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quietprofanity Oct. 26th, 2008 06:58 pm)
quietprofanity Oct. 26th, 2008 06:58 pm)And now we come to the end of the movie … which is longer than I’d like, but what can you do?
After George Washington leaves, the bells begin to toll and Malone gets caught in them. I like this gag, actually. It's a good reference to what happens at the end of the third stave of A Christmas Carol. When they're done ringing, Malone wakes up in a graveyard and is greeted by ... TRACE ADKINS! Although he'd prefer to be called, "The Angel of Death, turdhead!"
You know, I like a little country music once in awhile depending on who it is, but ... Oh, fuck this. Adkins, you are on Hollywood Squares. You are not worth any deep thought or analysis whatsoever.
Anyway, Adkins brings Malone to a potential future Las Vegas where the terrorists have won due to Malone's insignificant, they-only-represent-the-minority movies. Las Vegas has turned into Bin Laden City, a lot of things are written in Arabic and there is a sign for "Victoria's Burqa" which shows a woman wearing a garment that covers most of her body except her eyes and legs.
Okay, while I'm pretty sure the filmmakers know that such a garment also covers the legs, if it shows the eyes, IT IS NOT A BURQA. I didn't get a super-close look, but the garment was probably an abaya/niquab combination. But anyway, there are many types of hijab, not just burqas and what is used greatly varies depending on the country. Once again, try to LOOK at what you're condemning.
What the hell happened in this future, anyway? So Al Qaeda did it, but how? Did we just lose a war? Who attacked first and what happened? Or was our government disbanded and an Ayatollah-like character put in its place? Or does Al Qaeda have the whole country under a police state and we're all huddling in bunches hoping we don't die at any moment? All of these things would have very different effects on America, and would probably be a lot more penetrating than, "Oh no! No more lingerie!"*
Next Adkins brings Malone to his hometown in Michigan, which is all bombed out after a nuclear attack. "Is this Detroit?" Malone asks. Adkins shakes his head and brings Malone to a morgue. In a scene that echoes Scrooge's servants picking over his corpse and the graveyard scene, the morgue workers find the only remnants of Malone after the attack: his baseball cap and his huge butt. The morgue workers laugh and put his butt over their own and say things like, "Hey, I'm Michael Malone and I hate America! Ha ha ha!" Um ... considering what happened, I have a feeling rage and not mirth would be the more appropriate reaction.
Despite what the Wikipedia entry on An American Carol says, Malone actually doesn't repent in this scene like Scrooge does. Instead, Malone reacts by getting down on his hands and knees and crying, "I don't want to die! I don't want to die! I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" against Adkins' leg.
Once again, this is another really, really egregious instance of missing the point of the original story. To be fair, some of the A Christmas Carol adaptations get it wrong, too. (I really hate the ones that send Scrooge to Hell. Good God, did Mickey's Christmas Carol fill me with existential dread as a kid.) But I really do think the fear of missed chances, rather than the fear of punishment, should be the impetuous for Scrooge's turnaround. As Fred says, the way Scrooge lives his life he's been punishing himself for years.
Of course, the filmmakers don't exactly need Malone to repent. It's not very much to say, "I’m sorry I made some bad films that students only saw because their college professors told them to go." Instead, they just need to scare him into their beliefs, because that's what's really wrong with liberals. They just aren't SCARED enough. As John Gibson said in what I linked to you guys in the last installment, "We need another 9/11" to get those awful liberals to realize how correct conservatives are about those awful terrorists. They clearly just didn't learn the first time.
There's also something kind of selfish about changing your political beliefs just because you're afraid YOU might die. If he really understood that his actions would supposedly kill us all, shouldn't he be afraid that MANY PEOPLE are going to die?
Malone wakes up in his bed, but unfortunately hasn't really become a new man yet. He goes to the anti-Fourth of July rally outside the concert for the troops that the terrorists are going to bomb. (You got all that?) He tries to stop the rally, but he is a WUSS! So he runs into a porta-potty out of fear until JFK, Patton and Bill O'Reilly appear to slap him into being a real man, because conservatism is associated with manliness and shit. Malone is able to then get in front of the crowd and castigate his old allies. This is the last thing he says – I wrote this down.
