The Brady Bunch Movie

The Brady Bunch Movie is retro-Seventies overload: color it harvest gold and avocado green. It takes great delight in tormenting baby boomers in its celebration of shag haircuts, Sansabelt slacks, and polyester knit -- “Did I really look like that back then?” -- while delighting twentysomethings weaned on afternoon reruns with its hip spin on the banality of the original. Although the current trend of transforming yesterday's mediocre 30-minute television programs into today's mediocre two-hour movies has got to be one of the seven signs of the apocalypse, The Brady Bunch Movie is much better than most of its ilk. Nestled in their Seventies cocoon, the Bradys of today are living in a time warp, hilariously out of sync with the Nineties. They're freaks, a Republican's dream, the village idiots of suburbia. With one exception, the kids are particularly anachronistic: they dig Davy Jones over Pearl Jam, prefer knee socks and two-tone jeans rather than nose rings and tattoos, fight over who's next in the bathroom instead of money, drugs, or sex. Only the troubled Jan seems to have one foot in these perilous times. Suffering from “middle-child syndrome” and haunted by constantly bickering inner voices, Jan's a neurotic mess… and she wears one mean Afro wig. (It's no wonder the movie focuses on her more than anyone else -- she's a scream.) The movie's four screenwriters have threaded the plotlines of the TV show's more memorable episodes into the script -- Peter's voice change, Marcia's nose flattened by a football just before a big date, Jan's reluctance to wear her glasses, Greg's brief career as rock star “Johnny Bravo” -- so that the movie becomes a Trivial Pursuit exercise in Brady Bunch lore. The cast has a good time, with some of the performances uncannily capturing the originals: Christine Taylor is a dead ringer for Maureen McCormick, who played Marcia on television, while Cole's cadence and delivery sound eerily like the late Robert Reed, who played Mike Brady, the architect who designed a house with only one bathroom for six kids. Special mention should also go to Smart as the lush living next door, who lusts after every Brady with a penis (her exit line to Greg and Peter about making a sandwich is inspired beyond belief), and to RuPaul, who works it as a junior high school guidance counselor who relishes teen angst. As real as the Astroturf in the Brady's backyard and as eager to please as Alice's meat loaf, The Brady Bunch Movie is -- to exhaust this string of metaphors -- pure junk food. But like most junk food, it sure tastes good.