Seth MacFarlane's Failed Film Career

ah seth macfarland one of the most influential figures in all of history someone who i've talked about a pheromone on my channel but this man he's just created so many beloved and famous things that i thought i could ever run out of topics relating to him being interested in art and animation from a very young age seth first got to start drawing comics for his local newspapers as far back as the age of eleven if you go back and check out some of these you gotta admit for an eleven year old this stuff isn't that bad after breaking out into the industry to work on shows such as cayenne chicken johnny bravo and dexter's laboratory seth worked his way up the ladder and got the chance to create his very own animated television series at only 24. since then he's gone on to create three beloved three shows a live-action star trek parody and arguably seth's biggest creative endeavor of his career his attempt at breaking out into film as of today seth has three films under his belt with the latest one ted 2 being released 7 years ago in 2015 so i think it's safe to say that he's been taking a break from the big screen but why is that clearly he must have made some kind of good impression to be given three whole chances most people don't even get one so just what went wrong here to cause him to take a step back from filmmaking well i think the best way to go about this would obviously be to take a look at all three of seth macfarlane's films to see just what happened did his comedic writing not translate well to live action was it due to poor direction did people just want to see family guy the movie let's find out starting with seth macfarlane's big directorial debut ted dude you have no [ __ ] idea how hyped i was for ted the second i saw the trailer and the words from the creator of family guy appeared on screen i was hooked i had to see this movie august could not come any faster this was the worst most long feeling we'd have ever had for a film the only thing that came anywhere close was wreck-it ralph yes it's because sonic was in it but it was a good movie too okay but august finally keem i got all ready to go to the theater and see the funny man seth mcfarland on the big screen and oh wait i'm 10 years old well that's okay that that just means i can watch it when it releases on dvd in almost three months and then i had to wait till christmas but boy i have to say the wii it was [ __ ] worth it i adored this film as a kid it was my favorite movie ever made for a while i'd quote it all the time listen through all the bonus dvd content i even had to tad up on my ipad which was clearly just an adult ripoff of talking tom but to be fair i also thought family guy was the best thing ever as a kid i'm the kid who cried when they killed off brian griffin so it could be possible and now this is a stretch but it could be possible this thing i enjoyed as a kid isn't very good blasphemy i know but i'm going to try to go into this without any of my preconceived opinions to try and objectively see if this was or wasn't a good movie so what further ado here we have ted ted has a very basic premise this kid called jon gets a teddy bear for christmas and wishes on a shooting star that he could become real which he does and we fast forward to see just how much jon has been screwing up his life by living with a talking teddy bear honestly i'm glad they just [ __ ] their way through him coming to life magic allows the plot to move along quite nicely but honestly the movie isn't even really that much about tad it's actually way more focused on john with his girlfriend to four years trying to show him that he'll never grow up as long as he keeps his teddy bear around very obviously being a metaphor for needing to leave your childhood things in the past and grow up that's probably the first thing i'd point out about this movie despite the wild marketing campaign trying to advertise this thing as the most wacky raunchy talking bear movie ever made at its courts a very grounded and heartfelt love triangle movie john has to pick between his lifelong friend or his girlfriend and they put a large focus on that struggle he faces with his temptations maybe the way i'm wording that makes it sound all serious and deep but no not at all this is the same movie that spans a two minute scene pointing out how someone has [ __ ] in the floor but i think it's worth pointing out as it goes to show that seth not only wanted to make a good comedy movie here but also just a solid film in general with the heartfelt story which is weird because if you look at anything family guy has done in the past 15 years the word i'd never even think about using was heartfelt you're pregnant with our baby i also love the commentary on celebrity culture with ted being this big brick i'd start in the 80s and 90s but despite being a literal talking teddy bear eventually everyone just stopped giving a [ __ ] about him and so he falls into a relevancy but no yeah despite family guy for a majority of its run being this horribly fast piece joke a second kind of show where they never slow down to try to tell an actual compelling story i was genuinely surprised to see just how slow the peace ted has that's not a bad thing at all though as the movie instead of focusing on how to get to the next joke as fast as humanly possible we get a lot of time for scenes to linger on so you can really feel the emotion of the characters and i think that's pretty damn impressive for being a movie about a [ __ ] talking bear who smokes weed and it's not like ted has nothing to do here we also have a side plot involving him getting kidnapped by a deranged fan who's obsessed with him ever since he was a kid and wants to force him to be his son's best friend who i cannot look at without thinking about that lame disney channel sitcom on farm don't ask me why i know that honestly the weakest part of the movie's plot is that john doesn't even really have to end up sacrificing much in the end he eventually gets his life together and forces ted to move out of the house and lets