"We're in a real war. These terrorists want to kill us all and you people are acting like it's September 10."
The protesters then try to kill Malone but HE IS SAVED! And guess who saves him? Soldiers! Soldiers who say how glad they are that those army recruiters asked them to join and how they're able to go to college. I wonder how they avoided being turned into liberals ...
I don't have much to say about the rest of the movie. The main, evil terrorist is defeated because Malone tricks him into saying "Yeah, kill America!" in the middle of the concert. And the two other terrorists decide they want to be Americans. And Trace Adkins calls country music fans and soldiers and their hot wives the "real America" as Malone sees a vision of soldiers from our past major wars in the crowd. (GAG!)
At the end of the film, Malone sees his saintly nephew Josh off to Iraq, knocks the bratty disabled kids into the water (and it feels horrible to say this, but ... Yay!), walks off trading quips with Patton and then Malone and the good, now ex-terrorist sidekicks team up to make a proper JFK biography out in the desert because real, evil, liberal Hollywood won't give them financing, but we know who'll come to see it, right? [wink wink] The end.
~*~*~
Want to know the big, ironic thing about this movie? When it comes to celebrity elitists who hate America, Johnny Depp has nothing on Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens visited America in 1842. He was prepared to love it, express his concerns about slavery, complain about how the lack of an international copyright was allowing Americans to re-print his novels without paying him anything, and write a book based on his experiences. When he came back he found he was able to do only the last three. I read his book about his trip, American Notes, a few years ago and while it wasn't a total diss-fest (there are long descriptions about people he liked, such as Laura Bridgman's teachers and a Native American he met), he had some criticisms, to say the least. He made fun of Americans' habits of spitting and the way southerners spoke. He hated the press, which followed him mercilessly, and hated the politicians even more.
From Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Dickens:
"American leaders," wrote Dickens, are the "lice of God's creation." Party politics in the United States was contaminating everything, even the way its citizens educated their young and cared for their infirm. And, he asserts, its leaders "bow down" before any idea, no matter how barbaric or idiotic, so long as it represents "Public Opinion." Thus Dickens reviled not only the barbarism of slavery but also its attendant hypocrisy: jingoistic natives bragging about liberty and democracy while condoning the practice of slavery. The Declaration of Independence, he concluded, is a sham, and America is based upon a lie.
If that wasn't enough, Epstein says Dickens wrote some chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit in which one of the characters goes to America and finds Americans to be loutish, hypocritical and conspiratorial.
Needless to say, despite Dickens' dedication in the beginning of the book to his friends in America "who, loving their country, can bear the truth, when it is written good humouredly and in a kind spirit", people were pissed.
Things got better when Dickens came back in 1867. Twenty-five years had passed and the Civil War ended. He apologized for what he said, said America had changed, promised to put an insert of his apology speech in future copies of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, and left the country with buttloads of money. Of course, thousands of people came to see Dickens on the trip and so we can assume they forgave him, but Peter Ackroyd's book still has a cartoon of Dickens and his friend George Dolby with all the money he earned that reads, "What! Only $300,000? Is that all I have made out of these penurious Yankees, after all my abuse of them? Psaw! Let us go, Dolby!"
Ah, the more things change ...
~*~*~
But, on the other hand, who really cares? As I said before, we live in the era of Barbie in A Christmas Carol. Carol, like Romeo & Juliet, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Sherlock Holmes stories and many others**, is one of those stories that are so entrenched as a cultural phenomenon through movie adaptations, references, parodies and spin-offs that when we read the original stories, we have to actively work against what we officially "know" about them to truly understand them. An American Carol won't really change the original's reputation or anything, and people have changed the story so much already that any changes it makes don't really matter in the end.
An American Carol has largely failed, anyway. Zucker screened it from critics, and the few who saw it said it wasn't funny. The American Conservative didn't like it. The film has still only made about $7 million against a $20 million budget, despite cries of conspiracy from the filmmakers.*** The film has a lot of ... cheerleaders. I don't feel comfortable calling them fans because it seems like a lot of the comments I see online about this movie are some variation of, "It's hilarious! Liberals just can't take the heat! I'm coming back with 12 of my friends!" (Please, nobody has 12 friends. At least nobody has 12 friends who like each other enough to go see a movie together.) You'd think if they were fans they'd want to ... you know, discuss the film.
