Movie Review: Unfrosted
Unfrosted - Definitely worth watching
Jerry Seinfeld made a movie about Pop Tarts. It’s exactly what you think it is. Jerry has been talking about Pop Tarts for around 50 years, and now he’s super rich and famous and Netflix gave him about a $14 million budget to make a feature length film about cereal, Pop Tarts, Kellogg’s, Post, the 1960’s, etc…
I like the movie. I think it’s pretty good. It is definitely worth the 90 minutes you’ll be asked to invest in it. So let’s get into the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Unfrosted is filled with funny people who all give great performances. Melissa McCarthy, Amy Schumer, Bill Burr, Hugh Grant, Jim Gaffigan, Christian Slater… I could go on and on because this movie is star studded, and that makes total sense. It’s a completely uncontroversial, PG-13, period piece that tells a faux history of the race between Kellogg’s and Post to create the Pop Tart, and it’s written and directed by Jerry Seinfeld. Who wouldn’t want to be in it? (Answer: Apparently everyone wanted to be in it… and everyone is).
The movie is a bit of a spoof on The Right Stuff, but actually has throw backs to a lot of classic movies. This is true to form as Seinfeld’s TV series also pulled from classic movies a lot. It’s part of Jerry’s humor… sometimes you have to get the wink and the smile to get the joke. There’s a lot of that in this movie.
All of the performances are quite good, which is no surprise considering the cast. The sets are colorful and fun. The props and sets are incredibly intricate and add to the nostalgia that the film is obviously meant to inspire.
Nostalgia
In interviews about the film, Jerry has been quite open about his nostalgia for this era of Americana. He was born in 1954 and was 9 or 10 years old the year that Unfrosted is set. It’s obvious that he loves this time. He loves the things that existed in the early 60’s. Silly Putty, metal two slot toasters, the cars, the suits that men wore, the way offices were decorated, and the glassware and furniture.
I am with him on this. While the early 60’s predates me by 25 years, I do like this era of America. It seems like suburbia in particular was just innocent, clean, patriotic, and … better than now. Jerry makes the joke that if he can help Kellogg’s win the race for the Pop Tart against rival Post, he’ll be able to send his son to a top college, which costs “hundreds of dollars per year!”. A great line… considering when my father went to VMI in 1966, the tuition was under $1000.
That said, there is one thing above all that Jerry Seinfeld seems to love about the early 1960’s… the advertising.
He loves that companies were so willing to lie, specifically to kids, to sell their wares. The mail away prizes like the Frogman that didn’t work, or X-Ray glasses that you thought were going to let you see under people’s clothes, but were just cardboard with holes punched in the middle. None of it worked, and all of it was fun anyway. The fact that the product was a rip-off paled in comparison to the dream you had as a kid that the product might actually do what it said it would.
In the 1980’s when I was growing up, there were still remnants of some of this stuff in the back of comic books and on cereal boxes. We still had Sea Monkeys which are featured prominently in the movie and my friend Rob actually did send away for the X-Ray glasses… and as I recall we were actually so stupid and innocent that we thought they would work. I don’t remember if we ever got them, but I do remember being excited at the prospect. So I’m with Seinfeld on this. It was all pretty great.
Innocence
The movie opens with a very cute scene of a young boy packing a classic hobo stick and bandana with some comic books and ‘running away’. He makes it as far as the local diner where Seinfeld is seated. The boy orders a Pop Tart and Seinfeld uses the moment as a chance to tell the story of the invention of the treat.
It’s a nice scene. It makes you smile wide and think to yourself, ‘Were we really that innocent?’. And yes… we were. Again, I came along 25 years after this movie is set, but I pulled a similar move when I was a little boy. I didn’t do the hobo bandana and stick, but I found an old suitcase that I could barely drag and filled it with toys and other nonsense and announced I was running away too.
As was the proper parenting of the time, my mother simply said “have fun out there” and let me walk out the door dragging the suitcase. I hid in the woods around my house for a while and eventually came back. It really was a different time, and we really were innocent once. We believed what we were told on television and in commercials. We trusted that men in suits would deliver on what they promised. We counted on them… and in most cases, we weren’t disappointed.
It was that wonderful time of childhood before sex entered the picture and ruined everything. The whole world seemed so big and filled with great things, and adults were smarter than us and competent. At the end of the day, after school or playing with your friends, you went home to a mom and a dad, who if they really had their stuff together, might even have a Kellogg’s or Post treat in the pantry for you to grab before you ran off to watch TV.
That’s how this movie feels. It just feels nice. It feels like a Pop Tart.
