I can only assume Hollywood is aware I exist and have hired a team of elite ninja masters to hide their most egregious shit from me until it's too late.
There is no other possible explanation or excuse for the FAT ALBERT MOVIE slipping past me, coming in second place, and taking in twelve million dollars over the weekend.
I had seen a poster indicating that yes, Hollywood would be MAKING a Fat Albert movie, but it wasn't until Christmas Eve that I actually saw any evidence that they'd finished it, and by then, they'd already released it. For a 600 pound dude in an orange sweater, that's REALLY FUCKING SNEAKY.
This fact is all the more stunning when you realize that "Fat Albert" is, by far, the single stupidest idea for a movie this year. Possibly this decade. It's still early. And 2004 is a year that gave us "Catwoman". I heard they pushed "Racing Stripes" into early January just so it wouldn't lose out to "Fat Albert" as stupidest fucking movie of the year. And "Racing Stripes" has a talking zebra trying to fit in with talking racehorses and a plucky pre-teen girl, so that begins to give you some idea of just. How. Incredibly. Fucking. Stupid. The "Fat Albert" plot is.
But here at You Are Dumb Dot Net, we don't settle for "some idea" when the full horror of the idea can be revealed in painstaking, excruciating, violating-the-Geneva-Convention kind of detail. You see, "Fat Albert" is not just a live-action version of the 70's cartoon. That would be too easy. It's a fourth-wall, Space Jam, Looney Tunes Back In Action esque clusterfuck that brings the Cosby Kids from their 70's cartoon world into the own modern 21st century era. Which should, if you're the audience I think you are, already be twisting your guts into tiny square knots.
They come to 2004, you see, to help out a sad teenage girl. This sad teenage girl is sad and crying because she has no friends. And one single, solitary tear from this sad teenage girl falls into her remote control, opening a MAGICAL TRANSDIMENSIONAL PORTAL through which the Cosby Kids travel. I must, at this point, ask you to stop hitting yourself in the skull with your stapler, for two important reasons. First, although the pain does make you remember what it's like to be alive, it will not make the bad movie go away without also removing the cognitive functions you need to keep reading this column. And second, because you need to be strong, as I'm not even close to done yet.
You see, it seems that the Cosby Kids cannot stay in our modern future flesh world for long, as their colors are fading. So presumably there will be some wacky, rollicking sequence toward the end, leading to a touching farewell scene, before the Cosby Kids return to their pre-crack housing project idyll. Yousee, their colors are fading. For fuck's sake. What a coincidence that the molecular deterioration caused by a saline-and-AA-battery-based transdimensional portal would exactly match the kind of cheap-ass digital coloring effect a low-budget, piece-of-shit, live-action cartoon movie would have available to it. There must have been cheers and free donuts for whatever 20th Century Fox physicist discovered that.
If, at this point, you are not plucking out your eyeballs and storing them in a safe deposit box just to prevent yourself from accidentally seeing any of this movie, let's seal that deal, shall we? Fat Albert... falls in love. With a human. Specifically, the hot foster sister of the sad girl with the magic tears. Let's say that again, because it's the kind of sentence that slides off of your brain, and makes said brain recoil with horror at the touch. Fat Albert falls in love with the hot foster sister of the sad girl with the magic tears.
You know, I remember when Bill Cosby went off yelling at the black community this year, and there was a great debate a-rising across the land. Was Captain Jello delivering a much-needed boot to the ass, or was he an old, out-of-touch coot who had completely lost it. Bill Cosby wrote this movie. Technically, Bill Cosby and Charles Kipps wrote this movie, but Charles Kipps has only written six things ever, and four of those were things he wrote with Bill Cosby. So I think that debate can safely end now.
Bill Cosby wrote a movie in which a 70's cultural icon finds himself, thirty years later, confused by modern technology and society, and gets involved with a hot young babe. Hm. And a couple million of you had no problem shelling out for that matinee, during a holiday weekend. And while I do apologize for not being aware of this sooner and warning you off, I can't hold your hands forever. You have to learn to spot these things on your own.