Zucker claimed people will watch his movie on DVD. He's probably right, but that's because most films tend to get a lot of their profits from DVDs these days.
So I most likely wasted my time with all this. Honestly, I wrote this for no other reason than I wanted to compare it to the original. I don't exactly expect to change the cheerleaders' minds with this. And it's not like anybody reading this on my friendslist was going to see it anyway.
But, on the other hand ... you use the story written by a quasi-radical British man who wrote two whole books dissing America to make your political point about how much America rocks ... that's a little funny. And a little worth pointing out, and so I did. And I discovered much along the way. (DAMN YOU, PATTON!)
Seriously though, Zucker, you will never read this, but you don't have to stop making conservative comedies. Just ... research next time. And if you don't want to do that, remember your strengths. You used to make fun of everyone and now you have sacred cows. Either learn to skewer those cows, too, or leave them out of the story entirely.
But I'm done with Zucker, and I am done with this movie. Faced with my liberal friends' impotent horror at this bad film, conservatives' indifference to my words and my utter irrelevance as a social commentator for a dead man who needs no defenders on a failed film, what remains for me?
Five words: Barbie in A Christmas Carol!****
* Frankly, considering Judaism, Christianity and Mormonism all have modest clothing requirements/mores, I think if some hijab rules went into effect here, we'd probably be wearing altered versions of those if we don't have to wear clothing signifying our beliefs. That's my own guess based on some stuff I learned over the years, though.
** And mark my words, Pride & Prejudice, you're next if you're not there already. Just putting that out there.
*** Although, in the interest of fair reporting … my ticket did "City of Ember." Dum dum DUM!!!! (I did arrive past the show's official start time, though. And no, I didn't miss any of the movie. Just one of the trailers.)
**** Not really.
After George Washington leaves, the bells begin to toll and Malone gets caught in them. I like this gag, actually. It's a good reference to what happens at the end of the third stave of A Christmas Carol. When they're done ringing, Malone wakes up in a graveyard and is greeted by ... TRACE ADKINS! Although he'd prefer to be called, "The Angel of Death, turdhead!"
You know, I like a little country music once in awhile depending on who it is, but ... Oh, fuck this. Adkins, you are on Hollywood Squares. You are not worth any deep thought or analysis whatsoever.
Anyway, Adkins brings Malone to a potential future Las Vegas where the terrorists have won due to Malone's insignificant, they-only-represent-the-minority movies. Las Vegas has turned into Bin Laden City, a lot of things are written in Arabic and there is a sign for "Victoria's Burqa" which shows a woman wearing a garment that covers most of her body except her eyes and legs.
Okay, while I'm pretty sure the filmmakers know that such a garment also covers the legs, if it shows the eyes, IT IS NOT A BURQA. I didn't get a super-close look, but the garment was probably an abaya/niquab combination. But anyway, there are many types of hijab, not just burqas and what is used greatly varies depending on the country. Once again, try to LOOK at what you're condemning.
What the hell happened in this future, anyway? So Al Qaeda did it, but how? Did we just lose a war? Who attacked first and what happened? Or was our government disbanded and an Ayatollah-like character put in its place? Or does Al Qaeda have the whole country under a police state and we're all huddling in bunches hoping we don't die at any moment? All of these things would have very different effects on America, and would probably be a lot more penetrating than, "Oh no! No more lingerie!"*
Next Adkins brings Malone to his hometown in Michigan, which is all bombed out after a nuclear attack. "Is this Detroit?" Malone asks. Adkins shakes his head and brings Malone to a morgue. In a scene that echoes Scrooge's servants picking over his corpse and the graveyard scene, the morgue workers find the only remnants of Malone after the attack: his baseball cap and his huge butt. The morgue workers laugh and put his butt over their own and say things like, "Hey, I'm Michael Malone and I hate America! Ha ha ha!" Um ... considering what happened, I have a feeling rage and not mirth would be the more appropriate reaction.
Despite what the Wikipedia entry on An American Carol says, Malone actually doesn't repent in this scene like Scrooge does. Instead, Malone reacts by getting down on his hands and knees and crying, "I don't want to die! I don't want to die! I don't want to die! I don't want to die!" against Adkins' leg.