him know that he can't be part of his life anymore but after a run-in with the super fan tears him in half john's girlfriend somehow brings him back to life through another wish on a shooting star and is now suddenly okay with the idea of jon hanging around a teddy bear all the time perfect glad to see this entire movie was pointless probably would have been a better ending to just kill ted off at the end but i understand you got an andrew movie on a silly comedic note and also need to keep the door open for future sequels wink wink and speaking of these aforementioned characters the breakout star here is most definitely the titular ted himself voiced by the one and only seth macfarland and i gotta say he did a [ __ ] fantastic job at voicing him here it's gotta be tough to have your actors give a believable performance when they're acting against nothing but he knocked it out of the park along with mark wahlberg and mila kunis if you've seen family guy you may notice that seth has a very natural way of having dialogue scenes play out where characters can go off on tangents or stutter their lines it has a very improvisational feel which is hard to do with an animated character especially against pre-recorded humans saying no lines a lot of the times when recording these live-action cgi hybrid movies they'd merely have some random guy read out the animated characters lines to the actors but they went above and beyond here to try and replicate that style of humor seth likes what they actually did was have seth off to the side during filming so instead of no-name intern number 40 doing his best peter griffin impression seth was actually present in real time to talk back and forth which allowed for a lot more improv and causes ted's song quality to be the exact same as the other actors you know it doesn't just sound like he was doing it in a booth or something but yeah ted does a really good job here not just being some dumb gag like that could have easily filled this movie with ted doing shitty thing after shitty thing and you're supposed to sit there and laugh because of how nonsensical it all is it's a teddy bear who says the [ __ ] word but he's actually a fairly well-rounded character who looks out for his best friend and wants to help him settle things with his girlfriend mark wahlberg is great in this movie too he bunches off as seth so well sometimes you really do forget that he's acting along something that's not even really there like ted they do a good job at letting you know he's a [ __ ] up but not to the point of being unlikable like he's got a good heart and only wants to make sure he can keep everyone in his life and is trying to balance out to keep everybody happy the only character here i'm not a fan of is mila kunis as john's girlfriend lori she's a massive [ __ ] at first it makes sense that she'd be upset with her boyfriend bumming around with a bear all his life but sometimes that push it way too far to the point where she's completely unreasonable and then by the end she's just like eh whatever we can keep him around i don't mind this entire movie could have been avoided then you [ __ ] there's also a variety of side characters here but they don't really amount to much johnny has a few friends at his job who get like three lines each one of them is [ __ ] joe swanson lori has a boss who's hitting on her and he's really just there to give johnny a reason to continue fighting for the best secondary character to me has to be the villain played by giovanni rabisi revisee weird name he plays that creepy introverted psycho kind of guy perfectly he's also one of the funniest characters here he's got a lot of great moments i remember as a kid i lost at the scene of him dancing in his living room while drinking from the straw the comedy in general is pretty good overall i never really laughed i lied but that also might be because i've seen this movie like 20 times but when revisiting it for this video i often find myself finding the small bits of dialogue where funnier than the big guys that try to set up just little snarky remarks the characters would make that catch me off guard i said a bad word one time daddy punished me for it that's a great story i felt like i was there i think the biggest bit of comedy that comes from it is the fact that there's like a 30-year time skip and ted is already well known nobody bats denied his presence he's treated like any other normal person so a lot of the stuff i find funny was everybody just treating him like he's not a two foot tall teddy a big factor in that is how [ __ ] well he blends into the world around him i mean jesus christ these animators went above and beyond and integrating him to this world to this day it still remains as one of the best cgi characters in a live-action world to me i love why over the course of time you see him subtly declaring like some patches of fur being removed or scratches in his eye if you look at some of the behind the scenes stuff for this movie you'll see just how much effort went into the animation here a lot of that is probably thanks to seth himself it really seems like he had such a clear vision for what you wanted to do in this movie and i think that's why keymight is such a solid film like is it the best thing in the world no not at all but for what he wanted to accomplish i think seth knocks it out of the [ __ ] park on his first go in writing and directing a live-action feature also might i add the [ __ ] score for this movie goes so hard it's got that kind of jazzy frank sinatra vibe seth is known for liking and it surprisingly fits pretty well here but all this hard work definitely paid off the movie made half a billion dollars at the box office and got pretty good reviews i watched it with a friend and they even called it not so bad so if that's not a glowing recommendation i don't know what is and with that seth had done it he had successfully shown that not only could he make a pretty good cartoon not only could he voice act not only could he sing like a [ __ ] angel but he could also make a pretty damn good movie too so