Premise: Man evolves. Animals along with aliens attack mankind.
About: Written in the late 80’s by Alan Rudolph, the film was almost produced due to a change in studio management, Rudolph is a friend of Far Side creator, Gary Larson, and composed the script around a few hundred of the series’ panels. (And little else. He didn’t even think up much of a plot).
Writer – Alan Rudolph (directed Breakfast of Champions, and was an Altman protege, which leads to the exact type of weird nonlinear script The Far Side is).
When I was a kid, my older sister and mom used to read The Far Sider to one another and snicker. Honestly, I didn’t understand them. I was too young? (Eleven-ish). That is, excluding the panel with the fat lady posting the missing dog flyer. That’s comic brilliance. I never rediscovered the series. Although, as I read this script I finally found out this stuff is pretty hilarious. And more importantly, it’s pretty dark. And dark comedy in my book is the best of its kind.
The story is a highly nonsensical one. Basically, cavemen evolved into regular men. Then, two neighbors, Henderson (Bellow reference? He goes into the jungle) and Murphy (Goes to outerspace). There’s also a bad guy who’s based on the missing link. Henderson’s in trouble, but the missing link saves him. Then Murphy aggravates some aliens during his space travels, and the aliens attack Earth. That’s the story. Summarizing it now, I can see a sort of thematic link: man reaches too far (jungle or space exploration) and trouble results. I guess that works?
The story isn’t told in real dialogue, for the most part it’s a series of juxtaposed snippets from the cartoon. At some point,I found myself stopping and reflecting how lazy and awkward a screenplay this was. For the better of hundred pages, Rudolph describes a Larson panel and then uses the dialogue equivalent to the cartoon’s comment.
Now, I may be really wrong. But I just don’t get it. Larson’s work doesn’t need to be adapted to film. This is the equivalent of someone trying to make an animated cartoon out of the Mona Lisa. A great piece of visual art, but best left on its one. And while it would certainly be amazing to see Larson’s animated characters, Rudolph adds nothing more to this script. So I was pretty unsatisfied with Rudolph’s script. Although there’s a lot to laugh about here, I’d rather see the pictures as a carton and not as a film.
Complete Crap
X – Few Redeeming Qualities
Mediocre
Good
Pretty Darn Good
Incredible
What I Learned: You remember that Lincoln quote about how you can fool some of the people some of the time? You can sometimes get away with no plot in some parts of the film, but a whole film of unrelated dialogue is a little taxing. All The Far Side script has to link it together are loose thematic ties. Frankly, that’s not enough for a hundred some pages.
The 22nd Row 