Political Movies: It’s the Quality, Stupid
When I was a young screenwriter in Hollywood, I remember producers telling me you couldn’t make a baseball movie. They didn’t sell. Then along came Bull Durham and all anybody wanted for a while were baseball flicks.
Political movies have been similarly reviled. Not commercial. Samuel Goldwyn famously said: “Pictures are for entertainment. Messages should be sent by Western Union.” Really? Hollywood and others have made numerous political films that were critical and commercial successes from Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner and Judgment at Nuremberg to Battle of Algiers and Z. The Lives of Others — the 2007 Oscar winner for best foreign language film about life in East Germany under the Stasi — is to my mind the finest filmmaking of any kind in this century so far.
Now we come to W. and An American Carol — the political movies of the hour. (I am not writing here of documentaries, but feature fiction films.) Both were made quickly in an attempt to influence the election and have a rushed, slapdash quality about them, so they have about as much of a chance of influencing that election as a bad episode of Geraldo. But that is the least of their problems. They are both abysmal movies in almost every way.
I feel badly writing that about An American Carol because its director David Zucker and co-screenwriter Myrna Sokoloff are terrific people and I very much wanted for their movie to work for admittedly political reasons. Almost no “conservative” films are made by the movie industry and when one slips through you root for it fiercely, so I waited until the film mercifully disappeared from the marketplace before making this opinion known. But I think it is important that negative “inside” opinions be known; because if there is one thing that is bad for conservative filmmaking in general, it is to make bad films. Because of the bias, they have to be better than the liberal ones. Furthermore, dwelling on being “victims” of Hollywood by conservative filmmakers is a surefire prescription for continued failure, just as it is for other minority groups. To applaud this kind of filmmaking is to applaud affirmative action for conservatives. Not good.
What’s fascinating about W. and An American Carol is they both suffer from the same basic failure — the underestimation or “misunderestimation,” in the parlance, of their protagonists. In their film parody of Michael Moore, Zucker and Sokoloff give us a Moore (the movie’s Michael Malone) who is a self-centered dolt who overeats. Self-centered? Of course. Overeater? Obviously. But dolt? I am not so sure — at least not to the degree the filmmakers want us to believe. I am no fan of Moore’s by a long shot, but nowhere in evidence in this movie is the crafty, ambitious weasel who was able to turn his own mediocre film talent into box office magic and, for a while at least, massive political influence.
An American Carol may not be a great movie—but I’m still going to purchase the dvd when it is released. If nothing else, it will be my modest attempt to thank those involved in the project for their efforts. I strongly advise others to do likewise.
You need a great team of writers, directors, production people and actors to make great movies. And enough time to get it done. But time costs money . . . And then you have to please millions of extra diverse individuals. Tough business.
Unfortunately, a lot of the people who have been dumbed down by the education system in the last forty years are now making the movies. I remember Joe Mankiewicz being interviewed by Dick Cavett, saying that his vision for the ’63 remake of “Cleopatra” was intended as an updated version of Bernard Shaw, as opposed to the celebrity romp it became. Imagine what movies would be like with that kind of intellect today, rather than the cultural snobs who can’t come up with anything better than the next sequel to the latest comic book or computer game.
As I said to my wife, “What ever happened to movies?”.
Comedy needs to be rooted in the truth, even conservative comedy. It gives it the strength to develop and resonate. Liberal TV humor tends to fall flat hard when it starts on a lie as a premise. All Republicans are racist, all whites are oppressors, southerners are stupid, ect ect, whenever you see liberal comedy start on that premise, when the skit is done, your like , what was funny about that? Simon was correct when he said ya the guy is a pig but a smart weasel manbearpig. Portraying him as a crafty mustache twisting 1950′s black and white scfi fi villian would have been more accurate.
I think the lesson learned is “you can’t fool an honest man”. If you start based in truth it carries innate protections.
