Caution: As with most of my experiments with time, this may contain spoilers.

This was originally written for the Daily News Skim over at PointlessWasteOfTime. There, along with writing about news that never happened, we also sometimes wrote reviews for movies that we never saw. This was to be one of them.

As it turns out, literally minutes before this was to be published, news broke that the co-creator of Curious George had just been found murdered. After hearing this, the piece was quickly axed because it simply didn’t seem as funny any more. This was even after a hasty rewrite, and a title change from the original “I intend to murder one of the co-creators of Curious George.”

All that said, it is still kind of funny, especially once you forget about the whole brutal murder thing. I kind of regret bringing it up now. Bugger.

Enjoy.

Curious George

I am crapping my pants in anger as I write this. Based on its television and print ads, a reasonable person would expect the film Curious George to be a carefree animated adventure starring a mischievous monkey. So you can imagine my trouser-soiling outrage when I sat down in the theater and found myself watching a biopic based on the real life story of actor George Wendt.

Wendt is famous for being large, and for his walk on role during an episode of the hit series Frasier, where he portrayed a large man who knew Dr. Frasier Crane in some way. The ‘Curious’ in the title refers to the struggles Wendt has gone through first discovering, then coming to terms with his sexuality (he’s a powerfully unattractive heterosexual.)

“You know! I’m that guy! That guy from the show!”, he bellows at an unfortunate woman in an early scene as he battles his unattractiveness. Surprisingly, he actually refers to himself as “that guy from that show,” suggesting that he himself is not entirely clear about the details of his career. This might be caused by the other facet in the 2-facet gem that is George Wendt: his ether addiction.

The film switches into animation to better illustrate Wendt’s ether induced madness, with Wendt being portrayed as the high-spirited monkey seen in the promotional materials. As a drug-fueled primate, Wendt finds himself getting into and out of a series of whimsical adventures with his enigmatic companion The Man In The Yellow Hat. Together they have a fun time at the circus, get trapped inside a crate full of bananas, and assault a drifter on a lonely desert highway and leave him for dead.

Like most biopics, the film doesn’t really conclude satisfactorily. Wendt doesn’t find true love, or triumphantly conquer his ether addiction, or find the Nazi gold marked on a secret map he found (an early subplot quickly introduced then just as quickly forgotten). Whether this weak ending is the fault of the filmmakers, or of Wendt for not having ended his life in an adequately cinematic fashion is unknown.

1 star.
*

The problem here is the sparse source material, with the original filmstrip clocking in at just under 5 minutes. Director Simon West was forced to pad the length with a convoluted backstory involving an inept burgler (played by Michael Moore) who devises various schemes to trick children into revealing they’re home alone, with the intention of robbing the house. If that sounds familiar to you, it should: It’s almost identical to the plot of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and it’s sequel, Terminator 3.

I’m spotty on what happens next because my mind has repressed much of it. During a scene where Moore breaks into his first victim’s house, he loses his trousers in an unlikely booby trap and spends the rest of the film naked from the waist down (I am told Moore demanded this as part of a protest against the studio). By the third act the studio’s censors had forced West to re-film most scenes using an anatomically correct puppet.

Incredibly, one scene that survived with the real Moore is a climactic chase wherein Michael Moore attempts to evade the police on a bicycle. I’m baffled by the decision to mount a camera on the handlebars facing Moore’s groin, displaying a thigh-level horror that resembles two Sumo wrestlers tossing around a bald midget. That and the uniquely horrible mixture of sounds – Moore’s thighs violently rubbing together combined with his desperate gasps for air – caused at least 13 audience members attending my screening to vomit.

If this film is somehow a success, you an expect more of the same as the original 1979 version of “When A Stranger Calls” was itself part of a 12-filmstrip series including Nuclear Attack Preparedness Is Not A Joke, The Man In The Windowless Van, and Downed Power Lines Are The Most Treacherous Friend Of All.

