Happy! (Season 1)

There are some characters that may get to the right place, even if they’re willing to bend or break a few rules.  In 24, Jack Bauer is framing his actions as part of the greater good.  What’s a few broken fingers if millions of lives are saved?  He’s the guy you send in when conventional means aren’t an option.

To be clear, Nick Sax is no Jack Bauer.  Nick used to be a cop, but he made a series of bad choices, like sleeping with his partner.  He’s become about as apathetic as one can get.  He’s working as a hit man when he gets an unexpected visitor:  Happy.

Who is Happy?  Happy is a purple winged unicorn who happens to be the imaginary friend of Hailey Hansen, who has been kidnapped by Very Bad Santa.  She sends Happy out to find her father to help her and the other abducted children.  Nick is reluctant to help, mostly because it’s hard for an imaginary friend to be that persuasive.  (He’s also reluctant to believe that he has a daughter.)  Nick eventually comes around and starts tracking Hailey.  Also on the case are his former partner, Meredith McCarthy, and his ex-wife, Amanda.

You might wonder how a show about an imaginary friend would work.  There are some rules, like imaginary friends disappearing when the child dies.  (If the child stops believing, the imaginary friend still exists, unseen.)  It would also appear that imaginary friends are more real than one might expect.  Happy is able to relate information to Nick that Nick might not otherwise have access to.

Nick and Happy make for an extremely odd couple.  Nick is about as jaded as you can get.  Happy is about as optimistic as one could make a cartoonish character.   Nick can’t stand Happy and Happy is mostly doing this for Hailey’s sake.  In fact, may of the relationships can be defined as unwanted.  His ex-wife and ex-partner don’t want to work together, but do.  McCarthy is also being pressured by the show’s main antagonist, who is, in turn, being pressured by a client in a giant bug suit.  I’d say they only two characters that want to interact with each other are Hailey and Happy, who see the least of each other during the first season’s eight episodes.

It’s surprising that SyFy put out such a dark show.  It’s a lot closer to Breaking Bad than 24.  It’s almost like Breaking Bad and 24 were put into a blender with a heavy dose of sarcasm.  Even though it features a kids’ show, this is definitely for adults.  There’s plenty of graphic violence in each episode.  There’s also more subtle imagery, like two teletubby-like characters, shooting a rainbow between their respective places where the sun doesn’t shine.  (You may not even want to know where Smoothie got his nickname.)

The first season was ridiculous in a few areas, but generally worked pretty well.  The plot twists seemed to be in all the right places and none of them seemed unnecessary.  Part of this is probably because the season was so short.  You can only miss the bad guy so many times before it becomes a cliché. 

 

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The Secret Life of Pets 2 (2019)

In The Secret Life of Pets, we learned that Max is a very lucky dog to have a home and a human named Katie to care for him.  He’s still lucky.  He has the same home and all and a canine roommate that he learned to get used to.  Things rarely ever stay the same, though.  Max and Duke receive a shock when their human brings home a boyfriend, Chuck.  Chuck becomes Katie’s husband.  Then, Katie becomes pregnant.

Yes, Max is going to have to put up with a rug rat.  After seeing what small children do to other dogs, Max isn’t thrilled.  However, he learns to love Liam.  Max and Duke are like an extra set of parents, doing what they can to help their newest family member.

The trouble is that Max isn’t as good as Duke at handling stress.  Now that Max has to worry about Liam, he sees danger everywhere.  This leads to a nervous habit of scratching his neck, which leads to a visit to the doctor.  And…Max gets The Cone of Shame.

We now have three divergent storylines.  Max, Duke and family go to a farm for a vacation, prompting Max to entrust fellow dog Gidget to watch over his beloved toy, Busy Bee.  Meanwhile, Snowball gets to play hero and rescue a tiger from a circus.  The three stories converge at the end, making for an interesting chase scene.

I’ve been reading complaints about having three story lines.  It’s not that bad.  Each one is at least entertaining and it’s not unusual for a TV show to do the same thing.  (CSI would often have two cases per episode.)  My impression is that the movie was written this way rather than having several otherwise-rejected story lines being merged together.