Mr. Simon: If I may be so bold as to review your review. You wrote that American Carol portrayed Moore as a dolt, and went on to state, “I am not so sure — at least not to the degree the filmmakers want us to believe. I am no fan of Moore’s by a long shot, but nowhere in evidence in this movie is the crafty, ambitious weasel who was able to turn his own mediocre film talent into box office magic and, for a while at least, massive political influence.”
Proposition #1: Mediocre films, like “W” and American Carol, have not achieved box office magic and, thus, have no political influence
Proposition #2: Michael Moore is a mediocre film talent, who, presumably, makes mediocre films.
Proposition #3: Moore’s mediocre films have achieved box office magic and have had great political influence only because of craftiness and ambition.
Conclusion: Zucker and Stone lack craftiness and ambition or their mediocre films would have achieved box office success and had political influence.
I, like many “conservative” Americans, no longer patronize movie theatres. However, I do plan to either purchase the DVD or watch American Carol on pay-per-view – even after the election just to encourage the Holywood Affirmative Action conservatives.
Concur with Thompson. Supporting An American Carol is about building a market for Stuff That Doesn’t Suck.
It also was important for decorum. While I wouldn’t wish ill on Michael Moore in real life, it was viscerally pleasuarable to watch him get slapped around by proxy.
Also, being in a theater for the screening of AAC and hearing the trailer for W. get roundly booed was worth the price of admission.
Say whatever else you will of Bush, he’s taken the heaps of abuse with a graciousness exceeding anything I could muster.
The entire communications industry — newspapers, films, tv — is on its knees and gasping because they’ve done something no other capitalist enterprise would dream of doing: repeatedly insulted 50% of its audience.
When Julia Roberts said that “Republican comes in the dictionary just after reptile and just above repugnant…”
studio heads should have said,
“Well, Julia, since you’ve just pissed off 50% of your audience, we will no longer be able to pay you $20, million dollars a film. From now on, we’ll pay you $10 million.: It never happened.
I have always loved films and spent a glorious Junior year of high school playing hookey from a blackboard jungle school and going to the movies every afternoon. When I got DirecTV in 1994, I watched 15 movies a week. Now, I no longer watch shows like At The Movies. I will have to AGAIN go on hiatus from Netflix (I get 1 flick a week) because there is nothing I want to see.
I am a Libertarian/Conservative, former Ayn Rand Objectivist, and have posted a long list of classic Heroic, Romantic, Hilarious, pro-American, anti-fascist, anti-communist films on my blog: http://addulthomeschooler.com.
Enjoy!
I don’t agree with all of your opinions about American Carol. I’m not a screenwriter and I tend not to analyze movies, especially comedies like American Carol. I don’t think American Carol was Mr. Zucker’s finest work to date but I enjoyed it anyway. I was happy to see a conservative comedy at the box office and I went to see the film on opening day. That was the first time I set foot in a movie theater in more than 5 years, so at least it got me out to a theater. I hope American Carol was the first modern conservative film, an experiment if you will. I would like to see others follow, each being better than the last.
I can’t speak about W because I didn’t see it and I won’t be watching it, ever. W just isn’t my kind of film so I’ll skip it, same as I skip most movies. Fortunately, I don’t work anywhere near the entertainment industry so I never have to sit through a movie I don’t want to see.
I plan on buying many DVDs when they are released. I will keep one and send the rest as part of care packages to our deployed troops and injured veterans. If you can afford it, please do the same. Care packages are greatly appreciated by our men and women in uniform. If you’re in a giving mood this holiday season, please consider contributing to the Thanksgiving Thank You Project at:
http://thanksgiving.salute-heroes.org/
CR suggested sending DVDs to our deployed troops and injured veterans. What a terrific idea!
Now, I know what to do with all the extra LA FEMME NIKITA videos my “tape angels” sent me. Guys all loved the gorgeous kick ass Peta Wilson and gals all swooned for Roy Dupuis, sexiest actor ever.
I am donating Paul Johnson’s A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE to the Iraq library that Christopher Hitchens asked contributions for.
