film: garfield: the movie (1.5)

[onetwothreefour]

film: garfield: the movie

my god.

jesus. fucking. christ.

okay, enough with the blasphemy. this is truly THE most atrocious movie i've seen in quite some time (so fucking what - or sfw - was the last). at first (when i'd *just* heard this was being made) i was hopeful. i'm a big fan of the garfield comics and (extended) "books". i even like the cartoon series - the managed to keep the humour as it was in the original comics, so it was okay with me.

but then i started hearing bad reviews and i got worried. even when i was hopeful, in the back of my mind i knew this wasn't going to be great. but when everyone's saying it's average, that ain't a good sign.

so i borrowed the dvd from my sister (copied - grr ), and sat down.

it's a sad day when you can hold extremely low expectations for a film, and still be let down. okay, the plot was totally predictable, and i was expecting that. i can deal with it.

and the acting was wooden. if those were the only two faults, i could still manage. bad acting is *not* excusable, but if it's one of the only problems, i can look past it.

but those are the two least annoying things about this film.

the cinematography: what. the. fuck?? i swear to god the director just shoved the dop into the set and said "hey just shoot, like, all that stuff there. sure, wander randomly if it makes you feel more comfortable". fucking atrocious. there was absolutely no direction or focus to the camerawork in this film, and i honestly find it difficult to imagine how kids were able to understand a film, when generally they'd be used to having the camerawork control their gaze.

who fucking knows? terrible.

worst of all, really, was the script. written by the amusingly named joel cohen, it was basically an exercise in EVERYTHING you could possibly do wrong in an adaptation of a comic strip.

i've asked a few people this question, and effectively gotten the same answer each time. what is the main appeal, and think about it, of the comic strip of garfield? it's the cynicism, isn't it. sure, he's a lazy, apathetic, doesn't-give-a-fuck cat (and that definitely adds, 'cause don't we all crave that sometimes), but it's the fact that he's imbued with this sarcastic, cynical outlook on life - despite the fact that he actually doesn't have to do a fucking thing - which makes it so funny.

so if you were writing the script, would you really consider it a good idea to relieve said character of virtually all the aforementioned cynicism?? i don't fucking think so either. fucking hell. the lazy apathetic cat remains, sure. but there's no fucking fun there.

as you can see, i wasn't a massive fan

 

[keystroke]

I seen this at the start of the year, so my memory will be a bit shonky on it, but the only good thing about the movie was Bill Murray and Jennifer Love Hewitt (Bill murray, sure he isnt the original garfield, but he is one of my favourite actors and he does sound very close to the original I guess)


other than them two actors, this movie sucked 1 star.

 

[onetwothreefour]

ah, jl-h was *hot*, sure, but she acted horribly (so did breckin), but yeah, agreed - murray was good, and sounded quite the same

 

[fairnymph]

I didn't see this (wouldn't waste my time on it) but it gets 1 star (shame I can't give fewer!) simply because jl fuckett sucks so goddamn much.

Who gave it four stars? Fess up you idiot! I'm gonna rip you a new one. *grrr*

 

[kooky_swanky]

The cartoon has always been mediocre and done the same gags to death a million times, movie was never going to be great.

 

[Nexus One]

I got to the end of the first CD and never watched the second

 

[frostyangel]

I was hoping it would have been funnier than it was ... I really think it could of had potential.. but it was geared to much for a smaller generation... they should of come out with an x rated for adults

 

[drEaMtiMe*@#]

Re: film: garfield: the movie

Originally posted by onetwothreefour
my god.

it's a sad day when you can hold extremely low expectations for a film, and still be let down.

isn't it

i havent seen it, but 1234 you definitely get 10 points for using the word 'fuck' the most times i've ever seen in a review. lol. good work

 

[fairnymph]

The jackasses who gave it 4 stars really need to step up.

 

[Web]

Rediculous flick... un-funny. I was hoping for a little more with a movie that used Bill Murry for voice over... I was really dissapointed. I can't believe that my room mate actually PURCHASED this dvd.

 

[Dastrix Slogan]

I will give it the thumbs down indeed, the movie relies almost wholly on long set-up for Garfields facial expressions and his just plain not-funny one-liners, like 1234 sed - everything else just feels like its thrown in without any thought.

