Escape from Tomorrow is a dumb exercise in misery

so I know that I'm prone to hyperbole but escape from tomorrow is the most dumb stupid horrible inane awful ugly movie I've ever seen if you don't remember what escape from tomorrow is you do remember the hype from when it came out this is the indie film that was shot guerilla style in Disneyland and Disney World by some guy named Randy Moore that's a really cool concept and everybody was buzzing and curious to see how Disney would respond and they didn't by the way they just like ignored it anyway this will come as a huge shock to you guys but I'm a big fan of theme parks so this film was on my radar right away and as soon as it became available I had to go see it and to this day I remember that as one of the worst film viewing experiences I've ever had but now I have a YouTube channel so I decided to revisit it for you guys you're welcome so right off the bat I don't expect or want any of you guys to have to sit through this movie so I'm gonna give you a summary opening credits play over footage of people riding Thunder Mountain Railroad this is one of the few pleasant moments of the movie because no one is speaking and nothing is happening then as the credits end this happens then we meet our main character Jim he's on vacation with his family and he gets fired by his boss over the phone so you're firing me for no real reason then get my back of the family oh and don't forget about Sauron sorry old boy I'm just a real human being that talks like this Jim decides to keep this a secret from his wife and try to go have one last fun day in the park with his family they take the monorail to the Magic Kingdom Jim notices a lot of coughing tourists and then he fixates on these sexy French teenagers Jim and his family go on rides on it's a small world jim has unnerving hallucinations Jim and his wife Emily split up and they each take one of the kids then they swapped the kids Emily appears to have fun with the kids in the park Jim uses his time with first his son and then his daughter to creepily salivate over and stalk the French teenagers following them to six different attractions Jim's daughter Falls scrapes her knee and they go to first eight gym stairs lustfully at the nurses chest and the nurse warns them about something called cat flu Jim meets a sexy mom who behaves strangely it's humid today Jim stares lustfully at her chest and then he's hypnotized I'm not kidding about this part by a magical amulet that she's wearing he suddenly finds himself in her hotel room having sex with her she chooses the scenery for a while that girl is the Presidential Suite what a joke she tells Jim that the princesses are prostitutes possesses their hive as good as its what rich Asian businessmen they'll pay thousands the one in costume and then Jim just leaves he meets up with his wife and son back at their hotel Jim stubs his toe on a chair and then it starts bleeding badly so he gets neosporin to put on it but they call it Geo spork what the G of scoring the chinos oh yeah yeah yeah it's over there I think because they're really paranoid about getting sued they go to Epcot Jim gets really drunk then they meet the princesses and Jim watches them get groped by rich Asian businessmen riches and [Music] what it cost you and that wasn't my edit the voiceover was in the movie like Randy Moore was afraid we would have forgotten that line and been confused that's not why I'm confused Randy Jim and his wife fight and his wife decides to take their son back to the hotel while Jim stays behind with the daughter Jim and his daughter ride Soren and Jim hallucinates that there is a nude woman being projected over the images of hang gliding smoothly Jim you'll be mine you'll be mine [Music] you know I would expect the naked woman to be like the French teenagers or the sexy nurse or even the sexy mom from before but instead it's just some new naked woman that we haven't seen before anyway Jim gets off the ride and he sees the French teenagers one of them approaches him and asks him to join them but he refuses come with us you speak English please go well I'm afraid if I come with you something bad is gonna happen but if you don't something the teenager deliberately and expressionless Lea spits on his face Jim loses his daughter Jim gets intercepted by security and they taser him in his crotch I guess it's supposed to be funny Jim wakes up in a secret lab under the EPCOT orb and a scientist tells him that he's part of a shadowy corporation that's trying to monitor Jim's imagination Jim squirts neosporin everywhere in a scene that's framed in a weirdly sexual way it fries the system and Jim breaks free he also decapitates the scientist who turns out to be a robot Jim somehow realizes that his daughter is with the sexy mom from before so he goes back to her hotel he does find his daughter there she's now been dressed in a princess dress and the sexy mom is dressed like him Evil Queen you're a witch [Music] evidently she used to be a princess at Disneyland and she shook and hugged a child until her neck broke Jim argues with her a little we get the best line delivery in the whole movie you're sick you know this fantasy she also says this have you even seen someone decapitated what it's not like in the movie and yeah not my edit the movie replays that scene from Thunder Mountain at the beginning because Randy Moore doesn't trust us to remember it all so it isn't explained further Jim takes his daughter back to the hotel Jim has explosive diarrhea which yes we have to see and hear and I'm not going to show it you're welcome and then Jim coughs up a hairball everyone's so worried about cat flu now you can be a host yes