I am sending Tom Clancy and Vince Flynn thrillers and other books our guys might enjoy to:
Lt. Col. Jan Horvath
Headquarters COIN CFE
Camp Taji, Iraq
APO AE 09378
If you have other suggestions, please leave a comment on my site, reachable by clicking on my name above. Thanks.
Obama ‘admits’ Kenyan birth?
Barack Obama and his campaign doesn’t respond to claims in lawsuit over birth certificate. Attorney Phillip J. Berg to file for summary judgment today.
http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=78671
http://www.obamacrimes.com
http://www.nextgenerationcorp.com/NextGenBlog/?p=68
I think the Dark Knight is one of the best Conservative messages on the war on terror. Harvey Dent being the liberal “fairness” guy. Wanting law enforcement to fight something it can’t fight.
The trick is to not beat someone over the head with a morality play, it’s to tell an allegory and make them not realize it.
If it’s not a documentary or something trying to accurately replicate a real situation, I think movies are much better off slipping in politics as playful jabs rather than as blunt instruments for head smashing. The TV show South Park often bashes liberals but (mostly) as side stories, and Family Guy mocks Bush (and sometimes conservatives) from time to time, but usually as a throwaway gag not very connected, if at all, to the main storyline. That makes both shows watchable for most people not overly touchy about political issues. Movies would be likely better off doing stuff like that rather doing their usual preaching to the choir stuff.
I’m not surprised that the liberals in the audience reacted that way to “W.” Indeed, I’m almost surprised that they didn’t boo and hiss whenever the Bush character came on screen, like Party members when Emmanuel Goldstein came on the telescreen during the Two Minutes Hate in “1984.”
And what were they thinking running all those ads for “W.” on Fox News? That wasn’t the target demographic for a Bush-bashing movie! It was money as badly wasted as all of that thrown at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Honestly, every morning on “Fox & Friends,” ad after ad after ad for a movie that the mostly-conservative audience wasn’t going to see. They’d have been smarter to advertise on CNN or MSDNC.
I saw An American Carol the same night I saw Fireproof (my wife wanted to see it, wasn’t much interested in An American Carol).
I thought AAC was funny in a slapstick, skewer the liberal sense, but I could have, and should have, done without such things as the kids swearing or even Michael Malones’ repeated attempts at breast grabbing. That was unnecessary and I believe generally offensive to a large portion of the target audience.
I could have also used a lot more Jon Voight and Trace Adkins and not quite as much Kelsey Grammer.
Oh, btw – Fireproof was excellent and I am very glad my wife wanted to see it. That’s the one I expect to be buying the DVD of.
“…a strange and extremely boring movie.”
In other words, an Oliver Stone movie.
You can watch the Battle of Algiers at LikeTelevision. it is a great movie too… and very powerful in its message. (about terrorism).
watch it here.
http://www.liketelevision.com/liketelevision/tuner.php?channel=955&format=movie&theme=guide
Sounds like neither Stone nor Zucker were making the kinds of movies they do best. In a way, George Bush isn’t a grand or legendary enough subject for Stone. He’s done a lot of things (or made a lot of trouble, depending on how you look at him), but he doesn’t have Nixon’s malignant mystery or JFK’s semi-mythical status. The Iraq war is troubling, but it doesn’t seem to be having the soul-wrenching effect that Vietnam had. In short, Bush and his years in office don’t give Stone much to work with. The fact that he pretty much sums up Bush with a bit of pop-psych Oedipal conflict indicates to me that he’s not really interested in the guy. Just wants to get rid of him.
A Zucker movie is just a string of jokes inspired by a similar theme – not an extended meditation on one person or subject. In a more Zucker-esque film than American Carol, Michael Moore would appear in exactly one brief scene as the subject of a very amusing sight gag. The gag would incorporate Moore’s fatness, obnoxious interviewing style, and leftist politics, then it would be over – on to the next target. As Roger said, drawing the joke out to fill the entire movie was probably a mistake. Zucker might have done better to make a comedy about all the madness of a current Presidential race – Democrat and Republican madness, media madness, left- and right-wing fringe loony madness, college professor madness, etc. It’s all so easy to make fun of, right? He could even call it “Election!”
