Genre: Mystery/Drama/Comedy
Premise: (from IMDB) Years after walking away from her past as a teenage private eye, Veronica Mars gets pulled back to her hometown – just in time for her high school reunion – in order to help her old flame Logan Echolls, who’s embroiled in a murder mystery.
About: If you hadn’t heard by now, Veronica Mars was a TV show that aired on UPN which ran for three seasons. It was cancelled seven years ago because of low ratings. The silver lining was that star Kristin Bell carved out a nice little career for herself (appearing in movies like Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Couples Retreat, and most recently, Frozen). But the fans of the show, impassioned as they were, never gave up on seeing Kristin and their favorite show again. They hemmed and they hawed every year. But it wasn’t until creator Rob Thomas took a unique approach at raising the money for the film by going to Kickstarter (their original goal was 2 million dollars, but they got nearly 6), that that dream became a reality. Just this weekend, the film debuted simultaneously in theaters and digitally. Creator Rob Thomas’s career has been an embattled one. He seems to get things on the air only for them to be cancelled within 1-3 years. He’s written a bunch of pilots that have gotten to within a splinter’s width of going to series, only to be axed at the last second. Rob has gone on to say that it’s very rare that a cast and crew love making a show as much as everyone on Veronica Mars, which is part of why he wanted to make this movie so much.
Writers: Rob Thomas and Diane Ruggiero
Details: 107 minutes
We’re approaching that spot in the yearly schedule where distributors are actually starting to place movies they care about into theaters. A short climb up almost any hill and you can see summer coming. Need For Speed is by no means a behemoth, but it was something that was hoping for blockbuster status (I’m afraid it didn’t get there). Wes Anderson’s Grand Budapest Hotel is slowly expanding, and it’s looking like one of Wes’s better movies. I considered reviewing both movies today.
But I decided to go with Veronica and Co., only because it has a lot of talking points, what with its Kickstarter campaign and its taking a show that was never very popular in the first place, has been dead for seven years, and turning it into a film. It’s probably one of the more bizarre examples of a movie ever being made.
The challenge is tying all this into screenwriting. Because this project is so darn unique, it’s almost screenwriting proof. What, the story doesn’t make sense? That’s because you never watched the show and therefore don’t know the intricate backstory. What, the parts of the story you did understand were ridiculous and over-the-top, like a random sex-tape subplot that had nothing to do with anything? Silly non-original-Veronica-Mars-watcher, that’s a reference to well known episode 17 of season 3, when Veronica joked that at least she wasn’t stupid enough to ever make a sex tape. What, the dialogue feels turned-based and overly-written? That’s because it’s based on a TV show originally meant for teenagers who favored that kind of dialogue. As I played around with the idea of critiquing this movie, which I didn’t like, I realized that everything I came up with had an excuse. In that sense, Rob Thomas, the creator, is a freaking genius.
So what was this once-in-a-lifetime movie experience about? I will only say that if you are a Veronica Mars buff, you will want to skip my summary, because as hard as I tried, I was able to pick up only about 2/3 of everything that was happening. There was always a plot point seeping into the story that made no sense either due to bad writing or proprietary TV backstory new viewers weren’t privy to.
But from what I can tell, Veronica Mars, now in her late 20s or early 30s, had once been a high school private investigator in the small town of Neptune, California. She was considered a troublemaker and now, 10 years later or whatever it was, was on her way to becoming a lawyer. She’s even got the perfect boyfriend. Neptune is finally in the rear-view mirror.
OR IS IT!
This is where it gets confusing. Veronica Mars’s old high-school boyfriend (who we can only assume was on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again, a constant unknown in her tumultuous life) is being accused of killing his girlfriend, a well-known pop star – because former boyfriends who now date pop-stars and then are accused of killing them is, apparently, very plausible in the Veronica Mars universe.
So Veronica heads back to Neptune to “help” Old Boyfriend find a good lawyer (you know, since she’s about to become a lawyer and all). In a baffling non-turn of events, her current boyfriend has zero issues with her going home and spending time with a guy she had a steamy on-again-off-again affair with for three seasons. Yup, makes sense to me!
Oh but wait! It gets better. Turns out that she and Old Boyfriend have a sex tape together! And that it just appeared on Perez Hilton! When this sex occurred (when they were in high school? Recently?) is never clearly explained. But that’s not the craziest part. It has absolutely no bearing on the story. It doesn’t affect the plot or what’s going on at all. Again, I guess this kind of stuff is commonplace in the Veronica Mars universe and we’re just supposed to “go with it.”
