Buy Or Don’t Buy

Readers, there are many times in life where you will find yourself presented with a total information overload. The next one minute and 49 seconds will be like that for you:

Where can we even begin to reckon with this? It’s best to start by eliminating the obvious. I’m not going to tread the well-worn path of wondering what this means for David Cross’s career. I’m not going to examine the unfathomable awfulness of the pun “The Squeakquel.” I’m not going to get into the narrative gymnastics required to pull off the premise of “Chipmunks in high school!”

I’m not going to talk about the terrifying Autotuned chipmunk voices. I’m not going to talk those ungodly voices bleating out contemporary pop songs in a shrill mockery of three-part harmony, (In another trailer the chipmunks sing Flo-Rida’s “Round Round” because why not?) or the unsettling way the chipmunks’ tiny bodies convulse in unison. I’m not going to talk about the fact that this movie exists despite nobody nowhere in the history of ever asking for it.

No, instead we are going to talk about wisecracks. Specifically, these wisecracks:

• “It is on like Donkey Kong!”
• “Call me!”
• “You talkin’ to me?”
• “Boo-yah!”
• “In your faces!”
• “Make room for the love doctor!” (:50)
• “That’s what I’m talking about! Shake what your mama gave ya!” (1:24)

My issues regarding sexualized anthropomorphic CGI animals are well documented — specifically, I find them more offensive than hardcore pornography — so I will skip the lecture on chipmunks flirting with humans and the extra-credit assignment on gyrating underage Chipettes. But one thing that makes me just as upset is the generic reflexive “attitude” that pops up in this and almost every other lazy kids’ movie these days. Read the lines above. Does any sentence actually mean anything, or is this mix of dated slang, cliched pop-culture references and bogus posturing just an empty signifyer for hamfisted coolness? No one is expecting Hepburn and Tracy here, but making every character a savvy wiseguy in a lame attempt at individualizing them does the exact opposite of what it’s supposed to. This picture says it better than I ever could: When everyone is irreverent in the exact same way, then no one is.

What do you guys think? Does this horrific personified chipmunk I attempted to make in my own image (at the unfortunately named Munkyourself.com) sway you either way?