The more I read scripts that come out of Hollywood, the more I wonder how Tinseltown manages to make money. Oh wait, I remember – the Palace Guards hype the tripe so that the peasants don’t realize what’s about to hit them until it’s too late to demand a refund.
That’s not to say there are no good movies made anymore (The Blind Side is a recent example). Even when movies are bad, we expect them to be bad because of a poor script, poor directing or poor acting – or a combination of all three. What we are sick and tired of are movies with a “message” that Hollywoodists deem acceptable, wrapped up in the guise of innocent entertainment. And we are even more sick and tired of those movies being aimed at our children.
Take Furry Vengeance. Please. Ba dum bum. Coming out on April 30, this “family film” follows the adventures of Dan Sanders (Brendan Fraser), along with his wife Terry (Brooke Shields) and son Tyler (Matt Prokop), whom Dan has temporarily moved from Chicago to Oregon to oversee the building of a housing development in Rocky Springs.
Note: The final product may differ from the script – in fact, I saw a few things in the trailer that weren’t in the original script. Another example is that the script says Tyler Sanders is 10 years old, but the actor portraying him is much older. Yet I highly doubt the main message is much different than what I saw on paper.
Dan’s a confident businessman who’s more concerned with the bottom line than ethics or saving the wilderness, as evidenced by his importing lumber from Canada in order to save money AND get around Orgeon’s stringent environmental laws, as well as his willingness to cut down a protected tree and have a beaver dam dismantled in order to keep construction on budget and on time.
Of course, Dan enjoys watching Fox News. (And that’s not the only leftist sucker punch – more to come.)
But a team of cute little CGI animals, led by a raccoon, have other ideas. In their quest to halt the project, they begin by making Dan late for an important meeting with his boss by stealing his breakfast and trashing his car. When he refuses to stop his activities, they begin sabotaging the construction equipment and attacking Dan’s person in the way of spraying him with the lawn sprinkler (potty humor alert!) and eau de skunk.
Without reciting everything in the film, naturally after going through hell and back and being considered crazy by his family and coworkers (who, of course, don’t see what the animals are doing to him), Dan sees the error of his ways, stands up to his greedy boss, and in the end he and his family live in happy harmony with their little woodland neighbors.
Certainly I’m all for balance between nature and man. I don’t want everything paved over. But by portraying businessmen and developers as cartoonish thugs with no redeeming characteristics, what kind of message are kids supposed to take away from this movie? That people are inherently bad because they build houses and shopping centers and buy things? What about those kids who have parents who work in the construction or lumber industries? Will they see their mommies and daddies as horrible meanies who take over the homes of cute little furry things?
I have a few questions for the filmmakers:
- After Dan stands up to his boss and the construction is halted, how does he make money? I’m assuming that he no longer works for Neal Lyman (Ken Jeong), who is last seen being pursued into the forest by a mob of angry forest creatures. Does Dan now sponge off his wife, who has magically been promoted to principal at the local school?
- What about the men who have been put out of work once the construction is halted? Do they live in the local community? Are they now on unemployment? What about their families and their needs, or can they just go pound sand?
- Speaking of the community, the development was supposed to include a shopping center which, one assumes, would have provided jobs. Is providing jobs a bad thing? (Seeing as our real-life Dear Leader is still touting a “jobless recovery,” I guess so.)
- Will there be the usual kiddie movie toy tie-ins at fast food restaurants, along with other Furry Vengeance goodies like lunch boxes and video games and the inevitable DVD release? Because according to a fellow liberal, making “Stuff” is bad for the earth and stuff.
- How much energy was used in the production of this film, from filming to editing the final product? Did you know that using energy is “bad?” Shame on you!
- Seeing as you portray Dan’s boss as a greedy corporate type who can’t get enough money, will you be forgoing profit on this movie and allowing patrons to see it for free?
The film does have one saving grace – it mocks the idea of the faux “green” movement that has sprung up just about everywhere you look, with entrepreneurs hoping to cash in on people’s consciences – which have been burdened by nearly 40 years of leftist prattle about how we are killing the earth. Not that I am trying to crush the entrepreneurial spirit that makes this country great, but it’s a bit wearying to see so many products touted as “green” when a lot of it is just a bunch of malarkey.
By the way, the movie comes out just one week after Earth Day. Coincidence? Maybe. I just can’t help being cynical.
Still, it’s not enough to salvage the film for me, especially since this “family film” has more swearing in it than I’d feel comfortable having small children hear (unless it’s been deleted from the final version – but I’m not holding my breath). And there’s a sequence where Dan accidentally kills a frog when showing his city-bred son how to skip rocks on the water. I’m praying that bit got cut – nothing like having the kids see a cute little frog bite the bullet.
Oh, and those other leftist sucker punches I told you about? A gratuitous shot at “No Child Left Behind” (one of GWB’s initiatives when in office); Dan being tortured by the pecking of a crow on the bedroom window in a sequence he describes like being in Abu Ghraib; and at the very end, Al Gore’s name being trotted out as the final authority on whether the ground upon which the development being built is protected. No matter that Gore and his global warming baloney has been thoroughly discredited; he’s obviously still a Hollywood Hero. He has an Oscar to prove it! Will all of these sucker punches make the final cut? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see at least one or two of them.
By the way, Brendan Fraser, the film’s star, is also one of the executive producers. According to this source, he used to live on Readcrest Drive in Beverly Hills. Take a look and ask yourself: Does his (former) large home scream “concern for the environment?” And the entire neighborhood is full of large, lavish homes that cling to the hillside of what I’m sure used to be home to lots of cute little critters like the ones we see in Furry Vengeance. I’ve mentioned before that the entertainment industry is one of the biggest polluters around, so it’s really galling for them to preach to us and to our children about defiling the earth. But that’s how it is with liberals – as long as they have theirs, they can tell you what you can do with yours.
Final analysis: I’m glad my kids are too old to want to see this waste of celluloid.
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