Political satire is hard to get right, but Iowahawk is consistently on target. Most of his satire posts read like a screenplay translated into prose.
I agree with both Roger and the pro-American Carol posters. A good parody has to be three-dimensional and accurate in its presentation of the object of parody. It gives the humor depth and more savor. Perhaps Zucker and Sockoloff are too recent converts at conservatism to understand the true depth of the viciousness, the malevolent nature and motive of his dissumation of the Michael Moores polluting the media.
Nevertheless, I just thoroughly enjoyed watching MM get slapped, and like the Christmas Carol motif, and like others, temporarily broke my boycott of movies and dvd’s. My bootleg providers lost out this time.
Rather than make heavy-handed conservative films that bludgeon the audience with the obvious (which can be just as tendentious as liberal agitprop), the right should make more broadly conservative movies such as “Braveheart” or “Forrest Gump” (despite Zemeckis’ disavowal that he was making a conservative movie, it certainly promotes con themes of tradition, family, honor and morality).
The ads for W. made it sound like Oliver Stone was at least somewhat sympathetic in his representation of George Bush. Shame, too; if he had done essentially a remake of Peter Seller’s “Being There” at least it would have been watchable.
“You need a great team of writers, directors, production people and actors to make great movies.”
Unfortunately there are none left anymore, they have all gone the way of the Dinosaurs. Hollywood reminds me of the movie “Sunset Boulevard” where the movie industry as a whole is doing their best Norma Desmond imitation and the corpse in the pool represents everything that made motion pictures great under the old studio system-great stories, talented actors, superb directors, wonderful cinematographers and studio owners that understood that it was not their job to deliver messages but to entertain and make some cash.
I would rather watch paint dry then watch anything that comes out of Hollywood anymore, in fact I think watching the paint dry would be much more entertaining. The last movie I saw was that last Indiana Jones movie and I only went to be polite to my sister and her husband because they wanted to go see it and wanted me to come with. That was an hour and a half I will never get back-it was sheer crap. I could not tell you what any of the movies are currently at the theaters and I can only name two that have come out this year but I can tell you that do love a good movie and I am really looking forward to watching a movie this weekend. I finally bought a copy of a movie called “Kaidan” (or Kwaidan as it is called in the US) which once you have seen it you will never forget it. It is an anthology of Japanese “ghost stories” that is one of the most beautiful and haunting movies you will ever see.
The problem with Stone’s movies is that their content is perceived as objective truth by many, especially movie-watchers abroad.
I lived in Asia several years, and noticed how many young people there formed their opinions of the U.S. on OS movies like JFK and Nixon.
I wanted to enjoy American Carol, but couldn’t. The ticket price was like a political donation to the 4th place finisher in the race for dog catcher.
I think the best political movie of the last several years was “Team America”. Unfortunately the South Park guys always feel they have to push the envelope, and I think the extended male/male oral sex “subplot” was further than the mass-market audience wanted that envelope pushed. The rest of the movie was pure gold.
I can’t tell you how disappointing An American Carol was. On the margin, the movie hurts the “conservative” cause.
ACLU lawyers are not “zombies” – they are calculated in their determination to undermine the constitutional foundations of free speech (which is rooted in private property). Michael Moore is a self-loather who indeed hates capitalism, but he is not a bumbling imitation of Chris Farley either. Parody is only devastating when the object of derision is given a fair shake — and in the process shown to be a complete failure.
At first, I was shocked there was only one theater in Manhattan showing the movie — and almost appalled that there were only about 50 people at the first evening showing. After seeing it, I was relieved that almost no one saw it.
Stone likes to write about son’s struggling with the image their fathers have of them. Certainly, Wall Street was that way, as well as Platoon:
[last lines]
Chris Taylor: [voiceover] I think now, looking back, we did not fight the enemy; we fought ourselves. The enemy was in us. The war is over for me now, but it will always be there, the rest of my days. As I’m sure Elias will be, fighting with Barnes for what Rhah called “possession of my soul.” There are times since, I’ve felt like a child, born of those two fathers.
