Hollywood’s favorite idea these days, besides the “comic-book-to-movie”

thing, seems to be the “old-TV-Show-into-a-movie” thing. This has produced

some hits (The Addams Family) but has also created some bad misses

(Beverly Hillbillies, The Little Rascals). When they started

advertising The Brady Bunch Movie, it looked like they were

scraping the bottom of the ’70s barrel. But someone, somewhere deserves a

cookie, because this movie actually works. It’s fresh, funny and PC

in a good way.

The storyline drops the Brady family smack into contemporary Los Angeles,

with ’90s trappings like grunge rockers, greedy, real estate agents and

carjackers. But instead of being the “updated” Bradys of awful TV specials

like A Very Brady Christmas, these Bradys are still rooted in the

’70s cheese culture of the original series. Nevermind that the Bradys

weren’t exactly realistic in the first place (go see Dazed and Confused

for that sort of thing). This film version takes them for all their

sitcom worth. It even carries a stamp of approval from the original Brady

cast, apparent through some clever cameo appearances.

Using numerous classic episodes as subplots, the main story concerns a

greedy real estate developer’s plan to build a mini-mall on the Brady’s

street. But our heroes won’t sell. Mike Brady designed their house himself

and, gosh darn it, it’s their home.

This main plot is, of course, the last bit of the movie that anyone will be

concerned with. Foreseeing this, the filmmakers have wisely concentrated on

capturing the Brady zeitgeist. Many people may be frightened to realize how

many specific episodes they remember as the movie goes by.

The idea of pitting them against ’90s culture is what makes the film.

Instead of the tired old “icons-of-a-simpler-time-facing-today’s-problems,”

we get to see “’70s cheese-culture” versus “’90s cheese-culture.” The

satire is cross-generational.

Most telling along this line is the “Music Contest” scene, where the

movie-Bradys re-do the TV Bradys’ famous rip-off of the Partridge Family

(who are humorously acknowledged along the way). The brightly-fringed

Bradys compete against a dourly-flanneled, Pearl Jam-esque grunge band. The

’70s rip-off of the ’70s competes against the ’90s rip-off of the ’70s.

There’s some sort of message there, folks.

The strongest aspect of The Brady Bunch Movie is how it avoids the

nostalgia trap. The jabs it takes at the original series aren’t

mean-spirited, but neither does it pine for “the old days.” Oddly, it

reinforces both “family values” and “political correctness” in a gentle and

humorous way. It actually does strive, as the movie poster says, to “save

America from the ’90s.”