the movie both plays the audio of the nurse talking about cat flu and has Jim say cat flu because Randy Moore doesn't trust us to know that it's cat flu because his filmmaking is so subtle Jim's wife finds him dead the next morning Jim's family cries creepy Disney employees arrive to wipe down the scene and dispose of Jim's body and they also implant a fake happy memory of riding Buzz Lightyear in his son's head the van pulls away with Jim's dead body and then a car pulls up Jim gets out but it's like a nicely dressed Jim and his daughter is a different daughter and his wife is the naked lady from Sauron they're checking in the end if you're like what I swear it's not because I explained it badly you have just lived the experience of watching this movie now ah now let me unpack some of this stuff I am just gonna move in a list here we go the legal issues when this movie came out like all of the buzz was centered around the fact that Disney was going to be super about it like everyone was like oh my god go see it now the Disney lawyers are gonna shut it down Randy more fully tried to capitalize on this to like in interviews he was always hyperbolically saying what he thought Disney was gonna do I was thinking news does the projector would be shut down in the first screening and I guess I wasn't able to find a screenshot of this but apparently when the film was out the official website had like a running clock saying this many days without being sued by Disney it's really funny because in interviews he's really trying to impress upon us this idea that it was an extreme covert operation that required the utmost secrecy but like anyone could get away with doing what Randy did like even if they got caught with their love mics it would have been such a minor deal you could just tell security you were shooting a feature for your Disney food vlog channel of which there are five million on YouTube the actual difficult parts of filming are like he had to calculate the position of the Sun because it was all natural lighting so he had to think about where he was gonna be in what time of day also it must have been a massive inconvenience to get clear audio from inside the park because they have this copyrighted atmosphere music that's plain pretty much constantly from the moment you enter and he did a really good job with that it's it sounds fine but hiding the operation like he even said he made their camera crew shave their facial hair so they can blend in because nobody with beards goes to Disneyland anyway this bullet point wasn't meant to talk about the legality of shooting in Disney theme parks without Disney's permission because I care about that about as little as Disney does I'm talking about the inclusion of unsuspecting families that are there on vacation particularly lots of children who you know you're not generally supposed to film without permission and on top of that they're just kind of being disruptive of other people's vacation experiences which didn't come cheap like there's a scene where Jim is searching for his daughter while running through the fireworks crowd at Epcot you know it's dark you're in a crowd I'm you I'm bumping it to people I'm turning her you know I remember turning a kid around going Sarah is that you anyway what really rubs me the wrong way about this is that the film is by turns mocking and scornful of the people who want to go to Disneyland I wouldn't generally care if I was in the background of somebody's shot while I'm walking down Main Street or enjoying the fireworks but if they're using my image to frame me as part of the slavery masses for having the audacity to enjoy a show at a theme park I think I'd be pretty mad there are a lot of large waist bands a lot of people have just given up on walking all together this character who's supposed to be like an avatar for the kind of people who enjoy Disney World you made him like fat and southern and constantly eating and he put him in one of those electric scooter vehicles it's like he wants to be like look at this picture of American laziness and greed oh hey Randy uh thanks for using it's a small world's only wheelchair accessible boat and holding up the handicapped line for 15 full minutes so you get that shot of your actor riding and clapping along like a buffoon I'm sure people with actual disabilities in the line will understand when you tell them it's for the purpose of making fun of them next point the pacing there's a lot of talk about how between the film's initial screening and its final release there were a lot of little edits and cuts made to trim the fat as Randy Moore explained if that's true I can't even imagine what the original cut was like because the final cut is entirely fat the way this film conveys every single one of its points is as excruciating as it can possibly be like okay our protagonist Jim is sexually frustrated this is basically his only trait there's a scene in the film where he's riding Winnie the Pooh with his family and he wants to make out with his wife in the back row and his wife doesn't want to now let's look at the extremely subtle and concise way they convey this fact I hope watching that made you feel even a sliver of how painful it was for me to sit through this entire movie when the family enters the park they write Snow White Winnie the Pooh and it's a small world all in a row and we are shown all three of these rides in sequence with no outdoor scenes in between when Jim goes off with his son he rides Autopia the Tiki Room and the people mover and again we are shown all three of these why nearly every scene in this movie just feels like it's trying to kill time there are so many story elements that are crammed