Broken
During this past weekend, my family decided to have a moderately sized get-together. We ate at an Italian resaurant and then went over to my grandparents house for visiting. One of my aunts played this video called "Baby Mozart" for her recently born son. Since that was the only TV in the house, several other family members, myself included, watched it too. What followed was 30 minutes of stolen life that I would kill to get back.
This is in our "Misc" section because it doesn't fit anywhere else. It's not a TV show, it's not a game, and it's not really a movie either. I guess "baby video" is the only way to describe it. It's kind of like those videos they make for cats that show nothing but weird patterns and bugs except that it's for humans. Unfortunately for the creators of this crap, hiding under the "baby video" label won't save them from my critical and objective judgment. If they think they can justify this plotless, incoherent filth by claiming that it's for babies, they're in for a big surprise.
The key to any good story is it's plot. Well apparently the people behind this nuclear weapons test site of a video thought that they were above plot because they didn't bother to include one. It's nothing but a bunch of unrelated scenes of elaborate toys performing their functions while Mozart tunes play in the background. Unrelated except for the fact that they're all stupid. One scene had a toy train running along some bright red tracks for a few minutes while another one features one of those underwater bubble machines. There's nothing that strings these clips together and their purpose is never explained. It's just a bunch of crap they thought we should see. This is a case of style over substance coked up and running nude through the forest.
To say the acting is atrocious is an understatement. It'd be like saying the holocaust was simply "unfortunate." Once in a while we'd get a puppet who strolls across the screen, turns to the audience, and makes a weird noise. What the fuck is that?! In no way does that convey to us what your character is feeling. There was one scene that involved three toy seals who were transported up a small stair way and then pushed down a winding slide that ended at the bottom of the stairway, where they made their way back up to the top. At one point, one of the seals actually fell way behind the other two! I guess they fancy themselves above rehearsal as well. But as bad as it was, I won't blame it entirely on the actors because the material that they had to work with was so weak. Whoever wrote this demon spawn should be fired and blacklisted. There wasn't even any dialogue! Character development was also nonexistant and I didn't find myself caring about what happened to any of them. All in all, the bad acting combined with horrible writing made it a thoroughly unenjoyable experience.
Also of note was the budget, or lack thereof. It's like someone took a bunch of toys down from their attic and decided to make a movie. There were a couple parts that had some guy's hand manipulating the toys. Way to maintain the atmosphere morons! Having a hand in there is the equivalent of having a boom mic visible in the final cut of a movie.
And lastly, just when you start to think these guys couldn't get it any more wrong, you realize that the name "Baby Mozart" makes no sense. No where in this video is there a Baby Mozart, unless of course Mozart was a dinosaur, toy set, or human hand as a baby. You could argue that it's because they play cutesy versions of Mozart's musical pieces in the background, but if that's the case then they should have named the video "The Music of Mozart in a Form More Likely to Hold the Attention of Babies."
And yet, despite all these glaring flaws, my Aunt's baby sat there, glued to the screen throughout the entire half hour. All the while, the videos messages of drugs and illicit anal sex entered his mind, no doubt damaging his mental development beyond repair. As he watched the video in a trance like state, I could do nothing but shake my head and sob until I was asked to leave. Then to top it all off, Baby Mozart ends with a 5 minute advertisment for all the other videos in the "Baby" series. I guess now we're teaching baby to be a consumer whore! Knowing that this is the kind of stuff todays babies are watching is depressing. If you thought this generation was bad, just wait until you see the next one. But hey, that's fine with me. I'll need something to complain about other than back pains and heart attacks when I get older.
