitlement bent — a lot of jokes about inheriting something versus working for it. However, I don’t think it has much to say. You know what? That’s fine. Not every movie needs a political opinion or stance, or to push overtly left-wing politics, only good, as in very artistically valid movies need to meet such a threshold. This film, or movie if you rather, is not that, but it is funny enough to justify it’s existence.

I think for someone like Seinfeld to make a movie that doesn’t feel like the comedy of the century is yes, weird, but most comics don’t. This was a valid effort, and a workmanlike finish. Not great, but not exactly deserving of the massive backlash.

Here’s why as well…

The movie industry doesn’t survive if everything is Oppenheimer or bust. I get that there are only so many Lawrence of Arabias, and Star Wars’, and Spider-Mans that come along once a century and change cinema and it’s direction, forever. But back in the day Unfrosted was the kind of movie you paid for because you wanted to see a comedy, and then you at least didn’t want your money back. The film upheld it’s end of the bargain to be at least mildly amusing. It wasn’t going to make 100 million, or even 30 million in a weekend, but enough to justify it’s similarly smaller budget. When I see Unfrosted, or Roadhouse, or Fletch (Jon Hamm) get dumped on streaming services, I see a movie that back in the day kept theaters afloat, and movie companies not under like three conglomerates, and the threat of pop culture just freezing due to streaming companies making past content endlessly consumable. The irony is if this is more successful on streaming, and more people just check it out, it will make some of these cratering big production companies try more films and maybe put some in theaters. We as consumers can take our theaters back to when small movies could compete again.

But reviewing culture is such now that if the movie isn’t Dune or Oppenheimer, or A24, it’s not worth it because it’s “crap” or “slop”, even when, like this, it clearly knows it is. Reviewers are so afraid to take flak for bad takes, and I kind of get it. You aren’t just telling the people in your local paper what’s okay at the theater anymore, you’re selling a cult of personality around authoritative takes on film, but movies like Unfrosted deserve a bit more of an open mind. Just like Ghostbusters 2016 was not “terrible”, just very different, and yes, volumes worse than a once in a century classic.

This is something critics always have trouble with when reviewing films. Paris, Texas is one of my all-time favorites too, calm down. Sometimes though, you want the mindless entertainment, and that mindless entertainment used to come with the added benefit of going to a dark room with strangers, and going out for drinks, and all that. You don’t want to take a first date to Midnight Cowboy. This is why we need more movies like this to make a comeback, and I for one welcome it.

5.5/10