Rush
Limbaugh has sounded the alarm for his listeners to support An American
Carol, David Zucker’s new comedy that takes a shot at liberals. Zucker
is most famously known for writing and directing Airplane and Naked
Gun, and with An American Carol he attempts to use his talent for spoof
to bolster the conservative cause in Hollywood and make satirical
points that many feel are often lacking in that most liberal of
Babylons, Hollywood.
An
American Carol takes the plot of A Christmas Carol, but in the place of
Scrooge and the ghosts that teach him a lesson about Christmas, we have
Michael Moore (or Michael Malone as he is known in the movie) and the
patriots George Patton, George Washington, and Trace Adkins (??!) who
teach Mason about patriotism.
In
playing Malone, Kevin Farley does not go for an impersonation of Moore
so much as an impression of his late brother dressed like Michael
Moore. The other performances are just about as nuanced. Jon Voight and
Kelsey Grammer show up playing themselves costumed as ghosts of
Washington and Patton.
As a comedy the film is only marginally successful. Chief among its flaws is its penchant for repeating the same jokes ad nauseum.
At some points the film seems like torture-porn meant for people who
hate Michael Moore. We get scene upon scene of Malone trampled by an
oblivious or angry crowd, getting slapped in the face, or being
rejected by women. You will lose count of the number of jabs at
documentaries, and, for some reason, Zucker thinks the old jerk-off
gesture is still commonplace and funny because he utilizes it at least
three or four times throughout the film.
As
I have stated in other reviews, I do not find it funny when little kids
cuss. It is a cheap shortcut to potential laughs. David Zucker must
think it is hilarious because we are treated to this conceit throughout
the film. In fact, we even get a repeat performance from the child
actor who played the first kid to call Will Smith an a**hole in
Hancock. Here he broadens his range a bit, introducing a few more cuss
words to his repertoire, thus solidifying his role in the film business
as the cute kid with a potty mouth. I must ask the question: is this
conservative?
Feminists
will no doubt despise the movie, but they are not without their
reasons. Almost every woman in this film is used as eye-candy, and the
ones who are not, are primarily used as the butt of a joke. This should
not be a surprise coming from Zucker, whose fixation on using breasts
as comic relief in Airplane spills over into this film (Malone keeps
grasping at women’s chests, which, of course, ends with them slapping
him in the face).
Some
of the satirical bits come off fairly strong, however. A musical number
set in a university parodies the turn in the collegiate sphere against
traditional values and portrays professors as left over hippies, bent
on indoctrinating students with the vacuous (and I am being serious
because on this point I happen to agree) mores of the free love/peace
movement. At the Move Along.org awards show, the documentary award is
named after Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s minister of film, and this,
though seemingly over-the-top, is a little more pointed than you might
at first think (being that Moore’s films have gone along way towards
pure propaganda as of late).
The
film’s best jokes may be the scenes we get to see from Rosie O’
Connell’s documentary called “Look Out! It’s Those Christians.” The
film shows a pair of priests hijacking a plane and killing the pilots
with a glowing cross, a nun boarding a bus and screaming Catholic
sentiments before killing her victims...you get the idea. These moments
provide a bit of reality in the face of all the absurd mainstream talk
that uses the Crusades as proof of Christianity’s evil nature, all the
while bending over backwards to assure everyone that Islamic extremism
has nothing to do with Islam.
But
these moments of inspiration are sparse, and because this film is
trying to serve two purposes it often suffers from an identity crisis:
is it a lampoon or a political commentary? A good satire successfully
blends these two goals, but Carol spends much of its running time
somewhere in between, making the viewers wonder if they are supposed to
chuckle or nod with sincere patriotic approval. The last scene, in
which Malone sees his nephew off to war, is a perfect illustration of
this fault. It is almost as if Zucker and co. realize the scene is not
good enough to be patriotic or dramatic, so rather than shore it up
with a better setup, they try to mask its weakness with a frail
last-ditch effort at comic relief: kill off the nephew’s wife and kids.
Not only is it unfunny, but also woefully undermines the supposed
change in our protagonist, who, oblivious as ever, walks off chatting
with General Patton.
I
look forward to the day when conservative cultural icons like Limbaugh
will learn that art does not succeed just because it aligns with their
moral or cultural beliefs. Bad art actually does the reverse, and it
only undermines their credibility when they blindly endorse a movie
just because they happen to agree with the message.
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