Young Einstein (1988)

Reviewed on Jan 04, 2006 under Comedy, Sci-fi |

Directed by Yahoo Serious
Written by David Roach & Yahoo Serious
Starring
- Yahoo Serious
- Odile Le Clezio
- John Howard
- Peewee Wilson
- Su Cruickshank
Produced by David Roach, Warwick Ross, and Yahoo Serious

What, I ask you, is the utility of this movie? Against the great backdrop of the Western world’s ’80s pop culture, what purpose was served by this tale of a Bizarro-world version of Albert Einstein growing up in Australia?

Only this: To prove a thesis that is almost Star Trekian in its implications: That sooner or later, every nation will have its own Carrot Top, its own comedian whose humorousness is defined and bounded by his hair.

Australia’s Carrot Top was Yahoo Serious, a comedian who burst onto the international stage with this movie, then was quickly sent packing back to his native land — and why not? We each have our own Carrot Top; we don’t need yours!

How to make wallaby soup.

Mr. Serious here assays the role of Albert Einstein, a young man in 1905 growing up on his parents’ isolated apple farm in Tasmania. Albert is a boy of great brainy potential, and discovers both Newtonian physics and gravitational theory on his own (while a Tasmanian Devil which owes more to Chuck Jones than to the natural history of Tasmania runs around the trees). His parents (Peewee Wilson and Su Cruickshank) don’t quite know what to make of his dreams of being a physicist, but Dad finally decides to put Albert’s analytical streak to good use and sets him on the project that Grandad Einstein had abandoned: How to put bubbles into beer. (Apparently the divergence of the mirror universe from our own goes back at least as far as the ancient Egyptians.) Dreaming up the idea of atomic energy to put bubbles into beer by splitting “beer atoms,” Albert manages to convert Grandad’s machine from a Hanna-Barbera sound-effects generator to a big smoking crater with a mushroom cloud overhead. But it does put bubbles into beer, and from this experience comes his great discovery: E=mc², which everyone in the movie charmingly pronounces as “emk.” (Though, come to think if it, shouldn’t that be said “emk-emk”?)

Seeking the family fortune, Albert sets off in a rowboat for the mainland, to register his formula at the patent office in Sydney. I’m guessing that abilities in physics and navigation don’t often go together, because in making this journey….

…he manages to cross deserts, mountains, and snowy plains. Eventually, he makes it to a railroad, where, by curious happenstance, he shares a coach with two individuals who will affect his destiny: Marie Curie (Odile Le Clezio), fresh from her Nobel Prize win and thus looking rather radiant and buoyant (and single) for being thirty-eight years old and married, and Preston Preston (John Howard, playing the Australian version of John Lithgow), the conniving and self-obsessed patent officer. Marie is quite taken with Albert’s backwoods brilliance, especially his tale of having split an atom on his own in the woodshed; Preston (or Preston, if you prefer), on the other hand, sees Albert through the eyes of an alpha male guarding a potential mate.

John Howard, as “The Man Who Could Swallow His Own Head.”

Once all are in Sydney, stuff starts happening. Not particularly linear stuff, but stuff all the same. Albert takes a room in a cheap hotel populated by cheap floozies, and by the end of the movie they’re the best-educated hookers in the world. He creates an electric violin, and invents the surfboard while pondering particle-wave duality.

Unfortunately, his meal ticket, E=mc², is immediately stolen by Preston, who goes into partnership with a Bavarian brewery to create bubbly beer. Einstein briefly gets a lowly position in Preston’s patent office to make ends meet, but that ends when Preston has him committed to a lunatic asylum (The Mad Scientists Ward, to be precise). Why, if it weren’t for his invention of the electric guitar, he would never be able to break out and make it to the 1906 Science Academy Awards in France — presided over by Charles Darwin (Basil Clarke), who looks remarkably good for having been dead for twenty-four years — to save Marie from a fate worse than death at the hands of Preston. Actually, the fate worse than death would pretty much be taken care of by the fate that is death, when Preston attempts to demonstrate his bubbly beer in a huge keg that turns out to be the world’s first atomic bomb.

Serious was surprised at how quickly he got pigeonholed.

All of which sounds like it ought to be funny, right? Even if it doesn’t, it still sounds like it ought to be funnier than it turns out. The problem is that the “humor” comes from four repeating motifs:

- Stale Australia jokes involving sheep, wallabies, and cockatiels. Seriously, can’t Australians even come up with better Australia gags?

- Einstein comes up with a genuine Einsteinian theory in an offbeat way, or invents something anachronistic. Rock’n'roll, relativity, none of it really makes any sense as presented here.

- Familiar musical cues. This can be cute once or twice, but it gets old very fast. After the obligatory “riding a horse down a hill to the orchestral strains of ‘Waltzing Matilda’” bit, we’ve got bits and pieces of Beethoven’s 5th, Peter and the Wolf, two selections from Peer Gynt, the 1812 Overture, the Hallelujah Chorus, Thus Spake Zarathustra, Pomp & Circumstance, and the William Tell Overture. Playing “Gee, what well-worn bit of music will they trot out next?” isn’t a compelling substitute for entertainment.

Beakers? Of colored liquids? But that must mean th… uh… sorry, what was I saying?

- Yahoo Serious’ hair. We get to see it clean, dusty, stiffened upwards by ash, pulled back, parted in the middle, spiked and glowing, and blackened by soot. If the comedian were half as versatile as his hair, he’d have been a force to be reckoned with; as it is, he seems content just to be under it, playing second-fidddle to it.

And I relly found no amusement in any of the above. I smiled once or twice; I believe I laughed exactly once, when Charles Darwin appeared accompanied by a beagle with a collar around its neck that read, “The Beagle.” When that’s the high-water mark, though…

“Dance of the Oompa-Loompas” (techno remix)

As always, one man’s opinion isn’t meant to be universal; when Chris chose this for me as part of this Video Binge, he did so, in his own words, “because it’s cool.” For me, it just demonstrates that “silly” doesn’t necessarily equal “funny.”