in and then forgotten but know the sequence where Jim hallucinates a naked woman in Soarin over California had to be two full minutes in length next point the acting I already talked about how paranoid they were about filming in Disneyland and to me I am NOT surprised that the cameras and crew escaped notice what I'm surprised escaped notice is the acting because the acting is bad they make this for little tiny kids i think the mom is fine with what little she's given and even the kids do a pretty good job especially for child actors and especially for the environment they were expected to film in but the lead actors performance is painful to sit through like look at this incredibly subtle and realistic shot of him having to react to seeing people coughing in line everything he does is so goofy and exaggerated you know no one was giving me Benny I mean I'm in every scene as it no one was giving me any like kudos I was telling really it's all about the buzz and I understand why I thought it was more of a comedy I mean when I read it I was like oh this is a comic like a Ben Stiller comedy show this is also really funny to me the scientist actor at the end he seems to have really latched on to the idea of fussing with his glasses as a character tick and Randy Moore loves to combine that with shots of him turning away from the console toward the camera to begin speaking and finally we have our holy grail of bad performances the sexy mom that Jim has sex with if you're welcome to stay away real blast people just come here because they want to feel say do you know smiling is not good both are wrinkles honestly I can't even hate this because like at least when she's on screen you're having some fun you're seeing something entertaining not in the way it's intended to be even you know like she's making bad choices but there's liberabit choices and I can respect that anyway her character kind of ties in to my next point the women when this film came out a lot of critics accused it of feeling very misogynistic which i think is ridiculous a lot of the speaking roles in this movie are women and I think that's really progressive so let's take a look at some of these characters Jim's wife Emily alternates between just seeming like a normal mom who's trying to have fun with her kids and a canoe nagging basket-case why is your phone you took the one Space Mountain what's wrong with you have to reapply the sunblock before they go swimming consideration Jim cruelly comments to their son that he doesn't find her attractive yeah I mean not in a classical sense there's also this bizarre scene where he swims up to her in the pool and hands her a necklace the necklace was in his swim trunk pocket okay instead of being like oh thanks she's like you got me the wrong character Jim although after the way Jim has been acting maybe I would take an elephant necklace as a veiled insult - next up we have those two French teenagers who are supposed to look so underaged that they disturbingly cast one of them to be somebody who still has braces in one interview the guy that plays Jim even says that they're supposed to be like 15 which wow they're probably about 15 for sixteen-year-old girls oh he also says this he's getting led on almost there flirting with him - anyway these girls are written pretty realistically I've been to loads of theme parks with my hot female friends and we definitely spend the whole time clinging to each other giggling cartwheeling and seductively eating bananas you know that classic theme park food bananas and then of course you have the sexy mom character who's like a crazed villainous sexpot embittered by the loss of her youth I don't want to like blow you guys's minds with this extreme hot take but is anyone else getting the vibe that maybe Randy Moore has I don't know some kind of problem with women it's so subtle but it's there okay Randy Moore was asked specifically about this issue in an interview and he said I think the misogyny came in just from the way the whole park is set up and the way the princesses are presented and have stereotypical gender roles are reinforced by the park itself I think this stale weak excuse is so emblematic of Randy's whole approach to making this film is film totally isn't misogynistic unless it is in which case it's on purpose he thinks because you know the Disney Princesses are misogynistic the Disney Princesses are misogynistic because he heard it somewhere like in a BuzzFeed article or something what aspects of them doesn't he like and how does making them prostitutes comment on that he thinks he's making biting original satire but he's stuck in the frame of mind of like an edgy hot topic kid which brings me to my next point it's pretentious there are so many choices made in this film just because Randy Moore thought that that was a thing artistic films do it's shot in black and white which was actually a practical decision because Randy knew he wouldn't be able to control any of the lighting so this kind of makes all of the shots look similar to each other even if one is totally blown out by the Sun and the other ones dark but then Randy also tries to act like it's part of his artistic process because the old movies get it in the scene in the Epcot orb one of the monitors shows this shot of the castle and the Walt Disney statue and then it pans up to the sky and Jesus is written by like a skywriter Disney aliens really popular with sky writers because they can't like stop them from doing it and it's a really good way to have like a captive audience of a lot of people in one place and like the sky writers are usually Christian ones so obviously the crew was just there on a day that that happened and they