While some critics inevitably will (and already have) complained that the movie doesn’t accurately depict the early 1960’s… they are wrong. The movie perfectly depicts the early 1960’s. It just depicts it through the innocent lens of a child’s eyes.
Is it funny?
Yes. It’s funny. The jokes are well crafted, smart, and precise. It’s much more Jerry Seinfeld stand-up style humor than the Larry David influenced sit-com, though. The comedy is very aware of itself, and gets a little meta at times, but it is very funny.
I’ll admit that Jerry Seinfeld’s humor isn’t for everyone. It’s neither slapstick nor does it make big comments on huge cultural issues. It’s not Jim Carrey, nor is it George Carlin or Bill Hicks. Jerry’s humor explores the absurdity of the mundane. He likes to play with words, and works hard to make those words flow in a certain cadence which, like good music, brings the audience with him. You can almost tap your foot along with a Seinfeld stand-up set.
The humor in this movie is exactly like that. There are a lot of one-two set-up punchlines. There are some sarcastic comments that you almost have to pause the movie and go back to. It is difficult to highlight any real standout performances, because they were all strong. Jerry does a great job as Kellogg’s executive Bob Cabana. Jim Gaffigan is perfect as the doughy midwestern Kellogg’s CEO, Edsel Kellogg III.
Unsurprisingly, the only performance I thought wasn’t great is Amy Schumer’s take on Post CEO, Majorie Post. I thought she played a bit cartoonish… especially when juxtaposed to Gaffigan, she just doesn’t have those kind of chops. I think Iliza Shlesinger would have been a better choice there, but nobody asked me, so no harm, no foul.
Kyle Dunnigan is hilarious as Walter Cronkite. Bill Burr does a fantastic JFK. We even get a cameo from our favorite 1960’s Madison Ave advertising men, John Hamm and John Slattery.
All that said, the movie is not one that is going to have you belly laughing all the way through it. As I said, much like a Seinfeld stand-up set, it’s clever and precise and has some big laughs, but it’s not trying to one up itself all through the movie. Some of it is hilarious, some of it is just plain entertaining.
Who is this movie for? Who is it not for?
Unfrosted is for an older crowd. There’s nothing wrong with admitting that. If you are a younger millennial or a Gen-Z person, a lot of the humor is just going to go over your head. You probably don’t know who Jack LaLanne is, and you don’t really understand the connection to the space program Americans had at the time. It was a very big deal.
The real audience for this movie is Jerry Seinfeld, a 70 year old man who likes the things of his youth. My parents and their friends will like the movie. Really anyone who grew up at a time when kids were more ‘free-range’ and able to explore the world without supervision will like it. People who remember a time before cell phones, home computers, the internet, and certainly social media will like it. Anyone younger than that will feel preached at and might find themselves annoyed by it.
As a guy at the tail end of Gen-X, even I am almost too young for the movie. I still got the humor and I know who all the people are, but I have no personal connection to the early 1960’s. I liked the movie because I was able to connect it to my childhood in the middle 1980’s. After all, the technology was pretty much the same, we just had a few more TV channels.
The other group of people who won’t like this movie are critics. The critics are just going to hate it. The film very intentionally ignores the social strife of the early 60’s. It makes no comment on race, sexuality, feminism, or the patriarchy. There are no valium numbed housewives being abused by their alcoholic husbands and every race that I’m aware of is in the film… as full characters, because Jerry Seinfeld’s only casting criteria was “are you funny?”. Everything else is wholly uninteresting to him. As he has said before, if it’s not about the funny, he’s just not interested.
There’s a January 6th gag that critics will despise and the unabashed pro-America theme will drive them nuts. Frankly, the reason the critics won’t like this movie is the same reason they don’t like what the movie is really about, the space race.
It annoys them to no end that inside of 10 years, the United States of America accomplished something as impossible as going to the moon, and did so without all of the things they count on in their daily lives. There were no diversity quotas, no need to have a woman out front, no concern about inclusiveness in the messaging. They didn’t even know what a carbon footprint was.
It was a simple mandate and a simple goal. You can have the smartest people in the world and a hell of a lot of money. You can do whatever you want. You don’t have to answer to anyone. Just land a man on the moon.
And by God, they did it. A few people had to die and billions of dollars had to be spent. They had to hire a Nazi or two and had to steal a little technology. But they did it. It was that pure American idea, give us the problem and get out of our way and we will give you a solution.
We never would have gotten to the moon if they made those guys hire some lady or some person of color who wasn’t the absolute best in their field. We never would have gotten there if some politician or bureaucrat told them that the rockets weren’t eco-friendly enough. It was simple. It was pure. Man, moon… Go.
In a real sense, I feel that in Unfrosted. It’s pure. It’s simple. Make a good movie… Go.
—Virgil