This movie sounds like the worst movie ever. Beyond Showgirls bad. Beyond Gigli bad. Beyond even Can’t Stop the Music bad, and that’s a movie starring Bruce Jenner and The Village People. I mean, for God’s sake, David Zucker, why? You made Airplane! and The Kentucky Fried Movie. I mean, for God’s sake, David Zucker, why? You made Airplane! and The Kentucky Fried Movie. I know, the whole Meet the Spartans nadir your genre has fallen to may have driven you insane (then again, it’s partly your fault, isn’t it?) but still, why would you make An American Carol, a movie that sounds like a comedy penned by Sean Hannity, only not as subtle?
Whew. Okay, relax. Maybe I’m being unfair. It’s a conservative comedy, and that usually ends up as The Half Hour News Hour…but Zucker made Police Squad! He has to be able to make conservative humor funny. Right? Well, let’s see…
Executive producer Myrna Sokoloff has put together a “pro-soldier, support our troops, pro-America” comedy, which Stephen Hayes previews in the new Weekly Standard. In it, filmmaker Michael Malone (Kevin “brother of Chris” Farley) and his organization MoveAlong.org are trying to repeal the Fourth of July when three angels—the Angel of Death, George S. Patton, and George Washington—come to him and convince him to change his ways.
Okay, maybe it could sort of be…
Fat-assed Malone travels to Cuba, pledges to destroy America, and takes advantage of the invisibility granted by ghost status by grabbing a protestor’s boobs. Bill O’Reilly appears out of nowhere to slap him. “I just like doing that,” he says. Terrorists led by everybody’s favorite pockmarked tough guy Robert Davi bitch that they’re low on suicide bombers (”All the good ones are gone!”) and all answer to the name Mohammed. In a scene that Sokoloff described, but didn’t bring, Patton and his soldiers storm a courthouse that’s about to remove the Ten Commandments and start opening fire on the people trying to stop them. “You can’t shoot these people!” Malone says. “They’re not people!” says Patton. “They’re the ACLU!” At this point we see that the ACLU members are unkillable George Romero zombies.
Oh. Oh my. Well, maybe it has some redeeming…
In February, it was reported that Kelsey Grammar would be Scrooge in the new movie. He’s actually playing the ghost of George Patton, and Jon Voight is playing George Washington. In a clip we saw, Washington takes Malone to St. Paul’s Cathedral to lecture him on freedom of religion and “freedom of speech, which you abuse.” Malone is grossed out by dust in the priest’s box, so the doors open onto the smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center. “This is the dust of 3000 innocent human beings!” bellows Washington. Malone whimpers that he’s just making movies. Washington won’t have it. “Is that what you plan to say on Judgment Day?”
“That scene,” said Sokoloff, “is hard to put in a comedy. But we had to do it.”
Well, yeah. Because comedy is funny, and that’s not funny.
I’m not opposed to making fun of liberals. Everybody needs to get their ideas mocked and ridiculed once in a while. But this isn’t humor — it’s eliminationist fantasy wrapped up in a nice bouquet of 9/11 fetishization. It’s not funny — it’s far too serious in its animosity to be funny.
Good satire is done with a rapier. Zucker used to be able to do good satire. But this isn’t good satire — it’s being carved with a sledgehammer. The only question is whether, like Manos: The Hand of Fate, it’s so bad it’s good, or whether, like Glitter, it’s merely so bad it’s bad. I’m betting on the latter.
Sez you. It sounds sort of funny to me. Heh.
I mean, really, get off the high horse. “Because comedy is funny, and that’s not funny” sound like something my old English professor would say.
Although, then again: imagining my old English professor watching the bad movie you describe?
THAT’S funny.
But it’s not comedy.
I thought some of those scenes sounded funny.
I have a thought on how to make the last scene, if not funny, at least more pointed: The ghost of Molly Ivins appears before George and says, “3000 innocent people? Yes, but 3000 innocent New Yorkers! Including 554 ACLU members or donors (whom we’ve already established you consider to be sub-human), 1200 immigrants (at least 125 of whom are undocumented), 341 gay or lesbian people, 128 Islamic people, overlapping somewhat but not completely with the 147 people of Arabic origin, and approximately 2984 liberals. So save your crocodile tears, assholes, we all know that you secretly thought that the collapse of the towers looked cool and cheered the damage to decadent New York. Respect the people of New York City or shut up about how terribly sad you are about the 911 attacks!”
(The numbers are invented based on what one might expect from the population of NYC, but I expect that one could obtain real numbers for most of them, with the exception of the last because at least as far as I know, there is no definitive list of “liberals” anywhere.)
Dianne, are you making the assumption that the attributes of the set of {people who work in the World Trade Center during the business day} are the same as {people who live in New York}? I would think that the average income would be much higher, the racial mix would be whiter, and far fewer of them would be illegal aliens, just as a start.
Ron, it’s true that the sets aren’t identical, but not in the way you think. The WTC buildings were mostly filled with back offices. The people who worked there were not the high corporate muck-a-mucks, but the low level clerks, middle managers, etc. I may have overestimated the number of undocumented immigrants, but news stories from the time suggested that there were at least some people working there without papers. And the pictures of the missing that were posted throughout lower Manhattan soon after the event were of people of all races, multiple socio-economic groups, etc. Yes, including a number of people who were clearly of Middle Eastern origin. They were not at all the white, middle class Christian middle Americans that the Republicans like to pretend. (At least, not all of them were: this being New York, white, etc middle Americans are welcome too and some immigrants from the midwest died in the towers as well.)
They were not at all the white, middle class Christian middle Americans that the Republicans like to pretend.
Indeed. The deaths in the towers looked like a cross-section of America — all of America, not just the white people like me.
More to the point, anyone who could make a film arguing that it’s funny to kill members of the ACLU doesn’t care about 3,000 dead in the towers. Not as people, anyhow.
One would think the right-wingers would have gotten the bloody message that their eliminationist rhetoric isn’t cool or funny after the Tennessee church shooting.
Oh, and the ACLU aren’t always fighting for the big bad left. In 2004, my local Republican Party chairman was cited by his city for putting a Bush/Cheney sign in his yard that was deemed “too big.” He didn’t want to take it down, and decided to fight it out in court. Who was representing him? The ACLU.
Oh, I would presume that there were plenty of immigrants working at the WTC that day. But I’m talking about illegal aliens, not immigrants. Even back office jobs seem more likely to me to be lower in percentage of illegal aliens than the NYC population overall.
Even back office jobs seem more likely to me to be lower in percentage of illegal aliens than the NYC population overall.
Lower, yes. Zero…unlikely. My estimate/wild guess may be badly off–I made the numbers up on the spur of the moment. However, I do remember stories in the NYTimes about difficulties identifying some of the remains and accounting for some of the missing because they were undocumented immigrants who worked under aliases. IIRC, the initial estimate of the number dead was actually revised down in 2002 because some people were reported missing twice (once under their work alias, once under their real name.) How many people this was, however, I am not at all certain. Could be as few as single digits, could be as many as hundreds.
Also remember that even offices employ people in low wage positions that are likely to be filled by undocumented workers, i.e. cleaning staff, cooks (there used to be a restaurant on the top floor of one of the towers–I don’t think anyone who was working there at the time survived), etc.
There are also food service and janitorial jobs at the WTC; we know that some undocumented workers died, but we cant know how many, because of their undocumented status.
Oh, yeah, I’ll go along with there being “x” percentage of illegal aliens in the WTC at the time where % of illegal aliens in NYC overall > x > 0. I just wasn’t buying x = % of illegal aliens in NYC overall.
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