shot it and Randy was like that's so deep because it's like ironic because consumerism things people watch and enjoy are like a religion sports is like a religion one time I went to a music concert and everybody clapped music is like a religion I stood in a long line to buy groceries groceries are like a religion all of these dumb sheeple buying eggs ok Disney as a religion is hardly a hot take but it's also not even the central thesis of this movie it's so they just threw in the shot because it would look deep one moment that I think totally exemplifies this derivative manufactured Hot Topic edginess is when Jim is talking to the sexy witch mom lady on the bench she tells him that the turkey leg he's eating isn't really turkey well if it's not turkey then what is it Haman what EMU and it's like okay I get it Disney packaging pleasant lies selling them to people etc incidentally the turkey legs are not emove the reason they're so big is that they come from boy turkeys who have bigger legs that's literally it okay I don't care that the film is pushing a miss truth about the Disneyland turkey legs like whatever it's not a documentary it's fine but what bothers me is that this is already an urban legend and like a super basic one at that I mean sinister theme park is such a rich setting for ideas could Randy Moore really not think of his own urban legend about Disneyland it's his unoriginal and unshockable abb lake they keep Walt's head frozen you know I heard that if you shout Andy's coming the Toy Story characters all drop on the ground and then this movie has like an intermission with like a title card and I had an old-fashioned end card too and it's like why my mortal enemy that fraud Randy Moore said that this was to give the film an old Hollywood feel the score which is actually pretty nice reflects this too and in the scenes where he does have controlled the lighting it definitely has like a Twilight Zone kind of vibe but the way Jim and his family behave the language the characters use the story itself none of that reminds you of old Hollywood there's no justifiable reason for these stylistic choices except is like a trick to try to inject some style into your stupid bad movie also it's a bold move to put an intermission in a movie this tedious you're just giving your audience an opportunity to sneak out without looking rude okay next point the story is dumb and it doesn't make any sense okay far be it for me to point out plot holes in a film that's this unintelligible but I just want to point to like one thing really quick so Jim and his family are staying at the contemporary hotel they get on the monorail the monorail goes one stop down the line and then stops to let on more passengers the PA system announces that they are stopping at the Polynesian Resort and then the French girls get on but later Jim and his family are swimming at their hotel pool and then the French teenagers arrive to tempt Jim with their sexy bikini bodies but why are they here when they're not even staying at this hotel but like maybe this is all happening in Jim's mind anyway right so it's not fair to me to hold it to the rules of logic or consistency but then how come the whole movie we keep snapping back and forth between Jim's hallucinations and reality and every time he snaps back to reality the other characters notice and remark that he was behaving strangely but okay maybe just the French girls are a figment of Jim's imagination and no one else can see them except him but know Jim's wife and son both see them and comment on Jim staring at them why are we following those girls what girls just going there young Jim even for you don't you think we even see the French girls meet a pair of boys their age at the pool and then in a separate scene that seems totally divorced from Jim's narrative or point of view we just see the girls and these boys they met enjoying the aquarium at Epcot and then Jim's wife sees them walk by and one of their faces morphs into like a scary demon face and she's visibly shaken but Jim's wife isn't having any other delusions so like what's the deal with them are they actually demon things and if so what was the deal with the aquarium scene are they just evil demons of seduction but also they like to take a lunch break and go look at the aquarium if that's the answer then I guess they're the most relatable characters in the film halfway through the movie Jim stubs his toe and it gets like all bloody and infected but that's not how he gets the cat flu and then the French girl spits in his face but it's like the end of the movie and you're like if the cat flu is making him hallucinate he already had it so maybe cat flu doesn't give you hallucinations is it just an additional thing that's happening are there just demons and the demons are making weird stuff happen or are they just making weird stuff appear to happen or are the scientists planting false memories and then do the demons work for the scientists are the demons demon scientists and then there's the cat flu outbreak and it's real but it's unrelated to the demons and the scientists is the whole movie a delusion that Jim is having including the scenes that he's not present for and also possibly including his own death at the end why did they have all these plot threads if they all caught redic teach other and they didn't develop any of them I'd say that some of these elements are a waste of screen time but like honestly what even constitutes a waste of screen time in this movie I don't think a second of this was used wisely like they could have cut out a scientist sequence that didn't explain itself and didn't contribute to the rest of the film but but then we would have