what does he do now he does it again i was so [ __ ] excited for a million west vine in the west not only is seth macfarlane making another movie but he'll be starring in it like not just his voice but his theist too he's had some perfect fierces apparently white teeth enchanting smiles those eyes just got lost i was ecstatic could june 6th not come any soon 12 years old still uh still couldn't uh still couldn't see it but when i rented it from extravision a couple months later i was hyped it's time to finally see what i was missing out on it's awful i vividly remember watching this with my dad in our living room and by the time it was over i turned around to see that he had fallen asleep and when i woke him up he just turned to me and said that movie was [ __ ] no what that couldn't be true well i liked it at least right i was very much in denial because the million ways to die in the west is ironically no exaggeration at all one of the worst movies ever conceived by man how did this happen like really how the [ __ ] does one man write direct produce and star in his own film have so much creative freedom and it turned out this bad released in 2014 a million western the west is a film starring seth macfarlane does a sheep farmer in the old west called albert stark after just being dumped by his girlfriend that's it the plot just sort of halts at this point for a bunch of unfunny scenes featuring seth's friends trying to help him get back up on his feet until his new ladies introduced the wife of the most feared man in the wild west she quickly takes a liking to seth and tries to help him get over his ex and as you could probably guess he soon realizes that while chasing this girl his one true love was sitting right in front of him the whole time why is this western apparently this was like a big project for seth one that he put a ton of time into researching as he's supposedly a huge fan of western films but all we have here is the most basic romance plot we've seen time and time again except everyone is just playing dress up with their yeeha clothes of course that's where the title comes in or if there being a million west's die in the west he said but this means nothing in the grand scheme of things all this amounts to is a couple of scenes of people dying in somewhat comedic ways like i don't know it feels weird using a word like comedic when describing this movie but all this is here to do is show you how miserable seth is living in the old west but like you could have just put him in any other shitty living condition and the film would have been the exact same you may have noticed that i keep referring to our main character as seth and not what would albert and that's because this guy is completely indistinguishable as his own character to me he's just how i imagine seth is in the irl this has got to be one of the most annoying protagonists in film history all he does for the entire movie is sit around and whine and moan and whinge about how shitty his life is while doing nothing to try and better his situation there are scenes where he just rants and lectures people about how shitty the old west is except he's describing this to people who also live in the old west so this is nothing they wouldn't already be aware of so it just comes off as unnecessary and makes me think that seth imagined ways the audience would find this annoying attitude endearing in some way but the possibility of that is completely shattered because seth does not work as an on-screen star at least not in this i've never seen the [ __ ] orville or whatever it's called he just has this constant smug look on his face like he thinks he's so much better than the situation around him and because of that it makes me want him to feel this may sound like a strange suggestion but i actually think this role will be way more suited for a michael sarah type his lines remind me a lot of scott pilgrim where in that movie scott can sit around to complain about how everything sucks i find it funny because of how pathetic his delivery is and how pathetic he looks sorry michael there are times when i can see glimpses of what he's trying to go for i actually think a lot of the more quiet talking scenes are pretty decent in terms of the emotion but then i remember how much of a prick this guy constantly is and my sympathy is gone he spends the entire movie whining about how he's lost the most perfect girl in the world but we never see a single scene of them together before the breakups were like i don't care in relation to i don't care these [ __ ] secondary characters do nothing seth put all the attention on himself because none of these other guys do anything remotely important he has a friend played by the villain from ted who wants to [ __ ] his wife who's the time prostitute but oh no she wants to wait until they're married isn't that ironic this one wanted okay to smoke a cigar and then ash no like i get and the villain has no presence at all seth doesn't even [ __ ] meet him until there's like 20 minutes of the movie left the only thing to note about him is that he's played by liam neeson but i can only imagine this was because seth was like whoa i want to meet liam neeson put him in the movie this thing is filled to the brim with celebrity cameos that amount to nothing jamie foxx makes a five second cameo duck from back to the future ryan reynolds who also makes a cameo in ted for some reason but at least there no attention is really drawn to it ted doesn't look at him and go oh my god are you ryan reynolds who also makes a [ __ ] cameo in family guy now that i think about it but here we need seth to take a detour at the end of a scene to walk over to the barn and have a conversation with doc brown what is the purpose of this other than just i know what that is and it never [ __ ] ends why in god's name does this silly western movie need to be two hours long nothing happens scenes will drag out for an eternity seth has no idea what the [ __ ] piercing is wait no yes he does because ted had grit piercing what the [ __ ] happened here it's just not funny plain