I Watched the Unauthorized Full House Movie

Cinema is all about light. From before the earliest days of movies as we currently understand them, before movie cameras allowed even the early luminaries like Georges Méliès to ply their art, there were "magic boxes" and kinetoscopes that allowed light to be filtered through the spinning image to create the illusion of movement. Light gives life to the screen as much as it does to the Earth. Light is absolutely everything.

Last year, I wrote a review of the movie Winter's Tale and complained that when teaching film to students in the classroom, one of the hardest concepts to get them to understand is how important editing is to the final film product. The same is true of lighting, the control filmmakers exercise over the primal element of the medium. Now, having seen the Lifetime Unauthorized Full House Movie, I finally have the appropriate tool to demonstrate what happens when no concern is taken for lighting at all. Scenes seem to be lit by whatever lights were on in a room or location when the crew arrived. There is a scene in the casino where the three male leads are standing at a craps table and there is so much light shining directly on top of their heads that I actually made a comment out loud. When John Stamos is performing in How to Succeed in Business on Broadway, he exits the theater after the premiere performance into what is clearly the middle of the morning. They didn't even get a blackout tunnel to cover the door. Scenes in offices and homes are lit by open windows, and household or office lamps. That plus the brutal combination of extreme hard stops before every punchline, and sight gags so hoary and hackneyed they might have actually appeared on Full House itself, gives the whole thing the vague aesethtic of a Mentos ad.

You can also tell that there was a lot left on the cutting room floor, including, apparently, a sub-plot in which John Stamos is secretly in love with Dave Coulier's wife. Also, the final twenty seconds of the film reveal that there has been a voice-over narrator the whole time, and it is the third to last cast member you would have expected (I would have given a month's pay for the narrator to have been Andrea Barber, who played Kimmy Gibbler), because the role of voice-over narrator carries certain expectations about whose story it is that we are watching. I don't know, ultimately, in whose story Full House, its cast's lives, and their adventures took place, but I would bet that it is not the character who ends up summing up the experience. That would be a hard pill to swallow.

Are these odd criticisms to lob at a Lifetime Movie about a bad sitcom that aired for eight seasons and went off the air twenty years ago? Probably. Part of the reason that I am focusing on them is because despite them I absolutely loved the viewing experience. There is something almost Twilight Zone-esque about the way Bob Saget complains to Dave Coulier early in the film about how all the comics they came up with have hit it big except them, only to discover that the two shows that ultimately made him a household name (Full House and America's Funniest Home Videos) were a Tartarian torture that ate away at his soul and consumed his sensibilities. Nor is he an innocent victim in his own slow destruction. At one point he name checks Richard Pryor and George Carlin to insult Full House "Pryor was funny, Carlin was funny...this is not funny." The implicit statement in that kind of remark is that, left to his own devices, Bob Saget belongs in the class of Pryor and Carlin. He does not. His stand-up, even then, wasn't of the moment, it wasn't artistic and fine in the way that Pryor's and Carlin's were. Saget was a guy who made dick jokes, and the filthier the better. In the end, the movie positions Full House as his punishment for thinking that he was something more that he was. 

Coming in at 90 minutes (with some commercials), I walked away feeling that this would have been better as a five night mini-series then as a made for TV movie. It isn't like cost was a factor, it clearly cost nothing to make. But I would have loved more time on the Olsen twins, Candace Cameron finding religion, ANYTHING involving Jodie Sweetin, an exploration of the Lori Laughlin/John Stamos relationship, the implosion of Dave Coulier's life after the death of his sister and his wife blindsiding him with divorce papers. And ultimately, how can I give a bad review to something that left me wishing there had been more?

Rating: 2.5 / 4

Available OnDemand