Once again, this is another really, really egregious instance of missing the point of the original story. To be fair, some of the A Christmas Carol adaptations get it wrong, too. (I really hate the ones that send Scrooge to Hell. Good God, did Mickey's Christmas Carol fill me with existential dread as a kid.) But I really do think the fear of missed chances, rather than the fear of punishment, should be the impetuous for Scrooge's turnaround. As Fred says, the way Scrooge lives his life he's been punishing himself for years.
Of course, the filmmakers don't exactly need Malone to repent. It's not very much to say, "I’m sorry I made some bad films that students only saw because their college professors told them to go." Instead, they just need to scare him into their beliefs, because that's what's really wrong with liberals. They just aren't SCARED enough. As John Gibson said in what I linked to you guys in the last installment, "We need another 9/11" to get those awful liberals to realize how correct conservatives are about those awful terrorists. They clearly just didn't learn the first time.
There's also something kind of selfish about changing your political beliefs just because you're afraid YOU might die. If he really understood that his actions would supposedly kill us all, shouldn't he be afraid that MANY PEOPLE are going to die?
Malone wakes up in his bed, but unfortunately hasn't really become a new man yet. He goes to the anti-Fourth of July rally outside the concert for the troops that the terrorists are going to bomb. (You got all that?) He tries to stop the rally, but he is a WUSS! So he runs into a porta-potty out of fear until JFK, Patton and Bill O'Reilly appear to slap him into being a real man, because conservatism is associated with manliness and shit. Malone is able to then get in front of the crowd and castigate his old allies. This is the last thing he says – I wrote this down.
"We're in a real war. These terrorists want to kill us all and you people are acting like it's September 10."
The protesters then try to kill Malone but HE IS SAVED! And guess who saves him? Soldiers! Soldiers who say how glad they are that those army recruiters asked them to join and how they're able to go to college. I wonder how they avoided being turned into liberals ...
I don't have much to say about the rest of the movie. The main, evil terrorist is defeated because Malone tricks him into saying "Yeah, kill America!" in the middle of the concert. And the two other terrorists decide they want to be Americans. And Trace Adkins calls country music fans and soldiers and their hot wives the "real America" as Malone sees a vision of soldiers from our past major wars in the crowd. (GAG!)
At the end of the film, Malone sees his saintly nephew Josh off to Iraq, knocks the bratty disabled kids into the water (and it feels horrible to say this, but ... Yay!), walks off trading quips with Patton and then Malone and the good, now ex-terrorist sidekicks team up to make a proper JFK biography out in the desert because real, evil, liberal Hollywood won't give them financing, but we know who'll come to see it, right? [wink wink] The end.
~*~*~
Want to know the big, ironic thing about this movie? When it comes to celebrity elitists who hate America, Johnny Depp has nothing on Charles Dickens.
Charles Dickens visited America in 1842. He was prepared to love it, express his concerns about slavery, complain about how the lack of an international copyright was allowing Americans to re-print his novels without paying him anything, and write a book based on his experiences. When he came back he found he was able to do only the last three. I read his book about his trip, American Notes, a few years ago and while it wasn't a total diss-fest (there are long descriptions about people he liked, such as Laura Bridgman's teachers and a Native American he met), he had some criticisms, to say the least. He made fun of Americans' habits of spitting and the way southerners spoke. He hated the press, which followed him mercilessly, and hated the politicians even more.
From Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Dickens:
"American leaders," wrote Dickens, are the "lice of God's creation." Party politics in the United States was contaminating everything, even the way its citizens educated their young and cared for their infirm. And, he asserts, its leaders "bow down" before any idea, no matter how barbaric or idiotic, so long as it represents "Public Opinion." Thus Dickens reviled not only the barbarism of slavery but also its attendant hypocrisy: jingoistic natives bragging about liberty and democracy while condoning the practice of slavery. The Declaration of Independence, he concluded, is a sham, and America is based upon a lie.
If that wasn't enough, Epstein says Dickens wrote some chapters in Martin Chuzzlewit in which one of the characters goes to America and finds Americans to be loutish, hypocritical and conspiratorial.
