| Saturday, October 11, 2008 |
12:12 - The province of humor
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/an_american_carol/
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Aw, man. 13% positive on An American Carol. And 0% from Top Critics.
No wonder I never heard a word about this movie after a couple of rather grating radio ads on opening weekend.
And it had such promise, too. Or at least so we were led to believe, by the spectacle of a movie being made by a well-established name in the comedy filmmaking world that tackles issues no other movies go anywhere near—that itself being fodder for an armload of behind-the-scenes interviews and an undercurrent of anticipation, just to see what kind of freak-show we'd end up with.
I guess there's a reason why those radio ads I heard were so off-putting and overwrought. These days, making a right-wing movie is practically... illegal! And that would make Kelsey Grammer, Dennis Hopper, and Jon Voight... criminals! ...Uh huh. You know, if the movie is any good, you don't need to market it this way. This way all you're going to get is cranks, and they aren't going to go see it in theaters anyway.
Don't get me wrong—I'd have loved for this movie to do awesomely well. But—and I say this without having seen it—like Team America: World Police, this movie suffers from the Catch-22 that if you attempt to tackle perceived institutional bias in movies by making a movie, that very institutional bias that you're railing against will just make your movie stand out in such stark contrast that everyone will be too distracted by the polemic to be receptive to the message. We all expect movies to be left-leaning. We take it in stride. Hell, I love Real Genius despite the fact that its premise—that an institute of higher learning like Caltech might conceivably train students to work for defense contractors, and that this is a bad thing—is so loony. We're okay with that; it's what we've come to expect. But sit us down and regale us with an agenda that doesn't match what we're conditioned for, and we'll feel every bit as preached to as a Michael Moore audience. Perhaps more so. Even if it's couched as a bunch of Leslie Nielsen sight gags.
I guess it tells us something if some of the greatest minds of American comedy—Parker and Stone, Zucker—can't put together a convincing, hard-hitting, or even particularly funny satire of leftist politics. Though I hope they continue to try, because I can certainly sympathize with the impulse; we've got to do better at playing ball with pop culture than provoking these kinds of smirking reactions in people.
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Brian Tiemann