and simple the way a scene works in a million ways to die in the west is that seth will tell a joke then a character will go what no then he'll repeat said joke then start to explain said joke then a character will fart or [ __ ] and that'll be like the backup punch line in case they weren't giggling at the other [ __ ] and when they're not doing that characters will just sit and talk for minutes on end they'll just have the most boring conversation imaginable see you could make a serious romance movie or you can make a movie where neil patrick harris shits into a hat for two minutes but you gotta pick one funny man i wouldn't mind these slower scenes as much if they just did something visually interesting with them i had already mentioned why none of this movie feels real despite them filming in an actual desert scenes are way too well lit to the point where you can just tell it studio lighting and the costumes while impressive are just wet too clean you can tell they just put them on minutes before shooting their scene throw some dirt on their shirt put a tear in his car boy hat do [ __ ] something to make this not just look like some dumb snl sketch but apart from the visuals it's just shot lazily i didn't talk much about it with ted but the direction there is actually pretty decent there's usually a lot of shot variety in scenes but the highlight being when they do coke with flash gordon there's a nice shot of them sitting at a table but instead of just having a still shot focusing on each of them while they're talking the camera constantly pans around them in a circle which helps illustrate how unfocused they are talking about nonsense which also helps out to the dizziness of it all with it almost feeling that the room is spinning which helps add to that feeling that jon is starting to lose track of time shot reverse shot yeah i mean that's just as good in conclusion a million ways to die in the west is one of if not the worst movie i've ever sat through in my entire life and i take great solace in knowing that i never have to sit through this piece of [ __ ] ever again it helps me sleep at night unsurprisingly this movie did not do well critically with most pointing out its lack of any good comedy or wit and it was a big old flop at the box office only managing to rake in 80 million dollars on a budget of 40 million so i think it's safe to say we won't see seth starr in any new films anytime soon i've i've i've got a tear in my eye but it's tears of joy well you know okay man stumbled on his second attempt well well stumble is to put it lightly more like he [ __ ] fierce planted but ted was still good clearly he's not a total hack but what else could he do it's not like the first one had a perfect conclusion that perfectly wrapped up everything nicely or anything i was so [ __ ] hyped for ted too i could not wait to watch it when it came out july couldn't come any sooner god damn it me and my friends all went to the cinema to watch this and they refused to let us in so we all had to go and see minions instead that was my second time watching it in theaters thankfully when i went home that evening i decided to watch on my iphone 5 through very legal streaming methods i assure you and i didn't like it 13 year old me couldn't believe it could seth macfarland really make something bad i need to sit down ted two picks up right where the first left off with john getting married and even ted himself getting married to his girlfriend tommy lynn this is where we find out that john and laurie got a divorce off screen she doesn't even appear in this one perfect glad to know that entire last movie was pointless apparently laurie was in an early draft of the film when it was about jon and ted smuggling pot across the country but when the story was changed they had nothing for her to do and john 2 i can imagine which is why they just got rid of her in exchange for a new love interest who is just a clone of john in everywhere lovely the main focus is instead about ted trying to get a sperm donor so they can have a baby i don't know what i mean it's actually about him trying to adopt a child no it's actually about him trying to prove that he's a human after he's denied adoption which starts [ __ ] up everything in his life since he's not doing property now it's actually about him traveling to new york so we can get this big important lawyer to defend his kias and we'd actually divide the villain from the first ten movie coming back to try and once again kidnap him no wait actually it's invite them all visiting comic-con yes really my biggest issue with this movie is that it doesn't feel like a movie it feels like three episodes of a ted tv show slammed together the piercinger is [ __ ] atrocious see when making a movie or a tv show it's important to give each and every scene a point a good comedy movie can make you laugh but it's even better when it can make you laugh while still furthering the plot in some way but in ted 2 plot points are picked up and then dropped 10 minutes later never to be brought up again such as ted trying to get a sperm donor makes sense to cover that if he's trying to have a kid but what's the end point to this that his wife has no eggs left and therefore adoption is the only way all you need to do to get that point across to the audience is have the scene where they're talking to the doctor and he mentions this great get that out of the way very fast now we can move on to the adoption stuff so the real plot can kick off but no instead we have a two minute long detour where john and ted try to convince splash gordon to be the donor then when that feels we feel we need to have a 10 minute long scene of them trying to sneak into tom brady's house to steal his sperm but when that feels jon offers up his own sperm so we have a five minute long scene of them at the sperm bank where wacky antics ensue and when they finally get the sperm after 20 minutes of trying they're told they can't use it rendering the past 20 minutes of the movie pointless i just i just i don't know this movie is filled with [ __ ] like this