Unfrosted

I’ll be honest, normally I wouldn’t have watched Unfrosted. It had vaguely crossed my attention when it first dropped but failed to really register. But when the Discord mob said “shall we have a watch along, this is the movie?” I said yes; I’m not a complete misanthrope. Until we talked about what the film was about, I didn’t realise that I had heard of it, it made that much of an impression!

The film is based around a largely true story of the battle between Kellog's and Post to bring Pop-Tarts to the marketplace. What we see is nothing like the true history, instead it’s a lightning fast comedy that very much throws everything at the wall hoping that enough jokes land for you to carry you over the ones that don’t. All of us laughed enough that we have no regrets about watching it. We tended to laugh at the same things so we could have had a better, more focused, film that would have kept us laughing more. That said, for all we’re discord friends and while most of us have never met in person, we have close enough common interests that we’ve stayed together as a group for several years now, essentially unchanged as a group. The fact that we all laughed at the same things isn’t surprising and I’m sure there are people out there who laughed uproariously at stuff we just looked at, and scratched their heads every time we laughed.

If I may divert for a while, I sometimes watch people, usually Americans, react to things like Mock The Week “Scenes We'd Like to See”. There are chunks of jokes that I find hilarious that they just don’t get - too many British cultural references. I’m pretty sure there are American references here that I just didn’t get, although not that many that landed and caused laughs for the Americans I was watching with. Netflix has done some individual comedian standup shows. Those work, better than this from what I remember, despite being one type of humour because fans of the comedian make the effort to watch. But, in general, recent comedy films that I’ve seen take this scatter gun approach. It might give them the widest possible audience but it doesn’t deliver a really good film. I’m willing to put up a small amount of hard cash to bet you’ll laugh a few times if you watch Unfrosted. A better targeted film might have a smaller audience, but they’d also laugh more. Is that a disaster? I don’t know. There’s nothing to make me want an Unfrosted 2. Nothing to make me go to a con, buy merch or similar. There are films where I’ve done that in the past. There are comedy films, Ghostbusters springs to mind, I actually did buy merch for this, I didn’t for Galaxy Quest but I might have, so there are definitely films which would fit that description. Given I don’t specifically seek out comedy films often, the fact that I can think of one where I actually bought merch it suggests it can be done. I would note both of those films played to a specific sort of humour, or at least a narrow range… they might not have worked for everyone but for the right audience they definitely did. I don’t know what a version of Unfrosted that was aimed at a more narrow sene of humour would look like, nor how it would have done, in terms of viewers, but I can’t help wondering if it would have been a better film.

In the moments in Unfrosted when you’re not laughing, you can always keep an eye open for cameos, hundreds of cameos. The scattergun approach also lets you think about what they’re parodying now. Some of the things are big enough that even not being American I could easily place them, but I’m sure there are a lot that I missed.

This is an odd film. I have no regrets about watching it. It was fun watching with friends. I laughed enough that the film felt ok too. But it wasn’t a good film. It could have been but it aimed too wide and failed to really deliver a satisfying film to anyone.

Bechdel Test: Fail. There are at least two named female roles, and quite a number of women in cameos as well. But conversations between them? Not so much.

Ko Test: Fail. This is a very white film, pretty much all round in fact.

Russo Test: Fail. In fairness, apart from a couple of characters we know nothing about their sexualities, but where we do they’re almost all portrayed as unrelentingly straight. There are two men who end up living together, and you can interpret them as being gay, I did, but it’s not made clear - presumably so they didn’t offend the conservatives - so they didn’t actually pass the test.