Unfrosted

Unfrosted is a 2024 movie by Jerry Seinfeld about the invention of Pop-Tarts.
Quite unsurprisingly, such a ridiculous premise hasn't resulted in a masterpiece that's adored by critics. The movie has received mostly average to negative reviews, being called shallow and 'junk cinema'. What's odd though is that otherwise more critical and intellectual news outlets, like the New York Times and the Washington Post, gave the movie largely positive reviews. I personally would agree with their assessments, and its certainly one of the more enjoyable film experiences I've had since The Banshees of Inisherin. In all honesty, between Unfrosted and The Banshees of Inisherin, the former is by far the better comedy, as it certainly made me laugh more often.

I think part of this negative audience response can be explained by the simple fact that many audiences are focussed on the story of the movie. After all, that's what you're supposed to pay attention to when you go see a film. If you tell somebody you have seen a movie, the first thing they will ask you is 'what is it about?' The answer to this question that Netflix gives you is that 'in this satirical comedy, two cereal companies compete to invent a new breakfast product'.
But this is wrong. Unfrosted is not a story about the invention of Pop-Tarts. It is a movie that that takes the simple fact that the pop-tart had to be invented as the premise for a number of jokes based on some far reaching conclusions that can be logically reached from that premise.
Because by necessity, Pop-Tarts had to be invented to exist. And while this simple fact historically took place, it's also crazy to think about how some people had to devote their precious time, knowledge and resources to develop such a product. A product that nevertheless became very successful.
In an interview with Jimmy Fallon, Seinfeld states that the origin of the movie was simply 'a joke that was in my act'. Together with Spike Feresten, they expanded that premise into a 90-minute feature, even if Seinfeld had remarked at the time that such a story is 'not a movie' and later commenting 'it's all jokes'.

The premise as outlined before was a joke Seinfeld performed in his '23 Hours to Kill' comedy special, where after talking about breakfast routines in the 1960's, he says this:
'That was breakfast.
And in the midst of that dark and hopeless moment, the Kellogg's Pop-Tart suddenly appeared out of Battle Creek, Michigan.
Which, as you cereal fans know, is the corporate headquarters of Kellogg's.
And a town I have always wanted to visit, because it seemed like some kind of cereal Silicon Valley. Filled with Breakfast Super Scientists working on frosted, fruit-filled, heatable rectangles, in the same shape as the box it comes in.
And with the same nutrition as the box it comes in.
That was the hard part to achieve.
I don't know how long it took them to invent the Pop-Tart. But they must have come out of that lab like Moses with the two tablets of the 10 Commandments.'

It is this description of Battle Creek, Michigan as cereal Silicon Valley that led Seinfeld to create a movie modelled after The Right Stuff, the 1983 classic about the race to the moon between the USA and the USSR.
Unfrosted is therefore just a film with a loose plot that tries to fit in as many jokes as possible connected to this supposed high stakes race for breakfast supremacy. The film therefore contains less of a plot and consists more of an interconnected series of plot devices that ensure all the jokes the writers could come up with are connected in a logical sequence.

In this sense, the movie is simply a very well crafted piece of cinema. It's no stroke of genius, but straightforward hard work by a number of people who have honed their skills over multiple decades. Everybody involved knows how to make a movie. They know how to get from A to B, and they know where they need to hit their marks to get a laugh.
The Guardian wrote of the movie that it's 'amiable and funny in a way that’s much harder to achieve than it looks' and this is a very accurate description. If there is such a thing as shop-floor comedy writing, this would be a perfect example. To quote a line from the movie 'Don't worry Thurl, we'll get it, we got the best cereal writers in the business'.

That the pop-tart joke at the heart of this movie is important to Seinfeld is also evident. The pop-tart joke is referenced in the blurb to both his 2020 book 'Is This Anything?' and the aforementioned show '23 Hours to Kill'.
It was also the subject of a 2012 YouTube interview with the New York Times called How to Write a Joke, which Seinfeld starts with the comment that 'you think people will be interested in this, but they're not'. In the interview he says he has already been writing the joke for two years, so it's safe to assume that by the time the movie had come out in 2024, Seinfeld had been ruminating the origins of the pop-tart for nearly fifteen years.
He describes the joke writing process as being similar to song writing, where timing is very important and the biggest laugh has to come at the end. The ending he came up with is the following:
[at the introduction of the pop-tart]
'Why two?
One's not enough,
three is too many,
and they can't go stale,
because they were never fresh to begin with.'
That sequence of words has a great rhythm and carries a clear punch, about which Seinfeld says: 'That took a long time, and I know it sounds like nothing. It is nothing. But in my world [of comedy writing] the wronger some thing feels, the righter it is. So to waste this much time on something this stupid, that felt good to me.'

Wasting over a decade on something completely stupid is exactly what this movie has done. It's a ridiculous movie based on an absurd premise that is told through serious, yet buffoonish characters. It's also a movie that is fully aware of how silly it all is and dares to revel in it for the sake of having fun. And for me, this makes it a noteworthy experience.
Because this movie isn't made by some filmmaker who is trying to convince his audience of anything. Jerry Seinfeld is a 70-year old billionaire who has achieved everything one possibly could in show business. This has unsurprisingly earned him a considerable amount of clout in the industry over the years.
And with all this money and industry power, he can think of nothing better to do than to spend more than a decade carefully crafting jokes about a breakfast cereal that was introduced over fifty years ago.
That is an extraordinary feat that deserves to be championed more than it has been.