As Gouda as It Gets (2020)

I was born in 1990. That makes me a part of the millennial generation. Now, I don’t think you can clearly define generations the way people seem to want to. You can’t say millennials were born until 1996 and Gen Z was born starting in 1997 and say that people born in those two years will be completely different because of their generation. People don’t work like that. You can make generalizations about people born within a range, though. Late 90s being a blending of two generations? That makes more sense.

Anyway, millennials are typically seen as born between the early 1980s and the late 1990s. That’s a twenty-year gap that would lead to vastly different experiences. I was born in 1990, which means I experienced my teenage years in the 00s, where someone born in the early 80s would experience those years in the 90s. We grew up with different music, different movies, different technology. But there are some common traits that seem to pop up with many millennials. There is a certain sense of humour that we share that never really made it to people ten years younger than I am. There are certain likes and dislikes that define our generation.

I’m not necessarily the most knowledgeable about the different generations and what separates them from others. I haven’t done any real research into them. I can only speak from experience of being a millennial and experience from seeing all the other millennials doing things on the internet. Yeah, it might not be the best bunch of reference points, but I’ve lived. I know some things about being of the generation that I’m a part of.

Anyway, I think I found a movie that encapsulates what being a millennial is all about, without being a movie like Y2K that was very “Look at what millennials were doing at the turn of the millennium with this horror comedy.” No, this was a genuine movie that wasn’t trying to capture the millennium nostalgia. It just happened to encapsulate so many things about millennials that it was striking.

As Gouda as It Gets was a romantic comedy about Brie Belanger (Kim Shaw), a small-town cheese maker who fell in love with Jack Wolfe (Clayton James), a cheese critic in town for the state’s biggest cheese festival. Brie planned on entering her smoked gouda in the festival to try and beat Lambert Farms once and for all and show that she could make the best cheese in Vermont.

There’s a lot to unpack with As Gouda as It Gets and how it perfectly captures the generalisations and stereotypes of being a millennial. What I want to do is go through five different elements of the movie that speak to that millennial idea. Five different things that you could point at and think “Yes, a millennial was behind that.” Let’s get to it then.

 

 Hallmark Romantic Comedy

If there’s one thing I’ve learned as millennials have grown into the adult stage of their lives, it has been that they love a good Hallmark romantic comedy. The popularity of this style of movie has risen as millennials have grown older. Especially the Christmas iterations of these movies. They’ve grown so popular that other companies have copied the model with their own movies. Look at how Netflix has put out numerous Christmas romantic comedies in that style.

As Gouda as It Gets wasn’t set at Christmas, but fell into many of the tropes that the Hallmark Christmas movies typically use. That’s why I considered this Hallmark romantic comedy instead of Christmas movies. There was the big city guy falling in love with the small-town girl. There was food (I’ll get into that soon). There was a minor obstacle involving the city guy’s job. Sure, there was no royalty, but it was still a Hallmark romantic comedy with many of the tropes of those movies.

 

Cheese

This is going to sound like a strange millennial trait, but millennials love cheese. Everyone likes cheese but millennials love cheese. A lot. I’ve seen millennial comedy songs about cheese. I’ve seen commercials about cheese geared towards millennials. There are more cheese flavours of snacks and more cheese options at restaurants. Millennials are spending their money on cheese and taking in entertainment about cheese. Even if you’re a millennial and you disagree with this assessment, I still say I’m right.

As Gouda as It Gets was about a woman with an artisanal cheese shop in a small town. She made cheese for a living. Her grandfather made cheese for a living. She entered her smoked gouda in a cheese festival to be judged in competition with big cheese. The guy she fell in love with was a writer who wrote about cheese. He gained fame when he was a chef and ordered too much cheese. In a panic, he made a fondue that people loved. Their lives were about cheese. The movie was about cheese. Millennials love cheese, and it came through in their writing in this Hallmark movie.

Puns

You might have noticed my three other points spaced throughout that cheese section. It’s tough to bring up one of the points without the others blending into it, like a good fondue. As Gouda as It Gets was the title of the movie, but it was also one of the oldest cheese puns. That cheese was very gouda. That sort of thing. That wasn’t where it stopped with the movie, though. There was a scene where Jack made a few cheesy puns with a fan and was called out for them. The movie wasn’t going to shy away from puns.