Needless to say, despite Dickens' dedication in the beginning of the book to his friends in America "who, loving their country, can bear the truth, when it is written good humouredly and in a kind spirit", people were pissed.
Things got better when Dickens came back in 1867. Twenty-five years had passed and the Civil War ended. He apologized for what he said, said America had changed, promised to put an insert of his apology speech in future copies of American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit, and left the country with buttloads of money. Of course, thousands of people came to see Dickens on the trip and so we can assume they forgave him, but Peter Ackroyd's book still has a cartoon of Dickens and his friend George Dolby with all the money he earned that reads, "What! Only $300,000? Is that all I have made out of these penurious Yankees, after all my abuse of them? Psaw! Let us go, Dolby!"
Ah, the more things change ...
~*~*~
But, on the other hand, who really cares? As I said before, we live in the era of Barbie in A Christmas Carol. Carol, like Romeo & Juliet, The Wizard of Oz, Dracula, Frankenstein, the Sherlock Holmes stories and many others**, is one of those stories that are so entrenched as a cultural phenomenon through movie adaptations, references, parodies and spin-offs that when we read the original stories, we have to actively work against what we officially "know" about them to truly understand them. An American Carol won't really change the original's reputation or anything, and people have changed the story so much already that any changes it makes don't really matter in the end.
An American Carol has largely failed, anyway. Zucker screened it from critics, and the few who saw it said it wasn't funny. The American Conservative didn't like it. The film has still only made about $7 million against a $20 million budget, despite cries of conspiracy from the filmmakers.*** The film has a lot of ... cheerleaders. I don't feel comfortable calling them fans because it seems like a lot of the comments I see online about this movie are some variation of, "It's hilarious! Liberals just can't take the heat! I'm coming back with 12 of my friends!" (Please, nobody has 12 friends. At least nobody has 12 friends who like each other enough to go see a movie together.) You'd think if they were fans they'd want to ... you know, discuss the film.
Zucker claimed people will watch his movie on DVD. He's probably right, but that's because most films tend to get a lot of their profits from DVDs these days.
So I most likely wasted my time with all this. Honestly, I wrote this for no other reason than I wanted to compare it to the original. I don't exactly expect to change the cheerleaders' minds with this. And it's not like anybody reading this on my friendslist was going to see it anyway.
But, on the other hand ... you use the story written by a quasi-radical British man who wrote two whole books dissing America to make your political point about how much America rocks ... that's a little funny. And a little worth pointing out, and so I did. And I discovered much along the way. (DAMN YOU, PATTON!)
Seriously though, Zucker, you will never read this, but you don't have to stop making conservative comedies. Just ... research next time. And if you don't want to do that, remember your strengths. You used to make fun of everyone and now you have sacred cows. Either learn to skewer those cows, too, or leave them out of the story entirely.
But I'm done with Zucker, and I am done with this movie. Faced with my liberal friends' impotent horror at this bad film, conservatives' indifference to my words and my utter irrelevance as a social commentator for a dead man who needs no defenders on a failed film, what remains for me?
Five words: Barbie in A Christmas Carol!****
* Frankly, considering Judaism, Christianity and Mormonism all have modest clothing requirements/mores, I think if some hijab rules went into effect here, we'd probably be wearing altered versions of those if we don't have to wear clothing signifying our beliefs. That's my own guess based on some stuff I learned over the years, though.
** And mark my words, Pride & Prejudice, you're next if you're not there already. Just putting that out there.
*** Although, in the interest of fair reporting … my ticket did "City of Ember." Dum dum DUM!!!! (I did arrive past the show's official start time, though. And no, I didn't miss any of the movie. Just one of the trailers.)
**** Not really.
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I knew Patton had a rather unsavory side to his character, but I had no idea just how unsavory a lot of his beliefs actually were
I was totally out of the loop when I started this, so ... yeah, definitely.
and it certainly gave me a renewed appreciation for A Christmas Carol.
You know, researching this, I actually felt the same way. I love Dickens, but I'd always considered Carol one of his lesser works that just happens to be popular, but the compare and contrast was really useful in seeing the good parts of the original story.
And if you do want to try Dickens again ... hey, it's short! :-)
Anyway, I'm glad you enjoyed it and thank you for commenting!