This is also a year where we can't get enough of -- or at the very least, they can't make enough of -- movies that look at a product or cultural craze of the past and how it came to be.
I've just seen the fourth such movie of its kind last night.
The Beanie Bubble is just the latest to drop this particular template on us, the first to be about an actual toy. The others have been about:
- A basketball shoe (Air)
- A phone that can send emails (BlackBerry)
- A highly addictive video game (Tetris).
I'd be inclined to say the returns are diminishing, except that the first of these I saw was the one I liked the least (Tetris). Air and BlackBerry are currently in my top ten for the year, and The Beanie Bubble now lands somewhere in between.
I suppose Barbie is even a variation on this sort of movie, given that it does include an albeit highly fantastical version of Mattel, the company that makes the world's most famous doll.
(Speaking of famous dolls, I think we should now expect a movie on the Cabbage Patch Kid craze, and possibly Furbees.)
We should probably be getting sicker of this trend than we actually are, which points up how generally durable it is. We have an apparently inexhaustible appetite to have the cultural fascinations of our earlier years projected back to us on screen, beyond the obvious ways the movies have always done this with their constant sequels and remakes. We at least profess to be interested in how the thing we love came to be.
This trend is, of course, not new this year. Without doing an exhaustive survey of past examples, movies like The Social Network, the various Steve Jobs movies and even something like the McDonald's origin story The Founder have all been previous successful examples. They all center on something we know and love, while creating the opportunity for a Goodfellas-style narrator to talk about how they were making money hand over fist and it was going to their heads, and giving a screenwriter leeway to imagine juicy conversations that took place behind closed doors.
But however popular this form may have always been, it's coming on like gangbusters in 2023. And we're only 60 percent of the way through the year, so there could be more. (Movie titles creep up on me a lot more these days than they used to. So if there's a movie about the Easy Bake Oven later this year, I won't be surprised.)
As for The Beanie Bubble in particular ... I did like it reasonably well (3.5 stars), but template fatigue may have begun setting in a bit. Also it seems like the film could have been 25% more unhinged, given the opening statement that "There are parts of the truth you just can't make up. The rest, we did." I wanted a little more of this movie to beggar belief like that text promised it would.
That said, I am really glad to see Kristin Gore -- Al's daughter and a former Futurama writer -- make good with both her first screenwriting credit since the disastrous David O. Russell film Accidental Love in 2015 (shared with Zac Bissonnette), and her first directing credit overall (shared with Damian Kulash). (That she had to share both with a man is a funny reality for a film about a soured partnership between the characters played by Zach Galifianakis and Elizabeth Banks.) Gore comes back admirably from a flop for which she presumably bears only a small percentage of the responsibility.
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