Now, I don’t want to say that puns are a millennials-only thing. What I will say is that as a person ages, they tend to appreciate goofy, tame humour a little more. Puns become a more amusing thing. Millennials are in their middle-age era now, so they’ve grown into the puns. Dad jokes. Stuff like that. It’s another reason why As Gouda as It Gets felt like a millennial movie. It was a pun from the title down to the name of the main characters, Brie and Jack, down to the dialogue.

Blogs

Millennials grew up as the internet became a mainstay in households. We experienced a time without regular internet access. We experienced dialup. We experienced high speed. And we experienced whatever you call the current state of the internet. As we grew and the internet grew, we witnessed the peak popularity of certain parts of the world wide web. In the days before widespread video streaming, we had text. We had music. We had text-based online games, and we had blogs. Text-based games mostly fell by the wayside, but blogs stuck around. Sure, there are different forms. Blogs became vlogs became podcasts. Blogs are still here, though. You’re reading one.

Jack Wolfe was a chef turned writer who was very involved with the cheese world. Not only did he make one of the most popular fondues ever, but he wrote a book based on that fame. That book parlayed into a successful blog, where he traveled around to try out and review cheeses. He came into town in As Gouda as It Gets for the cheese festival, tested Brie’s cheese, and blogged about it. Brie didn’t like his review of her goat cheese, and their romance blossomed from that. It blossomed from a blog post. He was a very important cheese blogger because millennials are still stuck on blogs being a big thing.

Anti-Corporation Sentiments

This one might not be a millennials-only thing. Millennials just seem to be the generation where this became a mainstream thing and not just a bit of rebellion. There’s a knowledge that big corporations are a bad thing. Rich people continue to profit off the overworking and underpaying of the working class. The quality of working conditions has been forgotten for the sake of someone with lots of money getting more money. Many millennials have been working on changing that, though a lot of it is on the lower level at this point. A lot of it is helping employees feel better and more appreciated when coming to work. It’s not much, but it’s something.

The biggest conflict in As Gouda as It Gets was that the cheese tasting competition was sponsored by the big, corporate Lambert Farms. This was the same company who opened a cheese shop to rival her grandfather’s and ran her grandfather out of the business. They had multiple cheeses in the competition and were likely to win over Brie’s gouda, unless her gouda was perfect. The new CEO of the company also tried to buy her out and threatened to open a shop on the same street to run her out of business because the board wanted representation in her small town. Corporations were the villain.

All five of these elements came together in As Gouda as It Gets to make one of the most millennial movies I can remember. It might not have been flashy about being a millennial movie, but a millennial movie shouldn’t be. If a movie is to truly represent a generation, it doesn’t point out all the stereotypes. It doesn’t wink at the audience about that generation. It simply does what that generation does.

As Gouda as It Gets didn’t try to tell the audience that it was a millennial movie. It didn’t break the fourth wall or point out any of the millennial elements it utilized. Outside the puns thing, that is. It simply used those elements, elements that have become a regular part of millennial life. That was why I thought it perfectly encapsulated millennials in movie form.

I don’t claim to know everything about the generational breakdowns of people. I don’t even really understand how we can possibly break down generations by exact years and say one generation will act one way while another will act a different way when the people could be born two years apart. In reality, there should be some crossover. I’m a millennial, though. I can speak for myself and people around my age. And I can bullshit my way through a post about people our age because I am my age. I think that’s good enough to justify all of this.

Before you go, there are a few notes:

• Romaine Waite was in both As Gouda as It Gets and Antisocial.
• Another returning actor to Sunday “Bad” Movies was Kim Shaw. She played Brie in As Gouda as It Gets, and she was in Sex and the City.
• Finally, As Gouda as It Gets featured Marc Gourdeau, who was also in The Adventures of Pluto Nash.
• Have you seen As Gouda as It Gets? What did you think of it? Are there any other movies you think represent millennials without being obvious and in your face about the movie being about millennials? You can share your thoughts in the comments, or get a hold of me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Bluesky, Threads, and the comments are good places to suggest movies for me to check out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’m open to any suggestions you may have.
• I said in the last post that the next post was going to be for Trucks. The only reason it wasn’t was that the post was taking a little longer to write and I wanted to get a romantic comedy in for Valentine’s Day. I promise that the next post will be a post for Trucks. I’m partway through the post. It’s a snow day today. I’m bound to get some writing done. I’ll see you soon enough with that one.

