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‘Unfrosted’ Review: Jerry Seinfeld Directs and Stars in a Biopic of the Pop-Tart. It’s Based on a True Story, but It’s Knowingly Nuts


It's in the genre of movies like "Flamin' Hot" and "The Founder," only this one is an absurd and surrealist fruitcake cartoon.

That makes it sound like part of the new wave of mass-market product biopics — movies like “Flamin’ Hot” (about the creation of Spicy Cheetos), “Blackberry” (about the invention of the smart phone), and the one I think of as the “Citizen Kane” of the genre, “The Founder,” with Michael Keaton as Ray Kroc, the man who changed the world by taking over and franchising McDonald’s. On some level, Jerry was clearly drawn to the quaint capitalist energy of the film’s essential (true) story: that in the early ‘60s, the two reigning cereal companies in America, Kellogg’s and Post, were both based in Battle Creek, Michigan, a town of 50,000, yet they were fighting like rival European fiefdoms of the 14th century. To create a pastry product that can beat Post’s, Kellogg’s puts Bob together with his old partner, Stan ( Melissa McCarthy), who’s working for NASA, and the two assemble a team of inventors who are like a Mount Rushmore of cheesy ’60s brands: the exercise guru Jack LaLanne (James Marsden, giddy enough to make you want to see him star in a LaLanne biopic); the bicycle visionary Steve Schwinn (Jack McBrayer); the ice-cream entrepreneur Tom Carvel (Adrian Martinez); Chef Boyardee (Bobby Moynihan); a Wernher von Braun-type mastermind named Harold von Braunhut (Thomas Lennon), who keeps making thinly veiled allusions to his Nazi past; and an IBM UNIVAC computer that spits out punch-cards that are always reading the room.

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