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.

Hot Fuzz was one of my favorite comedies from last year, so when I first heard about In Bruges and discovered it was about hit men who are forced to hide out in a sleepy town, I expected an edgier retread of Hot Fuzz. But what I discovered when I finally caught up with the film (not released in Panama City theaters) was a film bearing more similarities to my favorite film from last year, Lars and the Real Girl, than the mixed genre buddy cop movie I quote so often. Let me explain.

I expected Lars and the Real Girl to be an extended SNL sketch on the idea of a guy who dates a sex doll-some hearty laughs, gross-out moments, and a largely superficial plot. Instead, writer Nancy Oliver focused on the characters, and gave us a film that is not only a challenge to build better communities, but a parable about the male race’s chronic obsession with immature understandings of women. In Bruges, meanwhile, could have been just another Pineapple Express or Hot Fuzz, but writer/director Martin McDonagh had other plans-crafting a character oriented, yet relentlessly plotted, story that is so rich with meaning and emotional depth that it begins to cross into Les Miserables territory.

Many reviewers have recommended this movie for its laughs, but, for me, the comedy did not always quite connect. It was funny, but usually I found myself only chuckling, and, forgive me, but since a good portion of the comedy comes in the form of overused jokes at the expense of a little person, it seems like the writer is sometimes trying a bit too hard to get a laugh. It is a nitpicky qualm, really, and aside from a few poorly-keyed green-screened shots, I have no other complaints.

The performances are spot-on. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson make their roles as hit men look believable, and yet still retain an approachable and likeable air. The supporting characters all fit in just right, from Ralph Fiennes as a hot-tempered Harry Waters to Thekla Reuten as the headstrong manager of the inn. The cinematography is top-notch as well. One pivotal phone call in which Gleeson’s Ken carries on a long conversation with Harry that alters the course of the movie, is almost completely covered in one virtuosic take that builds tension without drawing attention to itself.

But what makes In Bruges shine is its story. The film’s tagline is “Shoot first, Sightsee Later,” but this is a gross misrepresentation of the film. Very little shooting happens in the movie, but each action sequence is earned, and the writer finds a way to continually subvert our expectations within these scenes while still managing to give us something more satisfying than your typical shootout. And beyond the action sequences, lies a gripping morality tale, complete with a fully-fleshed out redemption story. Themes of sacrifice, atonement, honor and integrity may seem strange bedfellows for a film about hit men, but the wonder of this film is that not one of these themes feels false or tacked-on.

So I go on the record joining the chorus of voices extolling this film. We still have a few of the most promising good-movie months in the year, but I can say without hesitation that In Bruges is my favorite film of the year thus far.

Trailer

Brought to You by: The Grand Theater at Pier Park

The web has revolutionized film criticism, both in quantity and type. Before, a cadre of paid professionals dominated the industry, but now, armed with blogs, message boards and web-zines, a new army of film fans (like myself) get to write about a topic we love, and though unpaid, are frequented by a readership we would never have attracted in the world of paper and ink. But the most significant way the web has influenced the film world has come by way of the two big aggregators: Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic.

While in terms of judging a movie’s quality, their meticulously scored averages are no doubt an improvement on the old bottom-line box-office totals, and while they also grant the savvy film reader a hub to access virtually every available critic, the fact remains that they reduce a film to a poll number, and while polling has become a reliable means of judging public opinion, it has and never will be a reliable means of ascertaining the truth. Too often polling results are skewed by political concerns and band-wagon thinking, and thus we get ludicrously high numbers for films that are not all that good (Hellboy 2), and overcorrected low numbers for movies like Eagle Eye. RT currently assesses Eagle Eye’s fresh level at 26%, and while I do not intend to become this film’s minuteman, I will go on record and say, it’s bad, but not 26% bad.

I will not reduce Eagle Eye to a number at this point, but I will reduce it to a word: derivative. There is little in Eagle Eye you have not seen before, and even less that has not been accomplished more effectively elsewhere. It almost feels like the plot of a couple of Will Smith blockbusters (including one that featured a small supporting role by Eagle Eye’s main star) was mixed in with sprinklings of Live Free or Die Hard, The Dark Knight, Seven, the Matrix, and, oddly enough, the recent Get Smart remake.

The idea probably looked good on paper in treatment form, but obviously the powers-that-be had a harder time translating the germ of this idea to film, calling in three extra writers to help with the script (never a good sign). The scenes that set up our two principal characters bash us over the head with their subtext-“Jerry may be washed up, but he has potential” and “Rachel may be a caring mom, but she’s tougher than she looks.” It is not that such characters are uninteresting, but the way the writers try to get us to believe this subtext is. Jerrry’s poker-game speech, victory and the twist that follow are not only unconvincing, but boring. Rachel, meanwhile, after being established as the responsible parent, goes out for a night on the town, drinking Boilermakers with her friends, talking about booty calls and, when offered a drink by a boyish-looking businessman, utters the line, “No, he looks like the light beer type.” Uggghhhh.

Director D. J. Caruso has no less difficulty translating the action into something that resembles watchability. The first car chase is so heinously-filmed, the only thing you can conclude with any certainty is that cars are crashing…somewhere. Sloppy and slipshod, the movie runs from mandatory action scene to pedantic hero-bickering, the only thing keeping us watching being the story’s potential ace-in-the-sleeve-twist, which ends up being a pretty well-worn joker, only unexpected because it is not supposed to be allowed in this game.

Well, with words like these, who needs numbers? For some reason, whether the influence of my expectations (duly lowered by RT’s score and my initial gut-"that’s just like the Matrix"-reaction to the teaser trailer), I still found myself entertained by the movie, and though its social implications are not earth-shattering, the film did provide another wrinkle on the Big Brother warning that got me thinking. And, for me, any film that gets me thinking is worth more than a reduction to a low poll number, even if it is not shattering any boundaries.

Rated PG-13 for intense sequences of action and violence, and for language.