Does acknowledging obvious plot holes and
winking at them make it okay to have obvious plot holes or:
Grumpy Cat is so cute, I don't care about anything else.
Real talk: this movie was not bad at all. It was even maybe good? Maybe? If the answer to the above question is yes, then yes it is a good movie. But then again, I have to admit some pretty major bias. Number one, I've been on the Grumpy Cat train since day one. I've had two different Grumpy Cat profile pictures on Facebook (one was Grump as Judge Dredd and the other was her as the astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey). And number two, I love Aubrey Plaza, who voices Grumpy Cat. I should specify, I mainly love April Ludgate, but since April is basically the human equivalent
of Grumpy Cat, it is perfect casting.
So, Grumpy Cat is content living in a pet store in the mall. She knows that neither she nor any of the other "reject" pets (mice, birds, snakes) will ever be adopted. "We're all going to die in here" she tells the others, but again, she's fine with it. That is, until she overhears the store owner talking to the landlord about being behind on rent. Luckily, the owner has a plan to save the store! He's going to turn Grumpy into the greatest internet meme in the world! And he'll make a bunch of money selling merchandise and maybe even make a movie one day! Seriously, that's what they say, exactly what happened in real life. Then Grumpy's all like, nah just kidding, that'd be dumb.
You see, they establish early on that Grumpy is something of an unreliable narrator, and indeed many things she says must be taken with a grain of salt, even when we see it on screen. So she rewinds and says the owner's real plan is to sell this perfectly bred dog for a million dollars. "Sounds like a MacGuffin to me, whatever that means." Another of the many self-aware lines that Grumpy says.
Anyway, around this time, we meet the human protagonist, a 13 year old whose father left her family not long ago, and she's been struggling to make friends because of it. Or as Aubrey Plaza explains in a shot of her in the sound booth, "the girl who gets second billing to me." That's right, they basically take a shit on the fourth wall here in terms of not giving a fuck. Another example of this is because it is a Lifetime movie, there are ad breaks, and before one of them, Grumpy says to the camera, "time to sell you stuff," and then tells you what hashtag to use if you're live-tweeting. I can't tell if this was all supposed to be ironic and became genuine, or if it was supposed to be genuine but became ironic.
Right, the girl. So she's sad and lonely, only having conversations with the adult workers at the mall. After a failed attempt to talk to some cool girls, she's comforted by a mall Santa, who encourages her to make a wish, which turns out to be for a friend. Well, it comes true, but not in the way she expected. You see, she becomes able to hear Grumpy Cat's words. Before really comprehending what's going on, the cool girls who rebuffed her earlier swing by to provide more ridicule. "Look at the freak having a conversation with little kitty!" Which reminded me of this Archer scene:
As Barry says, from what the cool girls can see, she's just talking to the cat, not with it. Maybe this scene just really hits home because I talk to my cat a lot, often pretending like he responds, which sounds pretty bad typing it out, but as far as I know, there's no changing this, once it's typed, so I guess it's staying there.
The real conflict comes when the girl sneaks into the mall after hours in order to see Grumpy again and try and figure out what the deal is, but she witnesses a robbery of the million dollar dog. It becomes a kind of Home Alone without the Rube Goldberg traps in order to thwart the dumb criminals.
This scene is a prime example of both Grumpy as an unreliable narrator the movie getting away with major plot holes simply by acknowledging them and usually making a joke. The clip doesn't last long enough, but it does revert to normal, where the girl drives the car, not Grumpy. By the way, the car is a Camero. I only mention that because it was clearly product placement. It wasn't that in your face, except they never referred to it as a car, but rather always as a Camero, whereas the bad guys' car is a junker that people keep referring to as a "clown car." I'm not kidding when I say they say Camero at least five times in about a two minute scene.
Moral of the story, I thought this was going to be molten garbage poured on top of a septic tank, but it turned out to be a pretty good self-aware holiday movie, not including the point where the movie promotes Grumpy Cat's owner's real-life website that sells Grumpy Cat tchotchkes. That was something that I genuinely could not discern if it was a moment of self-parody or shamelessly shilling their shit.
Rating on the feel-good-o-meter: 5 out of 10 hugs
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