The original iPod was a 3 pound monstrosity with a 35 minute battery life and an outer shell made of children’s teeth. Yet despite all that it became an enormous sales success and brought Apple back from the brink of bankruptcy. Since then, every new iPod release has been almost immediately trumped by its competitors in storage space, features and price, and yet the iPod brand continues to outsell all others by close to 3 to 1.

Good marketing? Voodoo magic? Gypsy voodoo magic? More importantly, can it happen again? Meet the new Video iPod.

Size: Our tester 30GB model measured 4.1 x 2.4 x 0.43 inches, and at 5.6 oz is 40% lighter than the 4th generation iPod. This slender weight makes it useless for hand to hand combat, something to consider if you ever need to use it as a makeshift cudgel while fighting vicious animals or evading capture by Fish and Wildlife agents.

Interface: Apple’s much lauded interface is back again in fine form. The clickwheel is easy to learn and the menu system is simple and straightforward. There’s also a new feature: ˜Personal DJ.” It will supposedly study your listening habits, then suggest songs you might enjoy that are available to download from iTunes. A good idea, but there still seem to be some kinks to work out, as News Skim found that it only recommended music by Canadian prog rockers Rush.

Music: As we’ve come to expect from Apple, music playback quality is excellent. Also, the new iPod finally includes a Record To Mp3 feature, a must have for keeping memos, taking notes in lectures, or secretly gathering evidence during the sale of a black market leopard, as part of your plea bargain with the Bureau of Fish and Wildlife.

Video: The video quality on the new iPod gave us a boner. A boner of disappointment. For a $300 device, you’d expect much higher video quality. On top of that, the selection of videos available for download on iTunes is extremely limited. Desperate Housewives? Never heard of em. Where’s the episodes of Dr. Quinn – Medicine Woman, Wings or Major Dad? Similarly, there are no music videos available for many of today’s top bands, like the The Brian Setzer Orchestra, Sisqo, or Ace of Base.

Apple also drops the ball with its included software for converting your own videos to iPod ready formats. If you’re like most people, the main reason you’d buy something like a video iPod is to terrify old people on a bus with home made clips of your ass cheek puppetry. Unfortunately during field tests we found the poor image quality and small screen made the viewing of all such movies considerably less distressing.

Basically, it’s a steaming turd. And by the time you finish reading this, you’ll already own one.

The film portrays Kurtis as a dying breed, the solo flightplan filer who prefers to work alone. The audience quickly gets the impression that she’s somewhat of a loose cannon, a maverick of the flightplan-filing world, an impression that’s brought home by her constant humming of Kenny Loggins’ Danger Zone.

“She plays too fast and loose with the rules, always looking to cut corners,” says an Air Traffic controller (a surprisingly intense Alan Thicke in a powerful cameo) to an intern. “She’ll get someone killed one of these days with those antics.”

Looking confused, the intern replies. “Then why don’t they fire her?”

“Because she’s the best.”

For FAA paperwork enthusiasts like myself, the film should have been a home run. But the film quickly falls into the same trap as other big-budget adaptations (the screenplay was adapted from a stack of 300 photocopies of commercial flight plans from 1994-1996). I looked forward to watching the dynamic Foster pour over SIGMETs charts, forecasted cloud cover reports and turbulence warnings, but in reality this occupies no more than 60% of the film.

Even worse, the addition of a rival flightplan-filing gang led by their rapping leader Captain Baldwin (the woefully miscast Judi Dench) only adds confusion to the mix and the introduction of the love interest and terrorist ringleader (a creepily CGI-reanimated Burgess Meredith) doesn’t help matters. A dance-off in the mall in the third act seems forced, and the film quickly spirals off into the all-too-familiar Hollywood turd-abyss.

The rumours that surrounded this troubled production as it limped towards completion are now widely known. The repeated times Fred Durst stormed off the set, along with the constant demands echoing from Ms. Foster’s trailer for “more teenage boys! SUPPLE teenage boys!” appears to have taken a toll on the rest of the crew. The film feels like it was rushed through production, as evidenced by the final 10 minutes of the film being nothing more than a slideshow of childrens drawings of planes.

Flightplan is one “flight” that could have used a “flight plan,” had it actually been a flight rather than a film.