Naturally, Veronica Mars settles back into her old P.I. ways and starts investigating who killed this pop star. After Veronica’s sex tape is shown at the high school reunion to humiliate her and a giant bar fight breaks out for no other reason than they got more money from Kickstarter than they planned, she eventually traces the killer back to an old high school bitch who hated her who may or may not have hired a guy she was banging to do the job. This was all wrapped up, of course, in the very simplistic and shoddy way you’d expect a weekly episode of an average WB TV show to wrap up. Hooray!
Most boring actor in the history of cinema?
One of the hardest parts of viewing Veronica Mars: The Movie, was trying to figure out what in the world people liked about the show in the first place. I’m not trying to be snarky, really. I honestly want to know. It felt like literally anything you’d see if you turned on the WB between 7-9 pm any night. Teenage characters spouting out really obvious over-written dialogue at each other. Except these days, at least those teenagers have powers. So it’s actually kind of cool!
I guess the show may have succeeded due, in part, to its unique concept? Putting a high school girl into the role of a private investigator was kind of ironic, seeing as when you hear “private investigator,” you usually think of an alcoholic middle-aged man whose life has fallen apart. I agree that that’s kind of different.
But almost every decision the creators made in regards to this show seems wrong. I can honestly say that I have not seen a more boring uncharismatic actor in the last 20 years as the guy who plays Veronica Mars’s “love interest,” this “Logan” guy. There were times where I had to actually pause the movie to make sure he wasn’t sleeping. He alone was probably responsible for driving away the millions of fans this show needed to stay on the air. I’ve seen more personality and acting ability in a chicken embryo.
Ahh! And don’t get me started on the dialogue. I’m guessing this is the component that kept Veronica Mars TV fans coming back every week. And I say that not because I liked the dialogue, but because it was clear that the writers LOVED writing the dialogue and the actors LOVED performing the dialogue. You can actually see the actors licking their chops getting ready to deliver lines like, “You get the cliches?” when asked “You know what you get when you mess with the bull?”
Maybe what was so strange about this was that when the show originally aired and every character was in high school, starting each scene with characters making fun of each other with witty one-liners for five minutes made sense, at least in the universe of a TV show about high school. But here, with grown men and women delivering the lines, the banter now felt like it’d stumbled out of a cryogenic chamber.
So little makes sense in the storytelling and the plot and the dialogue when you watch Veronica Mars, that after awhile, you feel like you’re eavesdropping on a conversation that wasn’t meant for you. And every time you try to get closer to hear more so you can make SOME SENSE of what they’re saying, Veronica and everyone else turn around and glare at you, shaming you for even considering trying to understand a movie meant for only the purest of fans.
Look, I get it. You have to give the people who made this movie happen priority. Those are the fans of the original show who donated on Kickstarter. But I guess I was hoping for at least an attempt at bringing new fans in, since this movie isn’t going to spawn any sequels (which is what Thomas is hoping for) unless it makes more believers out of us. Unfortunately, I didn’t see anything to believe in.
The bigger question, of course, is “Did the Kickstarter model work?” Is this something that’s viable for the industry moving forward? Veronica Mars’s Kickstar success story was celebrated when it happened, but since there’s this thing called the internet, any happy koala bears and rainbows must be destroyed before happiness can spread, and the media quickly turned on the model, claiming that it basically gave studios permission to double-dip from us poor unsuspecting ticket-buyers. Make them pay to fund the movie, then make them pay to buy it.
Some of you might be saying that everyone who invested in the Veronica Mars Kickstarter Campaign got a free movie ticket, so that argument’s not relevant. But from what I understand, these ravenous fans are ALSO paying out of pocket to see the film to beef up its box office so it can spawn MORE incomprehensible plots and bad dialogue. Sigh. I don’t know what to believe. I think any other avenue to make movies is a good one, since the kind of money needed to make a film is always out of reach for the average (and even semi-successful) filmmaker (although call me when Zach Braff’s “Wish You Were Here” comes out and my opinion may change).
Veronica Mars was a bizarre trip into movie no-man’s land that I’m still trying to find my way back from. My advice to Kristin Bell is to stick with that little Frozen franchise instead. Sure, it may not make complete sense, but it makes more sense than this planetary drek.
[x] what the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[ ] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Beware of “wait your turn to burn” dialogue, the kind of dialogue where every character seems to be waiting to ZING the other person with a perfectly constructed overly-clever “burn” that no real life person could’ve possibly come up with that fast. Real people don’t talk this way. There is a time and place for this kind of dialogue (high school based TV shows where the “clever burn” is part of the conceit) but using it in any other type of setting (save for some high-school-based comedy films) is going to sound unnatural and overwritten.