 

[rcebborn]

This was completely shit. 'Nuff said.

 

[DarthMom]

Murray is such talent, imo, and cohen is usually pretty funny...this sucks....thanks for the heads up though, was gonna add it to our collection for the kids.

 

[kooky_swanky]

I've been looking for this and I finally found it, a very interesting article on Garfield and his creator. From here

"Aspiring cultural juggernauts could not have asked for a better how-to guide to world domination than Garfield: The Movie, out in theaters today. The film is an example of the kind of product that Garfield creator Jim Davis likes to attach his product's name to: Predictable, unfunny, and eminently forgettable. The movie won't take the nation by storm—in fact, it will probably vanish very quickly—but it will make a tidy sum in theaters and on DVD and then be remembered only by the small sample of tots in the viewing audience who turn into ironic hipsters during their college years.

And that's exactly how Davis wants it. Nothing scares the man more than the backlash that's created by white-hot success. He knows that the flip side to building almost any mass-market culture-industry icon—think Mickey Mouse or McDonald's—is intense loathing by the minority who will despise it. Davis's genius is that he's created the most widely syndicated comic strip in history—with the attendant profusion of plush toys, T-shirts, and themed Caribbean cruises—and yet, through careful brand management, he's largely managed to deflate the naturally occurring cultural counterattack.

Today, Garfield the comic strip appears in nearly 2,600 newspapers around the globe, and its readership is estimated at 260 million. If the readership number is right, then 4 percent of the world's population reads Garfield every single day. Garfield products—sold in 111 countries—rake in between $750 million and $1 billion each year. This was not accidental: Davis meticulously plotted Garfield's success. And part of his calculation was to make the strip so inoffensive that it's hard to hate it even for being anodyne.
Davis makes no attempt to conceal the crass commercial motivations behind his creation of Garfield. Davis has the soul of an adman—his first job after dropping out of Ball State, where he majored in business and art, was in advertising—and he carefully studied the marketplace when developing Garfield. The genesis of the strip was "a conscious effort to come up with a good, marketable character," Davis told Walter Shapiro in a 1982 interview in the Washington Post. "And primarily an animal. … Snoopy is very popular in licensing. Charlie Brown is not." So, Davis looked around and noticed that dogs were popular in the funny papers, but there wasn't a strip for the nation's 15 million cat owners. Then, he consciously developed a stable of recurring, repetitive jokes for the cat. He hates Mondays. He loves lasagna. He sure is fat.

The model for Garfield was Charles Schulz's Peanuts, but not the funny Peanuts of that strip's early years. Rather, Davis wanted to mimic the sunny, humorless monotony of Peanuts' twilight years. "After 50 years, Snoopy was still laying in that dog house, and rather than getting old, it actually has the opposite effect," Davis told the Chicago Sun-Times last year during the press blitz for Garfield's 25th anniversary. "It says to all of us, some things in life can be counted on, they're consistent." In In Dog Years I'd Be Dead, a book to commemorate Garfield's 25th anniversary, Davis calls the Peanuts licensing machine "a template that I could apply to Garfield." In his very first week, Garfield aped Snoopy by declaring, "Happiness is a warm television set."

From the beginning, Davis put as much energy into the marketing of the strip as he did into creating it. (It's telling that he's been inducted into the Licensing Merchandiser's Hall of Fame but not the hall of fame hosted by the International Museum of Cartoon Art.) In 1981, only three years after the strip's debut, he set up Paws, Inc., a privately held company to handle the licensing of Garfield products. Originally, Paws did only the creative work needed for product design, while Davis' syndicate managed the business side, but in 1994 Davis purchased the rights to license Garfield products from the syndicate for a reported $15 to $20 million. Even before that, Davis took an active role in the selling of his creation. Before agreeing to a deal with Alpo to put Garfield's face on a new line of cat food, Davis visited the company's plant, talked to its employees, and spoke with the grocery industry about the company's reputation. In his 1982 interview with Shapiro, Davis admitted to spending only 13 or 14 hours a week writing and drawing the strip, compared to 60 hours a week doing promotion and licensing.

