YOGI BEAR (3D)

The universality of the prohibition’s adoption staggers: No Movies In The Morning. But then, it is their nature to hide from the light of day. Alexander Kluge: “Our eyes…are not quick. Their power of differentiation is limited to one twenty-eighth of a second. As with film, where the eye cannot really make out that half the time spent in the cinema is spent in darkness. Out of every two hours we spend at the movies, we spend one hour in the dark, relaxing. The brain perceives this, its many synapses register it, and yet each of us will have seen an uninterrupted film. Probably this is the experience of film: We dream at the movies—In front of the TV perhaps a little less.” I never watched much Yogi, as a kid, nor entirely understood what his collar signifies. I often think, still, of Alvin (the chipmunk), accused (like Yogi) of selfishness, and wonder if he’s found his peace. Is the Jay-Z “Hard Knock Life” just a bit of stunt sampling? Or is the presence of the shrill orphans’ cries meant to mock such posturing as all men do? Or does he, on the contrary, dignify their cloying grouse with his gravitas?

It’s hard not to sympathize with the assistant ranger who’s not allowed to drive the ATV or guide tours until he’s “paid his dues.” The final humiliation: wearing a sandwich board to advertise the Jellystone centennial. Of course he’s easily seduced by the corrupt mayor, and sabotages the celebration. Let’s be honest: whatever damage done to any one of us by corporations and governments seems an order of magnitude less than that inflicted by the indifference of our own supposed communities.

The year’s first true 3-D spit-take seems shockingly late to arrive. Yogi has a bit of the Jackass in him, his ingenuity is for unstable contraptions. As the climax nears, he’s required to chase by homemade glider a pic-a-nic basket filled not with sandwiches and pie but containing a thought-to-be-extinct turtle whose revelation to the public will result in legal protection that would save the threatened park—but these stacked abstractions can mean nothing to a bear, a beast. His pic-a-nic is the plummeting. Play always goes too far.