Makes me wonder about Oliver’s childhood a little….
As for movies based on comic books, even they flop from time to time. Now watch Michael Jackson’s publicist try to push the production of a live action Naruto movie to revive Michael Jackson’s career (he’s the splitting image of one of the antagonists, and he’d be perfect for the part), only to have it bomb like most live action movies based on anime do.
“Dramaturgy”?
Mr. Simon, if you didn’t borrow that word from someone, you’d better copyright it. That’s beautiful.
My wife and I went to see “Carol” at the local theater the Sunday after it opened. The screening was thingly attended – maybe 20 people in the audience. There were no ads or trailers before the movie, which I’m sure is not a good thing for the filmmaker.
We went for the slapstick, and weren’t disappointed. Our 11-year-old son laughed uproariously at every pratfall. The bit with the two Marines in the washroom had us roaring. (It doesn’t hurt that two of our sons were Marines: we know the breed.) We enjoyed ourselves, though it was nowhere near as funny as “Airplane”. (“Excuse me, I speak Jive!”)
Zucker’s movies have always had heavy-handed political content. Remember the evil polluters from the second “Naked Gun” movie? Or the satire on Bush 41, complete with Barbara Bush doing pratfalls? Or the Academy Awards ceremony, where every movie is “one woman’s struggle” against something or other? (“It’s the bomb!”) “Carol” is more of the same – a lot more of the same. But there’s one point in the movie where the political satire and the slapstick come together for a truly delightful moment: the “1968″ musical number, which had my wife and I roaring with laughter – and, being Boomers ourselves, feeling that Zucker skewered our generation’s obnoxiousness with deadly precision.
By the way, it was good to see Leslie Nielsen on screen again. As it happened, I’d just watched my DVD of “Forbidden Planet”, a movie he made nearly 60 years ago; and it did me good to see that’s he’s still among us and apparently enjoying himself.
I saw American Carol when it came out and definately agree that Michael Moore’s character is a major problem. In no time at all he goes from crazy nutjob liberal to seeing the light. The funniest part of the movie by far was the Jihad training video.
Copies of AMC to the troops?
You want mass conversions to Islam???? LOL!
JC:
“Dramaturgy”?
Mr. Simon, if you didn’t borrow that word from someone, you’d better copyright it. That’s beautiful
Dude, buy a dictionary, mmmmmmmmmmmk?
Hawkins is absolutely spot on correct: the best movies that make a political point do so without wearing their politics on their sleeves.
I consider myself a moderate on most issues, sometimes left of center and other times right of center depending on the issue, and I thought that The Dark Knight was one of the best mainstream movies, which also had an underlying political point of view, in a long while.
TDK very much was an allegorical War on Terror movie, though it also contained other themes as well. It was so good that it may get nominated for Best Picture next March.
It’s not entirely true that there are no great writers, directors, actors, or production people left in Hollywood; to claim that is a gross injustice. There are a number of talented writers, who get re-written by directors, producers, and even actors, to the point that the original screenplay everyone loved has been over-written by people who clearly were less talented than the original author…
There are other examples, I’m sure, but as someone who is attempting to ply a trade at screenwriting, I can certainly speak for the writers.
As Roger noted, the trouble with aAC was it lacked depth, being mere parody, instead — which is fine for a comedy sketch, but parody can’t sustain a full-length feature. Especially when so much of the parody is based on false assumptions. I think, too, using a known formula for the plot made the film all the more predictable. We knew Michael Malone was supposed to have an epiphany at the end, thus mending his ways (and frankly, I thought that part, in particular, really fell flat). I thought the stuff about how terrible he was to his family didn’t work, simply because most people aren’t necessarily evil to their family (the old saying that the Nazis loved their kids and dogs comes to mind).
