Get Over It [2001] + Strange Magic [2015]
Welcome back to My Year of Shakespeare. This week we're covering Get Over It, the 2001 Kirsten Dunst/Martin Short/Sisqó adaptation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream". If you watched along, you're welcome.
Get Over It [2001-brackets-pre-9/11] adds a second meta-layer to "A Midsummer Night's Dream", of students putting on the play, and is full of 2000s teen comedy goofs and japes. It had a huge degree of the same energy as Bottoms [2023], a film I adore.
Martin Short in Mark McGrath getup bragging about his near-brushes with fame (many of which get cutaway gags showing how nothing of a story he's boasting about) is hilarious. Colin Hanks seems to be channeling his brother's energy and somehow the combination of that and his appearance is giving an extremely genuine portrayal of figuring out what blend of sensitivity, machismo, and debauchery you want to give off as a young man; I was a fan from things like Fargo but he really gives a lot of nuance to a role that only really called for being one-dimensional. Sisqó, jesus christ that guy can dance. Ed Begley Jr and Swoosie Kurtz as the overly-permissive parents are a delight. If there is a weak link among the principal cast, it's Ben Foster as the main character Berke, but he's written to be the sadsack straight man, so I think it's a perfectly adequate performance. Kirsten Dunst should have a crossbow in more movies.
The writing/editing team packs the whole thing full of great gags. The sex jokes are so much less homo/transphobic than I would expect out of an American Pie-contemporary, I'm reasonably sure that 10 Things I Hate About You or Deliver Us From Eva was worse on this front.
Lastly, it's only 87 minutes. Even if you don't love it, it's over before it overstays its welcome, and it ends with Sisqó and Vitamin C (i did mention this was made in 2001, right?) singing September, which took any bitter notes out for me.
This week we are also covering the only non-Star War that Lucasfilm Animation has made, "Strange Magic", which is a ill-advised jukebox musical for twelve year olds featuring music their parents would've thought was dated. If you watched along, I'm sorry.
As a Star Wars fan (who, like most Star Wars fans, thinks Star Wars fans are terrible), the feeling of asking the screen, "George Lucas, what the actual fuck do you think you're doing?" was extremely familiar. Why do we want to hear Kristin Chenoweth perform a Bo Diddly song? Do the children yearn for this?
This whole thing feels bad to look at (which is not an unfamiliar feeling, speaking as a person who watched The Clone Wars and Rebels) but on the grounds that it feels like some sort of 3D variation of Tales of Public Domain that also produced Happily Ever After or whatever lone, upsetting VHS your homeschooled neighbor had and watched relentlessly. Unlike Happily Ever After, which lost $3.5 million at the box office [and likely made it back up in rentals and VHS sales, estimated at ~$10M], Strange Magic lost about a whopping $86.4 million dollars for Disney/Touchstone.
While the Hot Topic fairy aesthetic may have produced a workable picture in, oh I don't know, 1998-2003, when it was current? This movie felt dated, like an Evanescence video. Evan Rachel Wood covering P!nk did not help this. If I didn't know better due to having a concept of "time" (and also "causality" and "wikipedia access"), I'd have bet the horrible little incel gnome that goes off to make a love potion was based on Lin Manuel Miranda. Alan Cumming, better known for better work, is unrecognizable as the Bog King.
The direction and screenplay on this was done by Gary Rydstrom, whose only other full-length direction credits were on English versions of Studio Ghibli movies (and usually Goro Miyazaki pictures at that); he usually is a sound editor or mixing engineer. None of the gags land, but to his credit, it is a good sounding film, ignoring to-taste judgments like "wow I'd rather be listening to truly anything else".
I'm firmly outside the target demo of this picture as a 30- or 40-year old man but even if vastly underestimating the tastes of tween girls, this felt pandering. This movie makes 99 minutes feel like 199 minutes. This movie had me pulling up subway surfer playthroughs to keep my attention on the screen.
It really felt emblematic of the ongoing push by monied interests to conflate "realism" and "accuracy" with "art". I have no issue with realism as a practice. But there isn't some degree of accuracy that turns a piece into art. There's no specific number of pores to give a character, there's no "threshold value" for how many hairs on a head make something "art" versus "image". Art relies on a semiotic, frequently iconographic, representation of the ideas it wishes to convey. Movies rely on not just theater but conducting, like an orchestra. One might think that should lend itself well to a sound engineer stepping in to the director's chair but I think for animation, especially gag-filled animation for children, you need a Chuck Jones or Friz Freleng. The slow Elvis cover with sweeping, flowery visuals isn't going to do it, even if you put the amen break behind it and mix in a little Beyoncé. The question you should ask is one my former bandmate would ask me: "Have you tried making it good?" Not realistic. Not accurate. Not "stylized like the style guide our boys down in marketing say the kids like these days". Good. Somehow "good" was beyond the capabilities of a hundred million dollar budget and the best animation department Lucasfilm Animation / Disney could assemble. Call me next time, I'll help aim for "at least make it suck less" if we can't go for "fun".
Thank you for watching along.
Or not watching along.
Or I'm sorry for you having watched along, with My Year of Shakespeare.
Next week we are watching a proper adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream with the 2017 Hamish Linklater/Rachael Leigh Cook version.
Next month is King Lear and the schedule looks like the following:
- King Lear [2018] (Jul 5)
- Ran [1985] (Jul 12)
- King Lear [1987] (Jul 19)
- King Lear [1999] (Jul 25)