gotten like what in exchange 20 minutes of footage of the family watching the country jamberry I mean I guess I would have preferred that to what they actually showed me now I don't know if you can tell but I haven't really gotten meme yet and I'm about to but before I do that I'm gonna talk about some of the stuff that I actually liked I already said that I liked the score I liked the idea of the cat flu I like that it's a silly made-up illness instead of bird flu or something and it makes perfect sense for it to be cats because Disneyland has this giant population of feral cats living all throughout the resort but it is weird that they didn't have any shots of the feral cats like to remind you of lurking danger or whatever cause like it's not hard to get footage of cats at Disneyland they're basically everywhere that has plants but anyway the idea of being at a resort and seeing these signs of outbreak is very creepy and interesting honestly I think I would have enjoyed this movie more if it was just like some cheesy found footage style horror movie set in the park oh and the whole exchange with the nurse was ominous in a way that I liked everyone still worried about cats now children are most at risk so we have to be extra careful mommies and daddies too you could be a host and not even know it until they've ruined it by having her cry when they left that was just too much there's one other level on which the creepiness succeeds for me and it's an accidental one they shot this film at both Disneyland and Disney World so if you're very familiar with the layouts of one of the parks then it feels a little creepy to watch because you'll notice that it's like a weird hybrid so things aren't where they belong the geography is inconsistent and that does give it this scary dreamlike quality but I was also aware that this was just done for production reasons and not to enhance the film in any way it was basically like they started filming in Florida and then they had to finish up the rest when they got home so it was it was more laziness than anything else I liked in the sequence where Jim gets arrested that it's these like retro Epcot hot cops I thought their outfits were delightful if I was in charge of a security force that is 100% what I would dress them like the last thing I liked was to avoid any legal trouble they couldn't play any of the copyrighted music so for the attractions that are entirely Musical he had to Commission these like sound-alike songs that were original [Music] so these faux Disneyland songs were so cheesy and goofy and they just made me smile that's it so that's all the stuff I liked and now it's time to get mean our next point is Randy Moore himself so this movie is very weird in a very confusing way and usually when I do a video I will just watch the movie and I will judge it based on its own merits for this particular video I actively sought out any interview material that I could find because I could already discern that this film like wasn't working for me and I was just so curious to see what mind had created it and tried to get some idea of like at least what he was going for so I watched and read basically everything available on the internet with writer director Randy Moore and I'm not proud of this but I basically went from hating the film to hating Randy Moore the person himself I know that's really mean I warned you first of all consuming all this Randy content is like a test of fortitude because you start to realize really early on that Randy Moore basically regurgitates all of the same things across all of his interviews everywhere and I realized that if you look at any individual in any press junket they tend to get the same unclever questions in every interview obviously there's only a certain number of things they can say to a degree it makes sense but Randy's word-for-word repetition of all of the same anecdotes with all of the same phrasing every time started to make me feel like I was Jim and I was stuck in my own theme park held in pretty much every interview Randy will tell the story about going to Disneyland as an adult with his wife and her comparing it to working in the psych ward alone she said this is worse than working the psych floor at the hospital this is worse or psych ward at the hospital worse than working cycler at the hospital because it's full of screaming children who want $30 princess wands there was a moment where we were at this princess fair it was kids were just screaming and demanding $30 plastic wands maybe $30 plastic ones $30 plastic ones he always says $30 princess once it's never a different products like clearly one of his daughters wanted this wand and instead of just getting it for the poor child he had to like see the about it for years then he'll unfailingly tell the story of scene Fantasmic and scoffing and all the dumb rubes further cult-like enjoyment of the show there was a Fantasmic show and at the end of it Mickey Mouse appears on the top of this mountain at the top of this mountain when he appeared there was just this audible gasp through the entire audience mostly adults and mostly even groan you know men and and women that magic for them never went away you know no one ever told him that I'm just saying that for a man who spent most of his youth at Disney World and then went at least 30 times to film his project he seems to have a really short supply of actual anecdotes to support his theses about the kind of people that go to the park the only other story he ever tells and he tells this one less often is that he was walking past the big Epcot orb and he saw like an overweight couple that were embracing each other and taking a nap in in the shadow under