For me, the only way to make the “Christmas Carol” premise of aAC work would’ve been to use Malone’s assistant as the central character — a woman caught between her misguided principles slowly coming to terms with their fallacy, while still maintaining her employment with someone who clearly was out of touch with reality. She could’ve been humanized, while retaining the Malone figure as a caricature of out-of-control liberalism. By having her — a normal working gal trying to earn a living — come to her realization, the film might have stood a chance at causing liberals to see the error of their ways. That’s what good satire does, it allows people to step outside their assumptions and see the world from a different perspective. The way the film was done, liberals will never get the message of the inherent hypocrisy of their beliefs, which is where the true comedy lies.
I apologize for ever calling you a hack, Rog. I don’t know what I was thinking. A hack would never do this:
“I feel badly writing that about An American Carol because its director David Zucker and co-screenwriter Myrna Sokoloff are terrific people and I very much wanted for their movie to work for admittedly political reasons. Almost no “conservative” films are made by the movie industry and when one slips through you root for it fiercely, so I waited until the film mercifully disappeared from the marketplace before making this opinion known.”
An American Carol was knee slapping funny in places. It was patriotic in many others. It touch on many good points that needed to be addressed. It was well intended, and was probably close to a mid level B movie.
I went to the movie to telegraph to the producers, that there is money to be made by addressing issues from a Conservative vantage point. Sadly, it doesn’t seem that enough people joined me.
The movie was a Michael Moore’s expense. Moore was fair game in that he has taken well known individuals to task. What goes around comes around. The one thing that the movie did by the end of the movie, was show Moore in a favorable light, in a make believe setting.
It wasn’t a complete trashing of Moore, although it did get pretty ripe. Still, in the end it depicted Moore as a caring individual in the end, not such a bad guy after all.
I’m not sure I would have been that generous to Moore, but I’d rather error on that side than in the manner so many leftists do these days when describing people on the right and their characters.
I basically agree with your piece. I saw Am Car & it was not a great movie & it had little great satire; it was an overlong Sat Nite Live skit. But some parts, esp. the Michael Moore parts were spot on. You may think Moore, um, smart deep down because you’re part of the Hollywood crowd & see that he makes money, but let’s just say “Hi. I’m Michael Moore. I’m not a fool but I play one in real life.”
I saw Moore’s original movie about GM & it was amateurish & boring. He also needed an editor to, say, cut the Pat Boone stuff for a different movie. End of my going to see any more of his agitprop.
Anyway, based solely on a “read the whole thing” regarding MSM movie reviews, overwhelmingly by leftist critics, apparently the Left pro-Liberal agitprop movies are not really all that great on any level either & yet the critics uniformly give them all at least 2 or 3 “stars” or a “C+”, whereas Am Car was either not reviewed (why not; they review every movie, even Angelika ones that few see?) or portrayed as the worst movie ever.
In my local paper Am Car got an “F”, which rating I’ve never seen in that paper for any, repeat any, other movie. The paper reviewed W as a disappointment rather than a failure & rated it a “C”; the reviews found some good things to say about W but nothing good about Am Car.
Someone will cry “foul” at my criticism of MSM movie reviewers as virtually all “Libs” & claim that they’re independent. As someone has noted “The Herd of ‘Independent Minds’ ”.
An American Carol was an attempt to combine an important message with Airplane-style humor -and the two just didn’t fit. It really was two movies mashed together. I applaud Zucker’s intentions, but we’ll need to work on execution going forward.
While your points are well-made, I thought this line was particularly telling:
“Both were made quickly in an attempt to influence the election and have a rushed, slapdash quality about them…”
Assuming that this is the case (and it seems probable), let’s look at what the two movies address. In “An American Carol” — the antagonist is NOT Michael Moore/Malone. He simply represents/espouses the many fallacious (and often laughable) ideas that the movie lampoons. Conversely, the mere title of “W” and descriptions that I have read (I’ll admit that I haven’t seen the movie) seem to imply that the main antagonist is a lame duck. I cannot imagine a more irrelevant topic for a movie, regardless of who the lame duck is. The only thing that it seems to do is echo Obama’s (entire) platform that “I’m not Bush”.
Next time, just buy a bumper-sticker, Olly.