Garfield's origins were so mercantile that it's fair to say he never sold out—he never had any integrity to put on the auction block to begin with. But today Davis spends even less time on the strip than he used to—between three days and a week each month. During that time, he collaborates with another cartoonist to generate ideas and rough sketches, then hands them over to Paws employees to be illustrated.

By comparison, Davis spends nearly every morning working on "concepts for new products," he writes in In Dog Years I'd Be Dead. Paws, Inc. has become a 60-employee licensing behemoth. There's a Garfield Stuff direct-mail catalog that began in 1997 and an online version at catalog.garfield.com. There's a "Garfield Pizza Café" in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, and Nevada's gambling board just approved a slew of Garfield slot machines. Garfield was the frontman for a 24-nation promotion by a grower of apples, pears, and cherries that targeted countries from Thailand to Guatemala to France. The Chinese government uses Garfield to teach English to children.

What's kept Garfield in business for so long is Davis' canny understanding of how much is too much. Garfield had the most successful debut of any comic strip in history. The first strips were printed on June 19, 1978, in only 41 American newspapers. But by 1980, the first Garfield compilation was a runaway New York Times bestseller, and in 1982, Garfield was on the cover of People. In 1983, the strip was appearing in 1,400 newspapers in 22 countries. That year, Davis placed seven Garfield books simultaneously on the Times trade-paperback best-seller list, a feat that's never been repeated. The next year, Garfield got his own balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

But Davis feared overkill. Garfield was veering into the realm of faddishness. In the late 1980s, Garfield plush toys with suction-cup feet were so popular than criminals broke into cars to steal them and sell them on the black market. Davis, protective of his creation's unobjectionable blandness, knew he had to act fast before people began to hate Garfield. "We accepted the royalty checks, but my biggest fear was overexposure," he told Entertainment Weekly in 1998. "We pulled all plush dolls off the shelves for five years."

And that's what makes Garfield: The Movie a perfect addition to Davis' cartoon kingdom. It will be gone before anyone realizes it was there."

 

[keystroke]

the Garfield cartoons were funny back in the day, I'll *always* remember the halloween episodes which they ended up near some Volcano, it has many memories from watching that when I was about 7 years old

 

[onetwothreefour]

that's a very interesting and informative article kooky_swanky, but it doesn't quite swing me. for sure, it certainly lessens my opinion of jim davis (as i'm *reasonably* anti-capitalist), but it can't take away from the fact that i thoroughly enjoyed (and still do, when i go back every so often) the old garfield comic strips and television cartoons.

i think it's obvious that the comic strips have tapered off *dramatically* over the last ten years or so, but that doesn't mean they weren't good to begin with. the cynicism of the comic appeals to me.

and despite all this, it doesn't mean that the film couldn't have been good - it all comes down to what the writer does, really. i think the point it being a "perfect addition to davis' cartoon kingdom" because "it will be gone before anyone realizes it was there" is a very valid point though, especially considering the context that the article gives us.

thanks for posting it.

 

[DarthMom]

good goddess, what an unlikely bump :D

guess someone rated it for it to be on the first page???

anyway, this movie was so terrible, so incredibly bad.

just fair warning to anyone contemplating such horrors

 

[Belisarius]

I gave it two stars.

I loved Garfield growing up, and the bad boy still has a niche in my heart. Still, it sucked. The story was inane (basically the tired old "outsider in the big city" plot), the "acting" was wooden, and it bothered me to no end that Garfield was the only CGI character (it would've been much better if he'd been a dubbed-over regular cat, like the others). Actually, Garfield period bothered me, and for me, that's saying a lot.

The only reason I didn't give it one star instead of two is that the movie was basically harmless, did have one or two moments, and would be safe enough for kids. Very, very young kids.

 

[L2R]

oh noes i still haven't seen it

 

[DarthMom]

The only reason I didn't give it one star instead of two is that the movie was basically harmless, did have one or two moments, and would be safe enough for kids. Very, very young kids.

to be honest, i feel bad for knocking it. it isn't meant to be for us, and my son did want to watch it over and over....(he is 3) so as far as kids movies go, it is just fine, i guess.