the orb if I saw that I'd probably be like oh that's kind of cute and I'd probably also be like I think they drank too much at the Food and Wine Festival but in an extremely confusing moment Randi talks at length about how this was this couple's dream you know you realize like this is their fantasy come true they just wanted to lie down and you know underneath this this ball and this in this place and how pathetic he finds that like at any given moment that you see strangers they must be living their dreams and I don't know if they were on their own or they were just in love or just so happy to be in abcott I don't see drunk college students eating at Denny's at 3 in the morning and extrapolate that this must be their dream and they're squandering their lives take some ecstasy or something it just to me it kind of sounds like Randy had a lousy vacation with his family and instead of like writing that one off he decided that he was so upset he had to go write a feature-length film about how it was the theme parks fault my wife was fed up with me on vacation because theme parks are evil I didn't get invited to parties in high school because I was too smart for them also he usually calls Disney a religious experience Oh in there is like going to church for them it's like a religious experience going that this you know giant like religious like moment it's like a corporate religion it's a corporate religion he refers to Mickey Mouse appearing as being like the Second Coming it was like a religious experience for them as if they were witnessing the Second Coming like they had seen you know the Second Coming or something and he always conflates being nostalgic about something with being indoctrinated and you know obviously these people had been like indoctrinated since they were children you were indoctrinated early you know indoctrination like the story of the couple sleeping under the EPCOT orb randy has decided that he's the authority on exactly what emotions everyone attaches to Disney World and he says the answer is too many emotions and people should feel bad and they should be sad and bitter and make independent films oh here's another thing I found out in interviews remember when I said I thought that the cat flu thing was clever because feral cats well that was foreshadowing if I was Randy Moore I would play you a flashback of me saying it because I don't trust you to remember it anyway I read an interview with Esquire and it seems like Randy doesn't even know there are feral cats at Disneyland that was all a coincidence it turns out the reason it's cat flu is that like the flu is antithetical to the happiness that people feel in the park and cats are the opposite of mice like Mickey Mouse oh my this is the same interview where Randi says that yeah he does think the EMU thing is true so I guess he really did think he was pulling the curtain back on some dark Disney secret in that scene there are some people online who believe it and when I wrote it I totally believed it now I don't know I need to test it I need to go get one of those legs and bring it to a lab or something I've never seen turkey legs in real life like the ones that they have oh my god Randy you can just ask just ask them they're not allowed to sell you food and refused to tell you what's in it my favorite moment in any of these interviews is when this guy tried to ask Randy why the hallucinations happened in small world when it was so early in the movie and nothing else had happened around it yet that and that happens early in the film and then it feels like there's a bit of a break before the hallucination was that just like a what was what were you getting at with putting it right there because it seems like you could have built gradually Randy doesn't have an answer well I do you a small world just it lends itself to be such a strange experience jim has hallucinations in the small world because Randy thinks small world is creepy the hallucinations don't do anything for the story and they don't explain themselves it's so obvious that Randy just like when in the park and shot a bunch of scenes without thinking how they were gonna go together because if he had had Jim alone on that ride with one of the kids he could have put it much later in the movie but the whole family's together so he couldn't change that in editing it okay I have to talk about the weird sex stuff perversion and sexuality is such an overwhelming theme in this movie but it's not a theme that ever says anything or culminates in any way but like the movie is more devoted to this than any of its other themes and know Randy doesn't bring up this theme in any of the interviews he only talks about it when it's brought up to him specifically first and whenever he is asked it seems like he's somewhat surprised like he didn't realize that this was all in there and honestly that makes it so much weirder like if he just came in hot on the interviews like yeah it's a movie about weird sex stuff he'd be like at least I understand let me hit you with another Randy quote these girls the Disney World tires are all beautiful but this is supposed to be the least sexualized place there is so I feel like there's a big sexual repression inside that Park okay the princess performers are beautiful but their costumes deliberately are very unsexy and have a lot of coverage they're wearing these garish colors that only children would find appealing they're wearing a lot of layers they're covered collarbone to ankle in most cases even the outfits that are sexy in the movies are very deliberately unsex if I'd for the theme-park versions I mean this isn't Hooters Randy by Randy's logic any public setting where there are