I could see them having been written as filler.  It’s not clear why Max would need someone to babysit his toy.  It would be more likely that Katie would bring it with them.  That does seem like it’s being done to set up the detour into The Land of the Crazy Cat Lady.  However, that was a pretty epic journey.

Having Snowball save a tiger was also strange.  At this point, circuses are anachronistic.  (Do we even have any traveling circuses any more?)  If I were writing the movie, I probably would have gone with a collector of exotic pets.  It would have made more sense.  It’s also a little odd that the tiger is so docile.  Tigers are wild animals and have been known to attack their captors, even after years or decades in captivity.

It still ends up being a fun movie.  It would seem that many of the errant details are done more for a joke, like having the tiger act like a house cat might.  It’s going to be fun for both kids and adults.  I just wonder how many kids will want a pet tiger.

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Donald Trump's The Art of the Deal: The Movie (2016)

George Carlin once asked, “If you try to fail, and succeed, which have you done?”  Such is the question with Donald Trump’s The Art of the Deal: The Movie.  The movie was released right after Donald Trump won the Republican primary.  The movie is presented as something that is done almost entirely by Trump.  The opening and closing credits have Trump listed as writer, director, producer and almost everything else.  The theme is performed by Kenny Loggins, although the credits posit that Trump could have performed it better.

The movie is satirical.  The opening scene has Ron Howard telling the audience that Trump made the TV movie based on the book, but that it was preempted by a football game that went into overtime.  Trump vowed never to let his masterpiece be seen again, but Howard managed to find a VHS copy of the movie at a yard sale.

The actual movie starts with a kid stealing a copy of the book upon which the movie is based.  He runs into an office only to find that it belongs to his all-time greatest hero, Donald Trump.  Trump allows the kid to remain.  This allows the kid to serve as an adoring audience for Trump while he explains The Art of the Deal.  He goes through several segments, which I understand correspond mostly to chapters in the book.

The thing is that it comes off exactly like you’d expect a Trump-made movie to come off.   The movie is made to have Trump look big.  He always hogs the scenes and tells about how great he is and how mediocre everyone else is.  In the scene with Ivana Trump, he constantly interrupts her.  The movie succeeded at looking like it was made by an amateur.

The joke plays out kind of quickly, leading to some repetition.  Trump explains seeing a picture of a boy looking at the Taj Mahal, which inspired him to buy the casino from Merv Griffin.  This becomes a running gag, wherein Trump repeatedly calls Griffin to make a deal.  There are also a few scenes where people tell Trump that he’ll never get the casino.

I’m not even sure I picked up on all of the humor.  Trump and others repeatedly claim how great Trump is with minority tenants.  The movie was supposed to be released in 1988, which would have made me 12.  I’m assuming that there was some lawsuit with Trump and his tenants around that time.   Some of the jokes are dated, such as an appearance by ALF of sitcom fame.  We also get an appearance by Christopher Lloyd as Doc Brown, coming back to warn everyone that Trump will be made president.  Most people with get the Back to the Future reference, but I’m not sure how well known ALF is now.

There were several scenes that were vulgar, like Trump giving two middle fingers.  This isn’t really something for children.  Speaking of which, I don’t think most children will find this funny in a few generations.  As I said, some of the references are dated.  Also, I don’t know how much people will know of the personal lives of Trump in 50 years.  If you look back at presidents from around 50 years before you were born, how much do you know about them?  How many references would you get if Calvin Coolidge was the main character?  I think a lot of it is meant for today’s audience.

In case you’re wondering, I had to look up Der Scutt.  I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be some ironic name, but Donald Clark "Der" Scutt is the actual architect of Trump Tower.  I’m not really sure where the Der comes from, though.

It was 50 minutes total, which was about 25 minutes too long for me.  It was exactly what I expected it to be, given that it was presented as a VHS copy of a 1988 production by Donald Trump.  It’s just that the joke got kind of old quickly.  It was actually made by Funny or Die, which is known for much shorter skits.  If you stay past the closing credits, you’ll see an end scene of Ron Howard deciding that the tape isn’t worth saving.  He made the right choice burning it.

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