Unfrosted

 In 1986 on a Saturday night I was watching a Rodney Dangerfield HBO Special.  Dangerfield was always one of my favorite comedians.  He had a blue collar appeal and often made himself the butt of his jokes.  When I need a laugh I'll often pull up one of his routines on youtube and it never fails to give me a belly laugh. Dangerfield's specials were built around allowing several comedians to each do a set. Sam Kinison and Roseanne Barr, among others were on that night and were funny yet raunchy (especially Kinison whose sets were wildly offensive even then) a young comedian named Jerry Seinfeld came on stage.  Seinfeld came across very differently from the others.  He wore a nice suit and looked like he had just graduated from prep school.  In contrast to the other comedians Seinfeld did a very clean set in which he poked fun at NY cab drivers and showers in a detached yet very observational way and it was really funny.  

A few years later Seinfeld got his own NBC show which at first I only watched sporadically.  I had a hard time seeing Jason Alexander as someone other than the nasty character he played in Pretty Woman.  But I kept hearing about how clever Seinfeld was and during the sixth season I started watching it more regularly and really got into its humor.  Whenever possible I tried to watch it with friends as it played much better that way.  

Seinfeld had good instincts on when to stop the show.  The last season has some very funny moments but overall was more hit and miss than the show was at its height and if there had been subsequent seasons the quality may have started to drop.  Each episode had about three storylines and it must have been an enormous task to produce, be the showrunner and the lead actor, even though Seinfeld was always playing a fictionalized version of himself.  Since it ended I have watched most of the earlier episodes and greatly enjoy most of them.

Seinfeld's post "Seinfeld" career has been carefully cultivated.  The show made him very wealthy so Seinfeld could pick and choose where he surfaced.  He wisely avoided trying another sitcom as he recognized that he could not top that show.  Seinfeld who is at heart a comedian has toured the country going to comedy clubs, doing occasional HBO and Netflix specials.  About fifteen years after the show ended he started a show called "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee" which is now on Netflix.  Seinfeld would pick a classic car to match the personality of a specific comedian and drive around with the comedian and eventually they would get coffee.  Guests included Jim Carrey, Stephen Colbert, Kristin Wiig and many others and the episodes only last about 15-20 minutes.  Seinfeld also wrote and starred as a bee in an animated film that was pretty funny.  Seinfeld maintains his same persona in all these outings.  He's very smart, asks a lot of questions, and makes wry and detached observations.  He even appeared on a episode of one of Cesar Millan's shows in which he had to earn the trust of his wife's dog.  This episode showed a different side of him since we see a little of his home life and he's just a dad and dog owner.  

All these experiences have taught me to trust a Seinfeld production.  If I watch him in something he has probably had a big role in writing it and there will be something funny in it.  Even the much maligned Seinfeld finale was funny.  The problem was it put the characters on trial for their behavior unnecessarily.  The show had always punished the characters for their selfish actions so the trial with all the character witnesses felt like overkill.  But the ending scenes with Jerry doing standup for the convicts was actually pretty entertaining and more in the spirit of the show.

A couple of years ago I was listening to Conan O'Brien's podcast and Seinfeld was a guest.  Near the end of the chat Seinfeld casually mentioned that he was directing a movie about the Pop Tart.  I thought he might be joking as I could not think of a less cinematic subject.  I like Pop Tarts (though I rarely eat them nowadays) but I could not imagine where the comedy might be in a movie about them.  Also, Seinfeld had never directed even an episode of his own show so I was surprised to hear that at his age (he turn 70 right before the film was released though he comes across as much younger) he would take on a task like a directing a film for the first time.  I hoped this would not be a misstep though I also believed that if anyone could make a film like this entertaining he probably could.  I was not sure if he would act in it too but was relieved to see him onscreen in the first trailer.

Spoilers below:

Unfrosted is about the race between Kellogg's and Post (who were bitter rivals in the 1960s) to develop the first breakfast pastry.  Seinfeld does a few things with his film to give it a voice.  First he pulls a little from his childhood, as he remembered when the Pop Tart first was released.  In the film, Seinfeld's character Bob Cabana tells the story from the film to a young runaway boy in a diner.  Bob uses the lengthy story to buy time for the boy's parents to arrive.  In doing so it is suggested that a lot of the many outlandish elements of the plot are made up to keep the boy engaged.  But we feel that Seinfeld would have been about the same age as the boy in the early 1960s when this is taking place.