beautiful women and you're not allowed to grope them is a place of great sexual repression isn't that most places nobody tell Randy about shopping malls for that one Applebee's with the pretty waitress I mean god I've never seen someone wear their baggage so boldly on their sleeve before he even tries to insinuate that Tom Sawyer island is secretly sexual because there's a sign where everything is spelled phonetically so welcome spelled welcome because you know get it I liked it in that interview that editor was even a little salty the most insane part is that Randy thinks Jim as a character we're supposed to root for when I started handing the script around to people like in my mind you know he is definitely he's on the line between being a hero an antihero the whole time but I didn't realize how much people didn't like the character you know the guy that's losing his mind and spends the whole film failing to parent his children and lusting after underage girls so when it came time to cast you know I knew I needed to find someone who could instantly who was instantly likable no matter what he was doing sort of like Michael Douglas and fatal attraction you know you you would go along with him and you'd root for him I guess that's why Jim is rewarded at the end by going to heaven or purgatory or whatever and having a hot wife like okay I get it I'm sorry the sinful princesses caused you to lust Randy okay let's move on to the themes so I already complained about the events as they unfold in this story but what is this story about so first I'm going to defer to the people involved in May p-nut and they all seem to have different answers and even among the same individuals their answers change in every interview the actors who played the mom claimed it was in some way about a family it's more about the story between a husband and wife and the you know the family but this movie isn't really about family at all like the family members other than Jim are just blank slates and Jim's interactions with them are inconsistent you can't tell if he really cares about his kids it's just like why are they even there that's just an affirmation of our marriage it's not about the dissolution of a marriage either I mean Jim and Emily's relationship starts the movie bad and then just kind of stays bad we didn't see them before so we don't know how it got to this point and it doesn't escalate during the movie in fact even up till the end you get the impression that when Emily goes back to the hotel she's not planning on ending their marriage when the family finds Jim dead they seem devastated by it so you get the impression that maybe typically he's a good father and husband but we don't see any of that I don't like Jim I'm happy that he's dead sorry there's even this one insufferable moment where Emily looks at the Dumbo necklace like you're supposed to be thinking that she's regretting being so harsh with him like I should have been kinder it's like no you shouldn't have but I also wanted to sort of like get you know go from the external experience to like the internal experience of what people you know feel when they're on these rides I don't know is the internal experience of writing Autopia to be overcome with lusts I mean it is for me ever since Honda added that robot to the ride the one really consistent thing is that everyone involved is like it's not about Disneyland Disneyland is the backdrop but most of the runtime is just footage of people being in Disneyland they could have informed us that Jim was following the French girls with like one or two rides or like a single scene but instead he goes to six different rides and we see every single one of them it's the bulk of the runtime and okay even though it apparently wasn't deliberate I'm gonna look at the sex theme to Jim's sexuality is repressed because he's at Disney World and that's bad right because repression is bad but Jim sexual interest is directed toward girls who are underage so it's good that it's pressed ray jims rejection of the French girl is immediately followed by him getting tasered and kidnapped so he should have gone with them but the French girls are scary demons right so is it just like a different bad thing would have happened if he'd gone with them Randy sets himself free from the scientist by holding the tube of Geo sporting crotch level and squirting it all over the lab including on two holographic images of a nude woman it's not very subtle it's so not subtle that I feel like I can't even play the clips of it without getting my video flagged so him not being sexually repressed anymore is what saved him right but the sexy evil mom witch queen is a sexually liberated character and she's portrayed as villainous and weird and crazy but then at the end Jim is trapped in Disneyworld in this like heaven or purgatory state and he has a sexy hot wife that was naked on Sauron so he's been like rewarded and his sexual appetites are fulfilled but he's at Disneyworld and that's where your sexual appetites are supposed to be repressed right so which is it like what's going on with this theme the most puzzling angle to the question of theme is that in every interview Randy Moore talks about how when he was a kid he went to Disney World with his divorced dad every summer it was a place that I'd been going to ever since I was you know 2 or 3 years old with my father who lived in Orlando and we'd spent you know a great deal of time if not no it would seem to me like all of our time there when I was with him and so it was this very very special intimate you know magical time that we spent together and and then you know we sort of had a falling out when I was older it wasn't until I went