Cynical Cinema

Horton Hears a Who is one of my favourite Dr. Seuss stories, and I have always enjoyed the old animated version. Now that it has become a big-time, feature-length film, I was not holding out much hope that it would continue to be excellent. But I was wrong. I really did enjoy Horton Hears a Who, despite the obvious script problems. Like this one - Horton is an elephant that discovers an entire civilization existing on a speck of dust. That civilization is called Whoville, and is populated by Whos. Which, unless I miss my guess, is the same little town that suffered the wrath of the Grinch in HIS Jim Carrey movie. The Grinch had a dog. And a mountain. If the Whos exist only on this speck of dust, wouldn’t that dog have been gigantic? And so too the mountain? Where WAS this mountain?

Horton lives in a jungle that is populated in a bizarre fashion. It is likely the only jungle in the world where kangaroos and elephants co-exist, and those are pretty well the only two recognizable animals. The others are non-descript creatures that have never existed, except in the mind of Dr. Seuss. Some great voice talent shows up here - Jim Carrey is less than impressive as Horton, but Steve Carrell is dynamite as the mayor of Whoville, Seth Rogen is pretty cool as a small non-existent creature named Morton, and Carol Burnett is absolutely fantastic as the scheming kangaroo. This kangaroo rules the jungle, you see. (It really is that strange of a jungle.) And her rule is capricious and malevolent. She feels as though she must destroy the speck of dust if she wants to preserve order, because allowing Horton to continue talking to it would encourage the kids to use their imaginations, and who knows what could happen then?

The main problem with this is that Horton is already, before the speck arrives, clearly insane. But that doesn’t really matter, it’s just funny. The political slant of the story is very apparent here, as the kangaroo represents the people who want to destroy something, even though they don’t actually believe it exists. Whoville itself is run like Big Brother, (or like the current American government), where everything is always good, even when catastrophe is clearly looming. But nothing bad EVER happens in Whoville, and we will continue to say this forever, regardless of what actually happens. And the tagline - a person’s a person, no matter how small? Sounds like an anti-abortion campaign to me.

Horton Hears A Who is a terrific adaptation of the fantastic story. There is an absolutely bonkers, yet perfectly done sequence in anime, which made me laugh as hard as anything in a kids’ movie in a long time. And Carol Burnett and Steve Carrell alone make this movie worth the price of a rental. Horton Hears A Who comes out today.

I’ve been paying close attention to the way TV series end now, since I got totally screwed watching six days worth of The 4400 before realizing it never actually ends.  With the Final Season of Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. was released onto DVD (November 25th, from Paramount Home Entertainment), I skipped right to the final episode.  And it’s OK.  But I am not convinced that the people making this show knew it was going to end.  I think they may have been hedging their bets.  First of all, the episode was set up with Gomer on the verge of transfering to another base, which would make Sargent Carter, of course, thrilled.  But then at the end of the episode, he stays after all.  And makes the Sarge ANGRY…

The final episode features clips and flashbacks to the best moments of the series.  Remember when Pyle did the following stupid thing… and so forth.  But there are only a couple, like they had run out of ideas and just needed to do a clip show.  And if that is the case, and they had just run out of ideas, they ended this show not a moment too soon. 

The biggest problem with this show is Sargent Carter.  He is constantly blowing his top, and there is nowhere for him to go.  He can’t get an angrier, he’s already so angry.  This type of character is best when he does a slow burn.  Think Herbert Lom in the Pink Panther movies, as he gets more and more angry with Peter Sellars.  Inspector Dreyfuss begins by being just a little irritated with the bumbling Inspector Clouseau, but by the end of the movies, he is in a full-on rage, eventually going so far as to plan to murder Clouseau.  With Frank Sutton constantly in full-rage mode, we know exactly what we’re going to get, and his rage is no longer funny.

This show remains reasonably funny, most of the time, in a cheesy-60s sitcom sort of way.  Jim Nabors is decent as Gomer Pyle, and the guest stars are usually pretty good, in some cases top-notch.  But the show was never terrific, never hilarious, and it was fairly merciful when the series ended.  Whether they knew it was ending or not.