Secondly Seinfeld loads his cast up with comedians.  Melissa McCarthy (who refreshingly does not play a loud mouthed person who curses a lot) plays a NASA scientist, Amy Schumer is a rival Post executive, Jim Gaffigan is a Kellogg executive, Hugh Grant is hilarious as Thurl Ravenscroft the actor who played Tony the Tiger, and Bill Burr as John F. Kennedy.  Additionally lots of actors from Saturday Night Live play smaller roles.  

Third and lastly Seinfeld embraces (and in doing so asks the audience to) the idea that making a film about the Pop Tart is so ridiculous you have to laugh at it.  The creation of the Pop Tart is treated as no less than a cultural and political phenomenon, equivalent to the moon landing that occurred a few years later.  There are shots from inside a toaster over meant to simulate a rocket taking off, miming the space race at the time.  Cold War tensions break out since Marjorie Post gets access to Cuban sugar for her pastry by meeting with Nikita Kruschev (because Kellog's has gotten most the rest of the sugar by meeting with a Latin American criminal named El Sucre played by Felix Solis, seemingly parodying his role as the head of a cartel in Ozark).  Kruschev is played by tough guy actor Dean Norris who speaks in Eastern European sounding gibberish instead of actual Russian.  The dairy industry is threated by this pasty that would not use milk so they react in the form of Christian Slater as a threatening milkman.  Thurl Ravenscroft leads a January 6 type attack by other cereal mascots on Kellogg's headquarters as the FDA are "certifying" the product.  I admired the gall of Seinfeld to spoof January 6 so soon after it happened and for finding a way to make it funny.  

As a director, Seinfeld focuses more on jokes and gags than the plot and the film plays a little like a more frantic version of Midnight in Paris (whch also used a lot of historical figures in a comedic way).  Not all the jokes work.  There is a subplot about "taste pilots" using real life figures from other industries that just eats up a lot of screentime (except for the Steve Schwinn cereal honors funeral which is inventive).  The ravioli creature is silly without being funny and as a parent I did not think children playing in garbage is anything other than gross.  The Romeo and Juliet relationship between Edsel and Majorie would work better if it were their kids that fell in love.

Seinfeld as an actor steps just a little outside his comfort zone, as Bob is a corporate type but also more eager to please than many of Seinfeld's characters, but he is largely the straight man among a lot of crazy folks.  Seinfeld wisely avoids casting actors from his show so the interactions have a different feel to them (except for Patrick Warburton, who has a brief cameo as an announcer who never interacts with Bob).  I could easily have seen Seinfeld casting Julia Louis Dreyfus in either Melissa McCarthy and Amy Schumer's parts (and Louis Dreyfus would have killed in either of them) but it would have felt like Jerry and Elaine which is not what this film needs.  In the very entertaining closing sequence the cast sings and dances (in moments clearly captured during the filming of scenes throughout the story) to a new song by Meghan Trainor and Jimmy Fallon called "Sweet Morning Treat", the lyrics of which sum of the tone of the movie "I like a rectangle that I can heat up".  Seinfeld is shown lip syncing and dancing to the song which I never could imagine him doing on his show.

A few of highlights are:

• The Bowl and Spoons spoofing the pomposity of Hollywood awards shows, staged in a Holiday Inn conference room instead of a massive auditorium.
• Andy Daly as Isaiah Lamb, the Quaker Oats mascot who always dresses up as and speaks like a Quaker.
• Kyle Dunnigan as a Walter Cronkite who passive aggressively expresses his marital frustrations to his camera people whenever he is off camera.  While the film jokes that his wife bothers him about his drinking this I believe is just a joke.  Cronkite and his wife Betsy were married for 65 years and while he was noted for being a bit of wine connosieur I have never heard of him being an alcoholic.  Dunnigan makes a lot of his cracks without ever dropping the broadcaster voice.  
• The very obvious corporate espionage between Kellog's and Post (janitors using cameras on their vacuum cleaners) that no one seems to notice.
• The White House scene has a lot of big laughs.  The idea that the White House staff has an old suit worn by President Taft is creative.  Burr makes JFK about the most arrogant version of JFK ever put on screen.  I loved his selfish twist on the "Ask not" line and the subtle way he goes to have some kind of offscreen threesome with the Doublemint twins (and McCarthy's quiet but notable offended reaction to it).   
• The cereal honors funeral for the always sweet Jack McBrayer's Steve Schwinn who gives his life to help Kellog's win.  The milk and coffin in the grave, lifting up the coffin makes this the funniest funeral since Hot Shots.   

Unfrosted (presumably called because the frosting on the Pop Tarts came later) is a fun confection loaded with laughs.  It's unlikely anyone other than Seinfeld could have pulled together this onscreen talent but I'm glad he did and as always, am eager to see what he does next.  ***