back with my own kids that all of a sudden you know all of these like emotions and complicated feelings I had towards him sort of resurfaced not to me I hear this and I can't help but notice that Disneyworld itself is like a giant convenient metaphor to Randy's real-life relationship with his father without anyone having to write it that way so hear me out Randy's only hot take about Disneyworld seems to be that everything's fake which yeah ok but that could tie in really well to his issues with his dad we have this concept of the divorced dad that doesn't know how to relate to his son so he takes him to Disney and when the sun's a child these are happy memories and then he grows up he realizes that there's no real foundation to their relationship so it starts to crumble if you have that relationship set up and that metaphor is like a jumping-off point for your story about sinister things happening in a theme park I feel like you could build something really interesting off of that like maybe instead of the central cast being horny dad Jim and his generic family you could just have it be the father and the son you know like maybe this is the summer after the son graduated high school and he's gonna go to college and maybe not see his dad anymore and it's like their last big hurrah together and then they go to the theme park but nothing is the same and creepy things are happening and they have to get out of this together and confront truths about themselves I don't know you could even leave in the weird sex stuff you could have like the son get drunk and hook up with one of the princess performers and she could have like a monologue about oh you do all these meet and greets with these kids and you have to pretend that there's this affection that's not really there and it's all just a front then she could have some expository dialogue about whatever your weird conspiracy story is there's one line that the crazy witch mom lady has in the movie it's like you can't be happy all the time and I feel like maybe that was supposed to be the thesis cuz they included it in the trailer too but people that go to Disney World don't think you have to be happy all the time they hope that vacations will make them happy because people like to travel and to have time off work and to go on rollercoasters family vacations don't make people stress because there's something inherently sinister about the idea of theme parks it's just like some people go and they have a fun day and then other people get overwhelmed and it's hot out and they spend a long day on their feet and things boil to the surface and they get cranky look I just solved the mystery of human behavior and I didn't have to make a feature-length film about a middle-aged man leering at teenagers anyway Randy Moore is a genius because he doesn't like fun things that everybody else likes I just wanted to really explore that that feeling that people have and that that mania which I think I tried to get at the end of the movie you know you just see the mania of people just coming in and like almost like they're going off the cliff together I assumed that when he said going off the cliff he was trying to make a reference to migrating herds of lemmings that will run over a cliff if you're a dumb phone intellectual it can be fun to compare any crowd or line of people to lemmings running off a cliff to try to indicate that they don't have a capacity for free thought ironically that's an untrue and regurgitated thought in itself um yeah it's it's interesting that he reminded me of lemmings in the wild lemmings that are in mass migration might unintentionally drown themselves if they try to cross the body of water that's too wide without gauging the distance first but they don't actually run off of cliffs that misconception actually comes from a wildlife program from the 1950s they shipped in these captive lemmings and then built a set with like turntables and faked the migration scenes and then at the culmination of this the film crew scared the lemmings over a cliff just to get a dramatic shot that Wildlife Program I'm talking about was called white wilderness and it was made by Walt Disney Productions Hey look a metaphor about following the crowd that's also directly tied into a fake and exploitative thing that Disney did maybe Randy could have tied that into his movie if he had a single creative bone in his hack body you wait a second the director's name is Randy Moore and the movie is about his dad issues his dad Randy's dad this movie is about Jim a father going to Disney World and being really horny over things Jim is a horny father a Randy dad it can't be that simple I remember coming home to my wife like well it's just I'll just you know do it and when I'm done whatever it'll be another project

Channel: Jenny Nicholson

Views: 1,778,529

Rating: 4.9160399 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: 38BiNsFFzcs

Length: 47min 34sec (2854 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 04 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/thepizzarabbit]

Welp, this is gonna be a hella long meal

[u/awesomemanftw]

Thanksgivingtimevideos

[u/SkyeFire]

/r/buffettimevideos

[u/DanknugzBlazeit420]

Practically as long as the movie itself

[u/_sirRantAlot_]

Wow that was so good.

[u/covabishop]

I love that she not only points out the bad parts of the narrative and themes but actually muses on what it could have started with and evolved from to be more interesting and less sex focused

[u/[deleted]]

So glad to see Jenny Nicholson on here, love her videos.

[u/chaseisonthacase]

I just watched this whole thing without knowing why. Well done

[u/CT_Phipps]

My favorite of her videos.