Rarely can I shut my brain off and simply enjoy a movie on its own terms: my thoughts will travel in a million different directions and any one of them can affect my impression. One can claim to be critically non-biased but if I have a bad day and I want to unwind by going to see the latest Jane Austin adaptation AND THEN I HATE IT (which I most surely will, if the trailer preceding this particular feature was anything to go by) then I have no one to blame but myself, don’t I? There are a minimum of three new domestic movies released EVERY WEEK OF THE YEAR, not including international films or re-releases. There will always be movies to see. If I had my choice, then, would I have seen Dolittle? The much-maligned reboot-slash-reimagining of Doctor Dolittle with an unshackled-from-Kevin-Feige’s-basement Robert Downey Jr? No: I would have sneaked into it for free. What do you want? It had terrible pre-screening reviews; worrisome press about “reshoots” and “retooling”; and then it was release-dumped in January: a time when no one wants to go to the movies because everyone is still exhausted physically-and-financially from Christmas and suddenly become very aware of how much popcorn should actually cost. Is your movie’s tone a little darker then you would like it and the Men In Suits pay you millions of dollars to reshoot the ending, only to have the new one ruin the continuity of the rest of the film? Dump it in January. Are you up against another Star Wars or Fast & Furious sequel on your current release date and all the big Studio boys have paid double then what you can afford for May-to-December slots? Dump it in January. Silly horror movie starring the only boy from that Netflix show who was willing to suck-a-dick for a career? January. Oscar bait? January. A foreign film re-edited by The Weinstein Company, and if that wasn’t bad enough Harvey gets slapped by your lead actress and he shelves the movie for three years? Nos vemos en Enero. Doctor Dolittle 2020? SEE YOU IN JANUARY. Guy Ritchie’s movies keep getting released in January: I’m sure he is not impressed. But my wife and sister LOVED King Arthur with Charlie Hunnam, and they were stoked for this “new vision” of the Dolittle story, too (which sadly is not directed by Guy Ritchie – but there is a “popcorn flick” for ya). Would it be like the Rex Harrison original, which my wife grew up on? The Eddie Murphy movies, which my sister grew up on? Or would it be closer to the books?
Let me tell you a story. When I was in my first year of film school, my job on the term project (which was done in teams) was Sound Designer-slash-Editor. I had never worked with sound before, and only ever held a boom-mike for the first time in that course. My focus up to that point was on Picture Editing but Sound Editing didn’t seem that far removed, and I was able to use the same software for both (when I really shouldn’t have. Strike One). The story was about a pizza delivery driver who gets stiffed on a run and goes looking for the guy that owes him, only to stumble into a warehouse where the mob have some lackey tied to a chair. The driver saves him, and they escape via car. The End. It was five-minutes-long. Let me reiterate: I WAS NOT THE BOSS. I was a Sound Designer. My job was to put in the footsteps and ambient noise after principal photography, as per the director’s instruction. Instead, I used it as an opportunity to take some control over the project. So when the driver character entered the warehouse, I put in sounds of women crying and an emanating low-bass to try and make it sound like he had stumbled onto a sex ring in a Gaspar Noe movie (so our lead wanders down the main hallway of the warehouse with ominous red lights flashing around him and shouting, “You still owe me five bucks!” He doesn’t even save any of the women, maybe because they don’t exist. Strike Two). And after all that work and with no backup, I dropped the portable hard drive I was working on that wasn’t mine to begin with and lost all the data (portable storage was not nearly as durable in 2007. Strike Three). Dolittle’s animal voice cast is too busy and too demarcated that you don’t know who is speaking to who (or what) when. Like a jungle (or a PG-friendly, off-screen sex trafficking ring), it’s a cacophony: whole conversations between animals (including a subplot involving the friendship between a polar bear and an ostrich) are drowned-out in the background by human characters spouting plot-driving garbage and a soundtrack eerily similar to 1984’s Dune (especially when Dolittle latches the boat to the humpback whale in the same way Paul hooked the Sand Worm). Wouldn’t it be funny if the reshoots were because someone corrupted the hard drive with all the sound clips on it so they had to call everyone back in to re-record?
THEREFORE, to answer my question: Dolittle is closer to the Eddie Murphy movies then it is to “the old one”; whether it’s close to the books or not is for someone who has read them. It’s nice to see Robert Downey Jr doing something other then Tony Stark Iron Man (and I’m sure he feels the same way), but it’s not a “defined” performance: it’s another loosey-goosey RDJ role we’ve seen before, but this time with a distractingly-fake Irish-ish accent. Martin Sheen and Antonio Banderas as the villains are fine, but not great. The CGI is fine but not great. What happened to the time when people were paid to train these animals in real-life to perform on-camera? Yes, there are certain moments in the film where it would be impossible to get a real animal to do what they have to for the scene: a sugar-glider getting thrown across a room to squish the juice from a berry into someone’s mouth? Not happening with a real sugar-glider (even if it was a VERY WELL-TRAINED SUGAR-GLIDER, liberal viewers would still complain about possible cruelty). But the ENTIRE MOVIE is CGI animals. Were producers worried of the liability should anything happen on-set? To the animals? To the actors? What if RDJ was bit by the gorilla and developed some sort of horrible disease? Rex Harrison was allegedly bit while making the original and was just as big a diva as RDJ so what’s the deal? Their compromise was to fake it all? Money. They saved some money. That’s what this whole experience felt like: half-assed. Actors; Writers; Sound Designers: they half-assed it. Kids will love it. My 84-year-old father-in-law loved it (especially the tiger with anger management issues, voiced by Ralph Fiennes). I’m simply not A.D.D. enough to let some of this bullshit slide anymore.
//jf 2.19.20
theory of a daskeman 