Alvin and the Chipmunks, 2007 Review

By Jim Fagan

Mostly, this movie about three singing chipmunks is convincingly horrible. My girlfriend, whose singing chipmunk standards are not exceedingly high, went in excitedly giggling and left comatose- so talk about losing your target audience.

And don’t give me that “it’s for the kiddies” bull. Isn’t this really a film for 20 something-year-olds and up? I mean, screw the kids: they were just a twinkle in the milkman’s eyes when the Chipmunk’s exploded onto the scene. They appreciate the Chipmunk’s Christmas Song about as much as they do Cole Porter, so spare me. To claim Alvin and the Chipmunks is really just for kids would be as off the mark as saying that Transformers was filmed for anyone other than 20-30 year old males who still live with their mother.

It wasn’t all bad though. In some ways, Chipmunks was a thing of beauty. That is, if you look at it as an artistic form of ritual career suicide. I’m not sure if Jason Lee was bored of success when he accepted this job or if he was just drunk one day on the set of My Name is Earl. Either way, he would have been better off going with a Christmas version of Glitter- at least nobody would have seen that. They could have called it Tinsel.

And I do like Jason Lee; Clerks, Almost Famous, and Vanilla Sky are all classics. Still, Lee’s Seville is something like watching a car wreck without all the delightful crashing noises. Rather, the vehicle just keeps spinning out of control until you’re hoping it will just wrap itself around a tree soon and get on with it.

Along the way, this runaway train has dashes of Christmas spirit chucked in. It’s hastily explained by the Chipmunk’s unnatural and somewhat maniacal obsession with having a family. This is a character trait that is probably supposed to empathize them with women’s biological time bombs, but mostly the three rodents come off as stalkers. At any rate, this Christmas spirit is entirely commercial and its true purpose is to align itself with anyone searching for a way to avoid familial conversation on Christmas Day. The truth is, Die Hard is more of a Christmas tale for its shear commitment to the season.

So I guess its best to suggest avoiding Alvin this winter. However, if you do find yourself face to face with three computer-generated vermin, there is a trick I taught myself halfway through the movie that really added to my enjoyment:

Just remember that, even though the actors are all speaking with the chipmunks, there isn’t anybody actually there. By using your imagination you can remove Alvin, Simon, and Theodore from the movie altogether. Then it looks like you’ve been granted an all access pass to view patients in a mental institution. Here, Jason Lee is particularly talented as he talks to himself in a scratchy voice. This voice is either an attempt at acting or the result of perpetually getting out of bed three minutes before the shoot and then weeping yourself to sleep immediately after. Its also fun to see people chasing thin air, or my particular favorite, imagining that Jason Lee is knitting sweaters for nobody- a sure sign of dementia. If your talents for imagination are particularly well developed, feel free to insert yourself into a scene, bursting in with men in white coats and having everyone committed and sedated. Ahhh, movie saved; another instant classic.

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