I'm no prude, okay? Nor am I some Bill O'Reilly conservative type, or a fundamen6talist Christian nutjob. Nonetheless, I must ask: Do we need jokey cameos from Hugh Hefner in a movie aimed at kids?
I'm speaking, of course, of Hop, the new animated/live-action mongrel that is, as the ads proclaim with a certain level of pride, "from the director of Alvin & The Chipmunks," which you may remember as the movie in which semi-beloved characters from an earlier era are reduced to eating shit and conspiring to get their human buddy laid. So expectations are already low.
Still, this is a movie about the Easter Bunny, which is one of those childhood concepts that ceases to have any significance once you reach the age of, I dunno, seven or so. So presumably, if you're making a movie about the Easter Bunny, you're setting your sights on really young kids as your target audience.
Now I realize that when millions and millions of dollars are spent on a movie, it has to try to reach as large an audience as possible. Presumably the filmmakers wanted to provide some sort of entertainment for the adults who are accompanying all those kids. They could have done this by creating a well-crafted, witty film that would enrapture everybody, the kind of thing Pixar can do without even trying.
Or they could take the most cynical route imaginable and make a bunch of cheap semi-dirty jokes, trot out the likes of Hefner and the deplorable Chelsea Handler, and give audiences a cameo from David Hasselhoff because...wait. Why would you do any of that? Even for b-level celebrities, haven't Handler and Hasselhoff long passed their sell-by date? Would anybody in any audience conceivably welcome their presence?
Probably not, but it's not like the maker of Hop give a sweet shit. If they did, they would have made a good movie.
