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REVIEW: The Brady Bunch in the White House
Directed by: Neal Israel
Produced by: Armand Leo, Lloyd J. Schwartz
Written by: Lloyd J. Schwartz, Hope Juber
Edited by: Terry Stokes
Cinematography by: Robert Seaman
Music by: Laurence Juber
Starring: Shelley Long, Gary Cole, Chad Doreck, Autumn Reeser, Blake Foster, Ashley Eckstein, Max Morrow, Sofia Vassilieva, Tannis Burnett, Saul Rubinek, Reagan Pasternak, Dave Nichols, Joshua Peace, Noah Danby, Jef Mallory
Based on the TV series The Brady Bunch
Year: 2002
The following review was originally conceived as an impromptu Facebook rant after I decided to watch this movie out of boredom while browsing Netflix, so if this review seems kind of random, it was. It wasn’t long before I realized, however, that I’d essentially written an impromptu movie review instead, so I took it and punched it up a bit and decided to publish it officially instead.
I think I just watched one of the most bafflingly horrendous movies I’ve ever seen – The Brady Bunch in the White House. The first two movies that took the characters and placed them in the 90s weren’t exactly comedy masterpieces, but they were pretty witty and smartly put together satires of the original show’s absurdity by mostly having the wholesome characters be unchanged and defiantly unfazed by the explicit realities of the then-modern world (save for Alice, who, as an honorary Brady, was given a bit more of an edge). It was a fairly clever concept, dodging the pitfalls that most other TV-to-movie adaptations succumb to, and even on an artistic level, those movies got everything just right: a near perfect cast, the musical cues, the sitcom style camera angles, the kitschy costumes and sets, and just enough heightened reality to let you know the people making it were doing it all in good fun while making it tolerable and enjoyable for all people, regardless of whether or not they actually liked the original show. (I hated it.) This third film, though… Read more…
REVIEW: Napoleon Dynamite – Ten Years Later…
Directed by: Jared Hess
Produced by: Jeremy Coon, Chris Wyatt, Sean C. Covel, Jory Weitz
Written by: Jared Hess, Jerusha Hess (screenplay)
Edited by: Jeremy Coon
Cinematography by: Munn Powell
Music by: John Swihart
Starring: Jon Heder, Jon Gries, Efren Ramirez, Tina Majorino, Aaron Ruell, Diedrich Bader, Haylie Duff, Emily Kennard, Shondrella Avery, Sandy Martin, Trevor Snarr
Based on the short film Peluca by Jared Hess
Year: 2004
Released in the summer between my junior and senior years of high school, Napoleon Dynamite would pretty much become one of the defining films of that year for my class (and a lot of other people, too, but this is my blog). Along with the first Anchorman and Garden State, seemingly nobody was able to shut up about these three films, all released that same year. Of those three, though, Napoleon Dynamite was the only one that I took to along with everyone else – I didn’t see Anchorman until well after it was released on DVD (and even then, I didn’t care for it much – I was a bit of a prude at the time), and I didn’t see Garden State until after college, when I gave myself the graduation gift of Netflix, because I had gotten quite sick of hearing about how wonderful it was over the next few years (it was… alright). Read more…
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