there's no focus at all see the first movie was mostly focused on john he's a human going through a very relatable dilemma so it makes sense why they don't want to put more attention on him in the grand scheme of things ted is just a plot device he's the third edge to this love triangle but in ted too tez is the mean star but there's no substance to this story he's just trying to find a lawyer to prove he's not property and john is merely a sidekick trying to help him achieve this while it's true they tried to give jon his own plot of getting back onto the dating scene it's just so bare bones and emotionless that you can't really care about it it's just here for the formula there is a total of one nice scene in this movie and it's when the female jon clone sits around a fire and sings this nice song at night it serves no purpose but for one whole minute the movie was able to take a breather and relax and not feel the need to shove 50 million jokes in your face at once and speaking of jokes 50 percent of them are just reused from the [ __ ] first movie like see him set up see him punchline everything this boss guy from the original ted says something [ __ ] up to him because he doesn't want the job but the boss instead praises him and hires them with some generic tough guy line like nobody's ever stood up to me before i like that they just do the same joke here he says something rude and gets commanded great good joke i liked it the first four times i heard it but the fifth not as impactful it really just feels like a tv show relying on the seeing gags and punch lines because well that's what they did the last time the villain has to do the weird dance to the song again it was funny in the first one so it'll be funny here too just like it was in a million west eye in the west you did the same gag in all three of your [ __ ] movies was it really that funny seth i don't understand it's not like this was accidental there are lines where characters reference how similar the story beats are compared to the first jon and ted have a fight except this one is way more forced jon is talking to love interest when he gets a call from ted letting him know that donnie is trying to kidnap him again so jon and love interest have to spring into action to rescue him oh my god deja vu [ __ ] you and when they're introducing no jokes that's the same problem as a million west to pronounce your very long movie title is trying to hurt my hands to type out all the time i mean [ __ ] it anyway it has the problem where the joke just lingers on and on characters just repeating what the punchline is for minutes on end his name's [ __ ] scott fitzgerald what no well then what's the f stand for francis no it's got to be [ __ ] it must be [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] [ __ ] damn it's [ __ ] oh right i get it [ __ ] is a funny word it's either that or it's just written like a cartoon like family guy where we'll have pointless cutaway gags that really take you out of it i seriously don't understand how a film sequel can have largely the same crew but totally feel so different on top of that seth's directing has definitely gotten lazier over time somehow this one is literally just shot and there was boring way imaginable i keep saying it but it just looks and feels like a tv show there's nothing cinematic about it unless you want to count the amazing opening sequence that for some reason has the big music number with singers and dancers and piano sets and just goes on and on and on and why it may sound like i'm jumping around from point to point a lot but i hope you realize that's the exact feeling i got watching this movie ted 2 is a film that has no focus doesn't evolve in anywhere from what the first established and if anything devolved with how the characters like johnny just reset to the same way they were at the beginning of the original and doesn't even feel like a proper movie and as you can imagine it didn't do well critically and nobody watched it ted 2 only made around half of what the first one did seth had mentioned he'd make a third if it performed on the same level as the first one huh so yeah he ruined that potential franchise wonderful job seth or maybe not because it was confirmed that they're looking to make a tv series based on ted for peacock who the [ __ ] has peacock yeah i'll go swimmingly honestly i feel like ted took him out the way it did was because seth was stretching himself so thin and not realizing his limits working on both a million winston in the west and this at the same time both of which he did a large amount of the work for so i can only wonder how different tattoo would have been if he fully devoted his time to it but there's no one to blame for that other than himself the dude does not understand that he can't do everything all the time on multiple projects and expect stellar results your creative juices are gonna get burnt out eventually and that was definitely reflected in reviews and box office reception and that was seth macfarlane's very brief film career it's a shame because the guy definitely isn't a hack when he devotes his time and attention to something he can make a really good product evident with the firsthand movie but before coming back to the world of filmmaking i'd recommend you get his ego in check and not expect to do everything himself because he thinks he's god's gift to comedy because this was a [ __ ] slog to get through and i never ever want to do it again was the last time i ever take requests from the [ __ ] twitch chat are you happy cheesy memer [Music] you

Channel: LS Mark

Views: 1,565,845

Keywords: LS Mark, LS Mark Family Guy, LS Mark Ted, LS Mark Seth MacFarlane, LS Mark Brian, LS Mark Brian Griffin, Seth MacFarlane, Seth MacFarlane Movie, Seth MacFarlane Ted, Ted, Ted 2012, Ted Movie, Ted Bear, Ted 2, Ted 2 Movie, Ted Review, Seth MacFarlane's Failed Film Career, A Million Ways to Die in the West, A Million Ways to Die in the West Review, Brian Griffin

Id: 8QPOkoF0eUk

Length: 25min 3sec (1503 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 27 2022