Fast and Furriest (2017) and the Most Unique Elements in Sunday "Bad" Movies

Do you ever get the urge to watch something of questionable quality? Like, you could watch one of the critically acclaimed movies or one of the popular movies. You could watch something that people know and like. Instead, you want something that isn’t necessarily as well known. It isn’t particularly well received by critics or by the general population. You’re just in the mood for that kind of movie.

I get into those moods. It leads to me scrolling through a bunch of streaming services. I go down as many rabbit holes as I can looking for the most obscure, goofy looking thing possible because I think that will hit the right spot. I avoid the “top movies” categories. I avoid the “recommended” categories. I go to the genre categories and scroll to the side until I see something that doesn’t look good. If that doesn’t feel like the right movie, I click whatever the “more like this” button might be. I go deeper. And deeper. And deeper.

Then I settle on something like the inspiration for this post, Fast and Furriest. Now, why did I settle on this one? I hadn’t watched a kids’ movie for the blog in… a year? Unless you count The Grinch Musical, but I wouldn’t categorize that as a kids’ movie. I also knew it would probably end up in Sunday “Bad” Movies (Spoiler: it did). I didn’t know, however, that I would find it kind of unique.

Fast and Furriest was essentially a kids’ version of The Cannonball Run. Chuck (Robert Notman) and Woodsly (Julia Flood) went to the Fur Ball Run to see their hero, Hunter (David Dixon), race. Through a series of events where Hunter tried to remove any legitimate competition from the race, Chuck and Woodsly were entered in a car of their own. They had to race against their hero and avoid their principal along the way.

Most of Fast and Furriest was a forgettable, albeit watchable, movie. The banter between the characters was decent enough. It was what was needed to make a children’s version of The Cannonball Run. The two main characters having their friend disputes. The girl dog that Woodsly had a crush on. Hunter being a bad guy. The other great racer that Hunter was afraid of. The boy band rabbits. The kangaroos who stopped racing to hang out at a saloon. The two female gerbils that fought over a boy. All that sort of stuff that made the characters stand out and had the whole thing feel like a race with a lot of participants. That all worked enough to make it watchable.

One thing really stood out, though, and became the crux for the post. The look of Fast and Furriest was unlike anything I can remember seeing. There may have been something else like it, but I can’t recall a movie that looked like this. Fast and Furriest was an animated movie, except for when it came to the animals. All the animals were real animals inserted into a CGI world. The cars were animated. The roads were animated. The buildings were animated. The bridge at the end was animated. The animals were real animals, filmed as they sat in front of a camera. Their mouths were animated to move, but that was the only thing animated about the animals.

I considered that a somewhat unique look and it got me thinking about what other movies I’ve covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies had unique qualities to them. I’ve seen 657 movies for the blog. There must be some that stand out more than others for how different they were. That’s why I’ve compiled a list of what I consider to be some of the most unique movies I’ve written about, and I’ll explain why I find them interesting.

 

Monster Brawl

The thing that made Monster Brawl feel unique was pretty easy. It was in the concept of the movie itself. Monster Brawl was a movie about classic monsters wrestling one another. Professional wrestling, not Olympic wrestling. As such, the movie was built like a television wrestling promotion. It had the commentators. It had the stats. It had the promos and the package segments. It also had the wrestling, which was the most important part.

I’ve never seen a horror movie outside of Monster Brawl utilize professional wrestling in quite the same way. Not too many movies, or even television shows, use the idea of a wrestling show as a framing device. Building the story through the promos and the packages and the matches, rather than have a story with matches in it. Imagine WWE, but less refined, and with monsters.

 

The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human

There have been thousands of romantic comedies over the years and most of the building blocks have remained the same. Man meets woman. They fall for each other. There’s some conflict that separates them. They overcome it and live happily ever after. Sure, there are the twists where a bet gets made, or the best friend is actually the right person for the main character, but they tend to stick to the basic building blocks and tropes.