“but nowhere in evidence in this movie is the crafty, ambitious weasel who was able to turn his own mediocre film talent into box office magic and, for a while at least, massive political influence.”
Could say a similar thing about W.
Don’t get me wrong, I have grown to like George W. and think he is misunderestimated. Which is my point about why he won, bettered his first win in his second election and why the lefties never really get a grip on him.
Loved An American Carol. Made me laugh throughout, and at the end I felt patriotic and proud to be American. Saw it twice. There really are a lot of funny gags throughout.
23. Nahanni:
““You need a great team of writers, directors, production people and actors to make great movies.”
Unfortunately there are none left anymore, they have all gone the way of the Dinosaurs. ”
Thanks for the reinforcement. If movies are bad, let’s not talk about TV . . .
Props to Roger… And Hawkins for his insight, as well. You gotta be honest and clever and subtle. If you’re subtle enough – and your audience is young enough – you might even change the way they think.
The last “Dark Knight” picture was clever and had a subtly conservative message. It was also honest enough to question it’s lead character and his methods: Was Batman Making It Worse? (Discuss amongst yourselves)
I also though “The Incredibles,” “300″ and “Iron Man” were essentially conservative films. I guess you have to be clever, subtle and honest when you’re working with comic book heroes.
Ideologues should steer clear of comedy. Especially satire. They simply aren’t equipped.
Comedy is hard. Satire is harder still. An industry that can’t produce half-a-dozen good films a year for billions of dollars spent shouldn’t even make the attempt.
An aside: The Lives Of Others was a good film but it didn’t touch the reality of personal betrayal in East Germany. Spouses ratted out spouses, children ratted out parents and parents ratted out children. Fully one out of every twelve East Germans was a Police spy.
If a hostess invited eleven people to dinner, the Stasi knew the menu.
This begs a question. If one for twelve was the rat-ratio under the hated Russians, what was the rat-ratio for Germany and Austria under the beloved Fuhrer? One out of six? One out of three?
Talking about national character isn’t PC but Lives Of Others evaded core issues. Loyalty is a vaunted and near iconic trait among Germans. Recall the Fuhrer’s rallying the anti-Semites with the cry that the First World War was lost because Germany was “stabbed in the back” by the Jews. Loyalty was at the core of “one folk, one Fatherland, one Fuhrer.” So how comes it the Germans turn out to be such spineless stoolies?
Have the Germans learned anything from the radioactive Stasi files uncovered after the Soviet collapse? When a German refers to a betrayer and a turncoat, does he call him a Wolfgang? Or is a traitor still a Judas?
The uplifting forgiveness at the heart of The Lives Of Others is essentially false. Family secrets, bedroom secrets, confidences of the most intimate kind betrayed to the state are hideous and one can’t fault East Germans for wanting to put this chapter of their history behind them. But for all its sobriety, The Lives Of Others is a puffpiece.
In addition to dumb fat jokes, American Carol suffered from trying to do something weird, rather than just tell a story. They should have picked something that didn’t involve ghosts and weird dickens parallels. Not only did it have ghosts, we had to keep cutting back to Leslie NIelson telling a stupid story to a bunch of children. That was entirely too much junk.
The stuff with the terrorists was funny (that is a weird sentence). Why couldn’t they just do a “terrorists turn against the other terrorists once they realize how awesome america is” movie? That might have worked.
From Inwood… let me be clear. I do not like Moore as a filmmaker at all. He is far worse than the two men I just panned above. Moore’s films are utter tripe but… he is a brilliant businessman and self-promoter, essentially far more evil and formidable than the doofus character in American Carol. That is why, above all, AC fails.
“A woman has to work twice as hard to get half the respect of a man.”
Don’t remember who said it, but it also indicates the state of conservative film-making vis-a-vis Hollywood’s liberal group-think.
I think that Stone’s W may have backfired a little bit. A very liberal friend (hey — I live in Ann Arbor) said that the movie made him feel sorry and sympathetic for Bush.
