Tag: Midnight Madness

Space Jam: A New Legacy (2021)

SPACE JAM: A NEW LEGACY (2021) *
I am not exactly sure why I decided to watch Space Jam: A New Legacy on a Saturday afternoon, following hot on the heels of the Disney live-action films Midnight Madness and Condorman.

I mean, I am not the biggest fan of the original Space Jam from 1996, basically a feature-length advertisement for the greatness of Michael Jordan with Looney Tunes and Bill Murray and Wayne Knight and everybody else guest stars or glorified cameos. Never thought it was all that great even back during the height of the Chicago Bulls — Space Jam came out Nov. 15, 1996, just a few months after the Bulls put together a 72-10 regular season and won an NBA title — and it has aged worse. Of course, it seems to have a major cult following, but then again, so does Howard the Duck.

Also, I have never been much of a LeBron James fan, since his arrival upon the scene in 2002. I’ve never cared for his style of play, his flopping and floundering about like he’s been shot when selling a foul despite the fact that he’s easily the size of an NFL tight end and bigger than most NBA players, his celebratory antics, his aping Michael Jordan from the shoes, money, and the uniform number to the chalk toss and now his very own Space Jam movie, his ring chasing and team hopping, and his outright hijacking of ESPN for the last two decades. He’s arguably been even more omnipresent in our lives than Jordan, one of the most famous people in the world during his glory days in the ’90s, given the social media factor.

For example, I liked and shared one LeBron traveling GIF, and the Facebook algorithms just won’t show me any mercy in the two or three years since. LeBron this, LeBron that, just because I thought it was funny to see LeBron travel across the desert with basketball in hand. Now, I have to see a brilliant quote like this one, I don’t give a fuck what nobody think. I’m him. I get shit for making the right play. Four motherfuckers on me. Motherfucker wide open right here. We are a team and I trust them. Why wouldn’t I have thrown it to them? I don’t care about the results. What?

Anyway.

You guessed it, Space Jam: A New Legacy is a $150 million and 1-hour, 55-minute advertisement for the greatness of LeBron James.

You can even play a drinking game with A New Legacy: Take a swig of the sauce every time you hear King James. It’s a lot safer than drinking every time they say Carol Anne in Poltergeist III or Cheech and Chong utter Hey, man in Up in Smoke.

I found very little to like in A New Legacy. A lot of the movie felt like watching a mash up of the plots from Hook and Space Jam. Also, the Looney Tunes more or less serve LeBron James and his greatness, aside from very fleeting isolated moments that don’t add up to any of the Looney Tunes shorts like Duck Amuck or The Great Piggy Bank Robbery or Porky in Wackyland or You Ought to Be in Pictures or any number of the brilliant shorts of the ’40s and ’50s.

Wile E. Coyote proves though he could be ideal halftime entertainment.

I absolutely hated what they did with all the Warner Brothers intellectual properties: Turn them into fans in The Big Game that closes out the picture. I mean, seriously, do you take King Kong or Pennywise for a basketball fan? I don’t see Pennywise cheering for anything. Come on, man. I didn’t catch Dirty Harry or Rick Deckard or Stanley Kowalski or Jack Torrance or Pazuzu in the crowd, but I sincerely hope that doesn’t mean we’ll see them in Space Jam 3.

I must admit to rooting for the villains, or the goons, during A New Legacy and found the greatest entertainment when they dunked on LeBron real good in the first half.

Of course, I understood the second half would take a dramatic turn and give us a great big happy ending for LeBron and his celluloid family. Wasn’t it cast in stone?

I just hope that LeBron (and his legion of fans) do not try and count his victory in A New Legacy toward his NBA titles.

Midnight Madness (1980)

MIDNIGHT MADNESS (1980) 1/2*
Midnight Madness is a teenybopper It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and I wrote of the latter picture ‘I laughed more during Inherit the Wind,’ ‘Because of its length, It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb title) earns my vote for worst comedy ever made,’ and ‘I did not laugh once for more than three hours. That’s a record.’

Had I seen it at the time of the original review, I would have stated ‘I laughed more during Judgement at Nuremberg.’

I, however, did not laugh more during Midnight Madness, which I thought I would rate higher than It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (much prefer James Brown’s It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World) because it’s shorter by a hour but Midnight Madness got so incredibly dumb in the final act that I could not in clear conscience give it any more than half a star.

Letterboxd plot summary for It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World: ‘A group of strangers come across a man dying after a car crash who proceeds to tell them about the $350,000 he buried in California. What follows is the madcap adventures of those strangers as each attempts to claim the prize for himself.’

Letterboxd plot summary for Midnight Madness: ‘A genius grad student organizes an all-night treasure hunt in which five rival teams composed of colorful oddballs furiously match wits with one another while trying to locate and decipher various cryptic clues planted ingeniously around Los Angeles.’

Laugh summary for a disgruntled viewer in the middle of nowhere, er, middle America: None.

Basically, I just do not like this comedic style, where a bunch of rumbling bumbling stumbling fumbling idiots fall all over themselves for two (or three) hours in the broadest possible acting imaginable (mugging) and this is supposed to be funny, entertaining, satirical.

Midnight Madness also belongs in this bizarre cinematic nether region between a G-rated Disney live-action movie and an R-rated National Lampoon’s Animal House.

Walt Disney Productions released Midnight Madness and it’s quite obvious, despite the studio not appearing in the credits and despite no Dean Jones, no Tim Conway, no Don Knotts, no Sandy Duncan, no Bette Davis, no Ray Milland, and no Keenan Wynn in the cast.

It has enough, more than enough, zany slapstick action for 10 Disney live-action pictures.

We get five different teams of colorful oddballs or rather, 21 young professional actors mugging through stereotypes like the fat twins, the beer-loving jocks, the debate nerds, the feminists, the Latino who never speaks, the older and younger brother, etc. There’s even a character named ‘Barf,’ preceding Spaceballs and Pizza the Hutt’s infamous line Barf … Puke … Whatever! Stephen Furst plays Harold – Blue Team Leader in a way that amplifies his Flounder from Animal House and crosses him with Mark Metcalf’s detestable Douglas C. Neidermeyer.

Midnight Madness certainly delivers the fat jokes at rapid intervals.

Anyway, well before the end of this dreary mess of a motion picture, all the characters are reduced to becoming overacting jerks like they’re all descended from Dick Shawn’s Sylvester.

The plot summary mentioned something or other about matching wits.

That’s more like half-wits, if you ask the spirit of Moe, Larry, and Curly.

Speaking of them, I’ll stick with Men in Black, Punch Drunks, and Hoi Polloi.