Little Man
Shawn Wayans, Marlon Wayans
I was house sitting at my parents’ place a few months back. As my dog, Mr. Gibb, made the rounds, sniffing around the kitchen for any crumbs that might have fallen on the floor when the most wonderful smell came to his nose – peanut butter. One little problem, this manna from the gods was sitting on a set mousetrap. Gibb looked at me, his brown eyes almost dancing with joy as I growled at him not to even think about it. It was then that I heard the snap and then the yelp as he bound out of the kitchen with the mousetrap hanging from his face. After pulling him out from underneath the dining room table, I carefully removed the dangling trap, put it back in its place, and decided not to set the trap again because I did not want a repeat performance. Even though peanut butter is one of his favorite snacks in the world, that glob of creamy goodness remained untouched for the next three months. He was not going to get his nose pinched again. What lessons can we draw from this parable? My dog that loves to drink from the toilet and thinks nothing is funner than eating a plastic pop bottle is smarter than most moviegoers.
Year in and year out, I hear people complain about the movies, about how dumb they are or how morally corrupt they are. Here is the dirty little secret of Hollywood. The movies are a conservative business. For the most part, they mostly make what they think people will watch. Every once in awhile, a studio executive will take a risk, gamble on some project that no one else believes in and it will pay off like three cherries on a slot machine like Lord of the Rings, Chicago, Pirates of the Caribbean, The Passion of the Christ, or Million Dollar Baby. For the most part, Hollywood goes with what works. It is why it seems like every month we get a new animated movie, a superhero adventure, or the latest knife kill/dead teenager flick. Some Christians love to moan about the lack of morals in cinema but then don’t support a film like Millions last year, maybe the best Christian film in years. If they had, I guarantee you executives would have sat up and taken notice and green-lit several likeminded projects. It is the same reason we are not besieged with reality show movies. When the reality movie The Real Cancun showed up at the box office DOA, dozens of similar projects were scrapped. People like garbage, the dumber the better, and Hollywood is glad to return the favor.
Case in point, White Chicks. Last year, the Wayans brothers made this small film about a couple of FBI agents that go undercover as a couple of Nikki and Paris Hilton-like siblings. Unbelievable and dumb as dirty, it took in $113,086,475. Even a blind man walking by the poster would know that it was awful. In other words, 15 to 18 million idiots had more money than common sense and thought this film would be a good evening out. Studio executives looking at this and the Wayans brothers track record (Scary Movie 1 and 2, Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood) leaned back in his chair and asked them what is the next major project the brothers had in mind. Now, if I was a studio executive and they pitched the concept of this movie to me, images of that wonderful scene in The Untouchables of Al Capone and the baseball bat would enter my head as I told them that might be the dumbest thing I have ever heard since the last time George W. Bush opened his mouth. At that point, some monkey with a calculator would lean down and show me how much profit the studio raked in from their last effort. I would smile and say, “Let’s make magic.”
The gimmick is using CGI Marlon Wayans plays a man so small that he could be mistaken for a baby. The 6-foot-2-inch Wayans was only filmed from his forehead to his chin. His facial features were then digitized onto the body of 9-year-old Linden Porco.
The plot is fairly simple and for some unknown reason I believe that the number 420 was very prominent in the creation of the script. Once they came up with the idea, you can almost picture the hamster spinning on the mental wheel. Why would a small man pretend to be a baby? Either he is on the run from some bad guys or he is a criminal himself and what he wants is somewhere in the house. The better comedy would come from him being a rude, crude dude. Plus, we can have a heartfelt ending where he comes to love the man who has taken him as a parent and realizes all that he lost by not having a father who loved him. Lets have Marlon play Calvin Simms who even though he looks like an evil midget is one of the world’s master criminal. There is something so funny about a midget acting like a bad ass. So how do we get him in the house? I got it. How about he has stolen something like a diamond and thinks he is about to be busted so he has to hide his ill-gotten gains in a nearby lady’s pursue. That way he can pretend to be a baby to get into the house to get the diamond. Any 2nd grader with a decent crayon can write the potty jokes from there. You know that there is going to be the breast feeding jokes, the dirty diaper gag, the rectal thermometer antics, and the baby drinking alcohol or smoking riff. In fact, sadly the best humor is in the trailer.
The profane baby gag has been done a thousand times better in the old Looney Tunes cartoon where Baby Finster, the cigar chomping, baby hat wearing infant gives Bugs Bunny a run for his money and Baby Herman in Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Heck, Tim Conway and Harvey Korman were doing a low tech version of this gag 35 years ago and the southern comedians on Blue Collar Television have continued this tradition. For some unknown reason, I was reminded of Martin Short’s Clifford, a film that still causes me to wake up in a cold sweat even after a dozen years. In it the middle-aged Short plays an unruly 10-year-old boy who is pawned off on poor Charles Grodin. Grodin, who is one of my favorite character actors, has not made a silver screen film since its release. It was a stake in the heart of Martin Short’s career. I am starting to hope the same thing will be said about the Wayans and Little Man.
I’ll put up with another movie about the wacky adventures of a family with more children than the old woman in the shoe. I will awful remake of an awful television from an awful decade known as the 1980s. I promise to be first in line for the big screen version of Knight Rider and will give the next Ashton Kutcher film a chance. On a stack of Bibles, I swear that I will not put my head in my heads and cry, “the humanity, oh god, the humanity,” the next time I am forced to sit through a Kate Hudson romantic comedy. Please, please, resist the temptation to go to this film. It looks fun, but you are going to get bit. The peanut butter is in the trap. Do you go for it?
Verdict: An Awful Joke of a Film