Satire without truth is just dumb and quickly gets tedious and boring. And it is tough to come up with. Whoever wrote McCain’s speech for the Al Smith dinner is a genius and should be snapped up by conservative filmmakers immediately. The impact of a really good political satire would be awesome.
We evangelical Christians suffer the same problem as political conservatives at the movies. When we run across a film that promotes our values, we feel tempted to think it’s better than it is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBX2ec7c81E
watch this
Too many people think that positions can substitute for ideas.
The general view which I pick up in the UK is that the movie is rahter sympathetic to GWB, for example see this (conservative with small and large C) paper:
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/london_film_festival/article4994396.ece
The Lives of Others — the 2007 Oscar winner for best foreign language film about life in East Germany under the Stasi — is to my mind the finest filmmaking of any kind in this century so far.
No doubt.
I’m not sure why David Levavi brought up “The Lives of Others” in this completely unrelated thread, but I could not disagree with him more, or agree more with Patrick Tyson. Levavi’s fixation with national character vis a vis the level of personal betrayal in East Germany is bizarre. To begin with, the movie most certainly doesn’t white wash it. It’s very much about that. The film was inspired by the true story of the brilliant actor who played the Stasi agent. This man (now deceased) who was an anti-Communist dissident later discovered that he had in fact been spied on by his then wife and mother of his child, who was revealed to be a registered informant. Rather than whitewashing the experience, which he knew was all too common, he exposed it and created a piece of art.
Additionally, that kind of personal betrayal is part and parcel of living in all repressive societies. Ask the Czechs, the other Eastern Europeans, The former Soviets, the Iraqis, the Iranians, the North Koreans… I could go on and on around the world. I don’t understand what point Levavi is trying to make. Is he claiming the Germans should have behaved better under the circumstances than other nationalities have managed to do?
I saw “W” … stinkeroo ! D+
I saw “An American Carol” … pretty good. B-
I saw “Bella” … came out of the theater thinking “what was that all about ?” C-
I saw “Expelled” … very good ! A-
I walked out of the same screening of “An American Carol” in St. Paul with a profound sense of sadness. It’s the feeling I got when “Half Hour News Hour” appeared on Fox News. Conservative satirists and humorists fail most when they fail to be genuine. Pandering to a set of supposed expectations, a template established by left-wing writers, is the recipe for box office doom.
Liberal humor tends to dwell on the dark side, wallowing in bitterness. (It’s funny to talk about physically harming Dick Cheney, for example.) Conservative humor ought to walk in the light, with joy and kindness, even for one’s ideological enemies. (It is not funny to talk about physically harming Barack Obama, ever.)
Sleazy innuendo, coarse language and extreme violence may be funny to some, but it’s not the kind of humor generated, or appreciated, by people with a high view of morality, and love for other people — in other words, by conservatives.
An American Carol tried to mix genres – slapstick and earnest parable. Now we know. It doesn’t work. The tone of AAC reminded me very much of a venerable Warner Bros. cartoon, starring Porky Pig, I think, probably circa WWII. Porky had a number of evocative conversations with our founders. Porky put aside the jokes and got serious. AAC never quite did.
iberal humor tends to dwell on the dark side, wallowing in bitterness. (It’s funny to talk about physically harming Dick Cheney, for example.) Conservative humor ought to walk in the light, with joy and kindness, even for one’s ideological enemies. (It is not funny to talk about physically harming Barack Obama, ever.)
A lot of liberal humor also seems to think it’s funny to talk about physically harming Sarah Palin. (I’m talking about a mannequin dressed like her hanging with a noose around the neck in West Hollywood, and Sandra Bernhard joking that her black “brothers” would gang-rape Sarah in New York City.)
DET – what liberal humor talks about harming Dick Cheney? citation, please. We make fun of him HARMING OTHERS, like his friend, like hundreds of thousands of civilians in a war he concocted.
Also “a lot” of liberal humor does not encompass one washed-up comedian. The person with a noose on the neck of any effigy isn’t trying to be funny, but it says something about your sense of humor that you are reading things into people’s Halloween decorations.