Sunday, August 3, 2008 |
11:12 - A Zucker is not born every minute
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/385rlkfy.asp
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Geez, I didn't quite see this coming:
Zucker's latest movie, An American Carol, is unlike anything that has ever come out of Hollywood. It is a frontal attack on the excesses of the American left from several prominent members of a growing class of Hollywood conservatives. Until now, conservatives in Hollywood have always been too few and too worried about a backlash to do anything serious to challenge the left-wing status quo.
David Zucker believes we are in a "new McCarthy era." Time magazine film writer Richard Corliss recently joked that conservative films are "almost illegal in Hollywood." Tom O'Malley, president of Vivendi Entertainment, though, dismisses claims that Hollywood is hostile to conservative ideas and suggests that conservatives simply haven't been as interested in making movies. "How come there aren't more socialists on Wall Street?"
But Zucker's film, together with a spike in attendance at events put on by "The Friends of Abe" (Lincoln, not Vigoda)--a group of right-leaning Hollywood types that has been meeting regularly for the past four years--is once again reviving hope that conservatives will have a battalion in this exceedingly influential battleground of the broader culture war.
Very interesting read—small wonder that the only other proponents of this kind of angle, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, share something of a history with the Zuckers. In that vein, though, I have to take strong exception to their consensus in the suckitude of BASEketball. I mean, c'mon—that's one of the funniest, best-constructed movies of its genre that I can ever remember seeing. Who says it was that bad? (these numbers, from professional reviewers, are pretty encouraging for a film of this genre.) The San Francisco Ferries? The "psych-outs"? I end up gasping for breath every time.
But shifting from that vein to an adjacent artery, I have to wonder how well this kind of thing will go over. I mean, it's not like Team America: World Police was the knockdown hit some people expected it to be—funny, yes, but (dare I say it) not Zucker funny, let alone Parker/Stone funny. I always worry that a moralizing comedy will torpedo its own message by making its jokes too obvious and lame or its lessons too tedious and unappealing, which is the same trap that so many left-leaning "message" movies have fallen into. Team America may have laid some essential groundwork for this new underground movement in Hollywood, but we'll have to wait and see whether it's tapped into a deep offshore well, or if it's just a Mr. Burns Slant-Drilling operation siphoning off that part of the audience that'll buy tickets to anything with vomit jokes in it.
It'll sure be entertaining to watch, either way.
Via Power Line.
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