ChrisThilk Blog

The plot to Bee Movie is pretty simple. Young bee feels dissatisfied by the endless expanse of his life that’s before him as he prepares to enter the workforce, decides to leave the hive, meets a human woman who agrees to help him sue the human race over their stealing of the bee’s honey and eventually realizes there’s a role we all have to play and rejecting that role endangers everyone.

Like I said, simple.

But it’s executed pretty darn well. The computer animation is good. It’s not great but it’s good. The script is good. It’s not great but it’s good. But it’s the performances, particularly that of star Jerry Seinfeld, that really elevate the movie into pretty darn good territory. Even if it never achieves greatness it’s a completely entertaining movie that contains no shortage of laughs.

A lot of the humor comes from the bee-life parallels to the human world. Barry B. Benson, Seinfeld’s character, is constantly being prodded by his parents to find a nice girl, someone “beeish,” to settle down with. And he feels every bit as lost and overwhelmed by the lifetime of work he’s faced with as any college graduate. Seinfeld sells it with his trademark conversational style and a delivery that never underlines the jokes in the script, something that can’t be said for some of the others in the cast.

I watched Bee Movie with my kids and, while the four year old was a little scared of some of the sequences, both he and my almost seven year old asked to watch it again, something they don’t usually do. While it’s not really a kids movie in the strictest sense of the term (the audience for the script is obviously adults) there’s little that’s actually objectionable in the movie for kids, at least in my opinion.

The “Very Jerry” two-disc DVD comes loaded with lots of material, some new and some carried over from the movie’s marketing campaign.

Disc One has a bunch of  “Lost” scenes and a number of “Alternate Endings” that are fully voiced but which appear as storyboard sketches. There’s also a cast featurette and, of course, commentary by Seinfeld on the movie itself.

I’m really glad a number of the items from the marketing campaign were put on the disc as well. Both of the live-action trailers are here, a short feature on the Cannes publicity stunt that had Seinfeld in a big bee costume flying over the city. Finally there are the 16 “TV Juniors” that appeared on NBC and which are really quite funny.

Disc Two is meant more for the kids, with the “We Got the Bee” music video, a bit of information on bees and some games and other interactive features that are definitely more entertaining for kids.

It’s a good movie that doesn’t redefine the goals of animated films or anything but does do a good job of providing 90 minutes or so of solid entertainment. And the DVDs serve as a good archive of some of the promotional materials and other features.

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I largely like Steve Carell. I find him an affable personality, a truly gifted physical comedian and a genuine talent at showing the pain that hides behind the bravest of facades.

Most all of those talents are on display in Dan in Real Life. Carell plays a widower with three daughters, ranging from 10 to 17 years of age, and a job as a newspaper columnist dispensing parental advice. All four of them embark on an annual trip up to the family home for a week with his parents and siblings. But while there he falls in love with a woman he meets in a bookstore, a woman who turns out to be the new girlfriend of one of his brothers. Comedy and tragedy ensue.

There’s about 60 percent of a good movie within Dan in Real Life. The cast all performs amicably, but there are just too darn many characters to for most of them to come off as more than place-holders. And John Mahoney is criminally under-used as the family patriarch, with Diane Wiesst, who plays the mom/grandma of the bunch, getting most of the lines and juicier scenes between the two of them.

Dane Cook plays the brother Carell’s character comes into conflict with and his laid-back, doesn’t really care persona is put to good use here as just that kind of character.

I think that the main problem with the movie is that there’s too much slow-pitch softball in the script. One scene early on shows Cook telling Carell that because they’re brothers nothing he could do would ever irritate him, something that is obviously going to be revisited later. It’s too easy a guffaw for the audience and there are too many moments like that in the movie.

But despite some qualms with the script, which is where most of my problems originate, I did enjoy Dan in Real Life overall. Carell does his best making Dan more than a cutout character and the best moments in the movie are the little grace notes he throws as he looks sideways at someone or other small moments like that. They make the larger implausibilities that are presented more bearable.

If you allow yourself to just go with the flow you’ll enjoy the movie quite a bit. I’m not asking you to turn off your brain, just to accept the events of the movie as following their own sort of logic and let it go. Most of the movie is not a flat-out comedy and it doesn’t really turn into a feel-good flick until the last three minutes or so, so don’t expect a lot of laugh-out-loud moments or anything. But it is a group of people who are pretty good in their roles doing the best they can.

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