The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human took those basic building blocks and did something with them I hadn’t seen before. It framed the entire love story as a nature documentary. The narration was there, as if you were watching Planet Earth. There was technical, scientific speech. Or, at least, there was a comedic use of words to make things sound more scientific. There have been mockumentaries around for years, but few of them do things quite like this.

 

Spirit Halloween: The Movie

I thought I’d go a little newer with this Halloween movie I watched only a couple years back. Spirit Halloween: The Movie was based on the Spirit Halloween stores that pop up at the end of summer every year. At its most basic, this movie was a kids’ horror movie. But there was so much more to it than that.

Spirit Halloween: The Movie was a feature film advertisement for the holiday-themed store. A group of kids wanted to spend the night inside a Spirit Halloween store. There was a ghost in the building that haunted all the Halloween animatronics the store had to offer. Sure, there have been movies with product placement before. How many movies have been wholly about a store and all that store’s products? Not many. This seemed like a fairly unique thing. Maybe not actually unique, but close to it.

 

Tammy and the T-Rex

Some movies capitalize on circumstance. If there’s a location available to a filmmaker, that filmmaker might find a way to use that location. That’s a common enough production tale. I went through film school. Beg, borrow, and steal is something we were taught the entire time I was there. Use what’s available.

Tammy and the T-Rex was one of the most extreme cases of that I can think of. Stuart Raffill, the director, was offered the two-week use of an animatronic T-Rex before it was to be shipped off to a park in Texas. He came up with a story in one week and shot it within those two weeks, simply because he had an animatronic T-Rex available to him. The story certainly felt like it was thrown together in a week or so. I couldn’t tell you any other movies that were made because a writer and/or director had access to an animatronic T-Rex for a week.

 

God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness

Almost every modern Christian movie has been about how Christians are persecuted for their beliefs and not able to believe the way they want. That’s not really happening. But there are movies like Last Ounce of Courage where they claim that people can’t celebrate Christmas anymore because nobody likes Christians. It’s kind of annoying to turn on a Christian movie and get the same rhetoric over and over again. Propaganda for the church.

That’s why I was surprised that God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness did something different. Something to make it stand out. Something unique. The first movie was about a college kid not being allowed to believe, and then Christian belief changing people’s lives for the better. The second involved Pastor Dave being arrested for not sharing his sermons with the government, showing that Christian freedoms were being targeted. The fourth movie was about the attack on home schooling and how that attack was against their religious rights to not teach evolution and such parts of science. In all three movies, the Christians were the victims, and they came out on top, proving that Christianity could break through all the haters.

The third film, however, featured a little less of the black-or-white, Christianity-or-bust type of storytelling. Yes, there was some Christian persecution complex in there. God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness was mostly about a college trying to get rid of the church that was on school grounds, after the church was vandalized and destroyed. The vandal, who hated the church at the beginning, did come around to Christianity at the end. There happened to be a twist, though. Something that made the third movie in the God’s Not Dead franchise feel unique among Christian movies. Pastor Dave’s brother was around, telling him that the college might not be wrong. Through the movie, Pastor Dave came to a realization. Sort of. Everyone said that the church should move because other religions didn’t have places of worship on the college grounds. Pastor Dave realized that those other religions still had followers without that college presence. His church could, too. He agreed to place the church off the college grounds and allow his followers to come to him.

This takes just a little more explanation. You see, with Pastor Dave agreeing to leave the campus, he allowed all religions a space to exist. This was a Christian movie that started as a tale of Christian persecution complex and ended as a tale of all religions being able to share a space. I’ve never seen that in a Christian movie and I’m sure it will be a long time before I see that again.

 

Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical

A perfect storm of situation led to Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical becoming a unique sort of movie/television special. For a few years leading up to it, TV networks had been putting on live stage events. They took plays and musicals and adapted them as a television special that aired around Christmas time. In 2020, however, the pandemic hit. It separated people. It kept them at bigger distances from one another than ever before.

Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical was a result of those two things. It was a live musical stageplay adapted to television that couldn’t actually be performed live. Because of the restrictions put in place to reduce the spread of Covid-19, it wasn’t feasible to perform the story live. There have been movies and specials presented as live when they weren’t really, but this was the only time I can remember a live performance having to be filmed yet still presented as live because it was part of a series of live specials. The sets also looked like stage sets, which was cool.

