Paulie

🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿🍿

🎙️ EPISODE 703: 04.19.23 So I watched another talking animal movie from the 90s for some reason. Whereas Homeward Bound was, and shall remain, a treasured memory of my youth (even if the movie itself felt underwhelming and left me questioning by prepubescent taste in cinema), I have zero recollection of this film — 1998's Paulie, from the director of War of the Buttons, a TRUE RANDOM selection — ever coming out (I was a junior in high school by this point, with vastly different interests, so I'll forgive myself for not seeing this quasi-kids flick in the theaters). This movie — featuring a shockingly great cast including Gena Rowlands, Tony Shalhoub and Cheech Marin — is superior to Homeward Bound (and most talking animal jams?) in almost every way. More inline with the adventure genre than kids flicks, honestly, it features Jay Mohr in the titular role of sarcastic talking parrot whose found in the basement of an animal-testing science institute by an immigrant janitor played by the always terrific and underrated Shalhoub.

I don't know what the general conensus on Mohr is but I think he's a good actor! (He even plays a secondary live-action part here as a small-time crook.) His animal voiceover is pitch-shifted here, which sounds way more annoying than it actually is; like so much about this movie, it surprisingly works. Look, this is the very definition of "IT IS WHAT IT IS" but what it is — AT THE END OF THE DAY — ain't bad. I thought it was going to be dumb, potentially ripe for unintentional comedy, but it's nothing of the sort. It's silly, for sure, but it's also incredibly sweet. The pacing is great — it's told in flashbacks over the course of two decades that eventually connect with the present — and its big movie score + likable characters portrayed by good actors (who have all bought into the fantastical/goofy premise) equates to a really positive watching experience. I love when my expectations are totally subverted like this.

CHRONOLOGICALLY
⫷ EPISODE 702 - (YOU ARE HERE) - EPISODE 704 ⫸

---

Paulie is a 1998 American adventure fantasy comedy film about a disobedient talking parrot named Paulie, starring Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Gena Rowlands, Hallie Eisenberg, and Jay Mohr. Mohr performs both the voice of the title character and the on-screen supporting role of Benny, a character who has a lot of dialogue with him. It received mixed to positive reviews and was a box office disappointment, grossing $26.9 million domestically against a $23 million budget. However, in the years after its release, Paulie would find a larger audience on home media sales. It was released on April 17, 1998.