| Jerry Seinfeld, fresh off his “they don’t let us make comedy anymore” social media whining tour, has made a new comedy, Unfrosted, making fun of a whole bunch of better movies that came before it. Seinfeld who acts as producer, director, writer and star of the movie, belongs to a small set of people who likely never saw Air, or Blackberry or Tetris but complained about the idea of those movies being stupid. So he decided to make a stupider movie because he couldn’t see the humanity that was behind those movies. | | 2024
Directed by: Jerry Seinfeld
Screenplay by: Jerry Seinfeld, Spike Feresten, Andy Robin
Starring: Jerry Seinfeld, Jim Gaffigan, Melissa McCarthy
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Unfrosted is a mostly completely untrue spoof about the origin of the Pop Tart with a lot of famous comedians. So many that you would be forgiven for thinking it’s funny, because it is occasionally funny. It’d be almost impossible not to be funny when every single scene features at least three of the following gems: Jim Gaffigan, Melissa McCarthy, Hugh Grant, Kyle Mooney, Mikey Day, Patrick Warburton, Amy Schumer, Max Greenfield, Christian Slater, Thomas Lennon, James Marsden, Peter Dinklage, Fred Armisen, etc., etc., because the list really does go on. And most of them have more than one scene.
Air is probably the most famous of the new product biopic genre this movie is spoofing, but there are direct jabs at the yet-to-be-released but potentially high profile Fly Me to the Moon, and then the least well known but one of the best of its kind, Tetris. Probably because Jerry Seinfeld doesn’t understand why the political backdrop to Tetris makes it such a fascinating movie, he creates a fake political backdrop set during a mostly real political backdrop to then make completely unrelated ties to current politics.
Unfrosted is set during the early 1960s. John F Kennedy is president, there is a cold war brewing with “Russia” (does the movie not trust its audience if they call it the Soviet Union? No, it does not), and our Kellogg “heroes” approach El Sucre the Mexican sugar mobster to control all sugar entering the United States. That should give you an idea of how stupid the overall movie is, but there are complete jokes about naming a breakfast food “dingus” and pauses after someone says “Uh, oh, Spaghetti-os” to allow the audience enough time to laugh at how funny it is.
The best character (who later becomes political fodder) is Hugh Grant as the Tony the Tiger actor, a British thespian who does Shakespeare and high art, and is continually frustrated by how they don’t get his genius over at Kellogg’s marketing department. So he joins up with all the other breakfast cereal mascots and stages a Jan 6th-type coup. Seriously, complete with a Vikings horn helmet the mascot crew force their way into Kellogg’s offices directly re-enacting the famous Capitol images. There is no point to that political tie-in, maybe he’s trying to be edgy, not sure.
Finally the movie chooses to end with one real fact. Curious enough to make me look it up. Marjorie Post in real life (Margaret Post played by Amy Schumer in the movie) was a female owner of one of America’s biggest food companies, at one point the wealthiest woman in America, who then built and owned Mar-a-Lago (the Mar-a-Lago). Seinfeld tries to connect feminism with Donald Trump to make a point that nobody has honest politics. But he misunderstood what actually connects Marjorie Post and Donald Trump is not feminism but money, they’re both rich and liked flaunting their money, the end. But Unfrosted isn’t about money, it’s about nothing.
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