 

From Justin to Kelly

Here’s another one that might not seem unique at first, but there was one element that made it unique. Lots of musicals and musical-adjacent movies have been made to feature musicians in major roles. Glitter, Spice World, Crossroads, and the like. From Justin to Kelly might seem like one of those movies. There’s more to it than that. Why it was made is what made it unique.

From Justin to Kelly was the result of American Idol’s first season. As the season wrapped up, Kelly Clarkson defeated Justin Guarini to take the top prize. However, their contracts had one more element to them. The top two contestants were contracted to star in a movie for Fox. That movie ended up being From Justin to Kelly. This was the only movie I can think of that was made to capitalize on the first season of a television talent show by casting the final two contestants in leading roles.

 

Not Cool

I’m sure this concept isn’t as original as some of the other movies included in this post. I’m pretty sure the idea of how this was made has been done before, in other situations. But I wanted to include it anyway because it’s not something that typically happens in filmmaking.

Not Cool was a movie made for the reality show, The Chair. The idea was that one script would be given to two different directors. Each director would then take that script and make their own version of the same movie. This was the one that Shane Dawson directed, which was filled with Shane Dawson level humour. It wasn’t good, but the production concept was interesting enough that I eventually want to see Holidaysburg, the version of the script directed by Anna Martemucci.

 

Scream Returns

Fan films are an unsung part of the film industry. They don’t make money because that would cause a whole slew of copyright issues. Instead, they allow fans to put their fantastical ideas for an IP out there for the public to experience. Some are good, some are bad. That’s just like any other movie, really.

Scream Returns was a fan film that came out between the fourth and fifth Scream movies. It wasn’t produced by anyone involved in the franchise and didn’t lead to much of anything. The reason I’ve included it in this post was because it used a Grand Theft Auto V emulator to place Ghostface in San Andreas, leading to a fight between Ghostface and Trevor. I’ve not seen another movie that brings a slasher icon into the world of Grand Theft Auto.

 

 

 

These weren’t the only unique movies or movie elements that were featured in Sunday “Bad” Movies. I’ve seen over 650 movies for this blog. There have absolutely been more than a handful that have stood out for various reasons.

Fast and Furriest is the newest of those movies with unique elements, and it surely won’t be the last. It provided a visual that I hadn’t seen before. Stationary live-action animals green-screened into an animated world. It set it apart from other children’s movies that I’ve seen for Sunday “Bad” Movies because none of the other kids’ movies did this. Not to mention that the movie wasn’t all that bad. It was watchable. It was entertaining.

I don’t necessarily choose movies to watch for Sunday “Bad” Movies based on the unique qualities they have. Sure, that has come up once or twice. I choose them based on the movie having a bad reputation. People think its bad, so I check it out and see if they’re right. Or it just looks bad. I’ll find the worst looking thing that might look like the smallest amount of fun and I’ll check that out. However, the uniqueness of some just comes out. I watch the movie and think “Well, that was different.” That’s the magic of bad movies.

The bad movie watching mood strikes me sometimes. I never know when it will hit. When it does, I go searching. I find something. I find something bad. I watch it. I write about it. I make the Sunday “Bad” Movies blog live on.

Now it’s time for some notes:

• Here are the posts for Monster Brawl, The Mating Habits of the Earthbound Human, Spirit Halloween: The Movie, Tammy and the T-Rex, God’s Not Dead: A Light in Darkness, Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch Musical, From Justin to Kelly, Not Cool, and Scream Returns.
• I also mentioned Last Ounce of Courage, Glitter, Spice World, and Crossroads in this post.
• Have you seen Fast and Furriest? What did you think? What are some movie elements that you’ve found unique over the years? Let me know in the comments, on Bluesky, or on Threads.
• If there’s a movie you think I should check out, drop it in the comments. Or suggest it to me on Bluesky or Threads.
• Now it’s time for a look ahead. I’ve got a little something about Trucks coming up. It was the second feature film adaptation of the Stephen King short story. The other was Maximum Overdrive. Hopefully that one will get done faster than this one. I’ve just been having trouble getting time to write recently. Or getting in the mood for it. Either way, see you soon with another post.