Let's Get This Over With

Our story so far: In August 2008, I first heard of a movie called An American Carol about which I wrote several times. Long story short, this David Zucker directed comedy was supposed to herald a new era of conservative dominance over the movie industry and turn Hollywood into the West Coast annex of the RNC. The one flaw in this perfect plan was that, as time went by, word started getting out that the movie was on an epic level of bad. The movie's inarguable box office failure sparked some hilarious conservative conspiracy theories and buried hopes of making a series of overtly conservative films for several generations. That was pretty much that except for one nagging little detail. Despite my intention to do so, I had never gotten around to seeing the movie I had spent so much time trashing. I decided that no way in Hell was I going to plunk down the nine dollar theater price but, when it came out on DVD, I always managed to find different movies I wanted in my Netflix queue. "Oh look, Hannah Montana--Season 1 just came out, guess Carol has to wait till next week," is something I would typically say. It looked as if I would never actually get around to watching it.

Until now. Until I discovered that Netflix had it available for streaming which made me think on a lazy Saturday afternoon, "Why not?" so I microwaved some popcorn, clicked the PLAY button under the movie's icon and prepared to see if I was wrong.

An American Carol is bad. Showgirls bad. Bride Wars bad. As bad as fetish videos of women who stomp grape jam with their feet are for people who don't have that particular fetish. I know, I know, you're thinking, "How could the 8 millionth rip-off of the Scrooge story directed by David Zucker whose last good comedy, The Naked Gun, came out 20 years ago possibly be bad?" That should have been the first clue for the movie's investors. They should have thought that when Zucker pitched them the movie, said, "Oops, we forgot our checkbooks," run out of their so fast that they left Road Runner clouds behind them and had someone call Zucker later on to tell him that they had died. Instead, they agreed to finance this movie and, as a result, now have jobs where they pleasure anonymous men on the street for three dollars.

The movie opens with a shot of the title superimposed over an American flag and pans down to the ideal conservative world: a neighborhood street fair where the sun is shining, kids are playing and no one is black save for one old woman who gets hit in the face with a Frisbee in a moment that is both the movie's first attempt at humor and the movie's first failed attempt at humor. We see good old Leslie Nielsen playing the same role he's been playing for Zucker since Airplane. This time around, he's making some burgers for the kids which, in the movie's second failed attempt at humor, inexplicably taste horrible. I can't figure that out as barbecued hamburgers are tough to screw up. I also can't figure out why this was thought by anyone to be funny. Anyway, Nielsen gathers the kids around and tells them the Scrooge ripoff story which is the actual plot of the movie.

Middle Eastern terrorists led by Aziz (played by outspoken conservative Robert Davi who now gets to add this to a resume to such stellar films as The Hot Chick, Call Me: The Rise and Fall of Heidi Fleiss and, his magnum opus, Showgirls) decide that they need a professional movie maker to help them with their efforts to recruit suicide bombers. They need someone who hates America and that leads them to Michael Malone (Kevin Farley). That's his name in the movie, anyway, but he's really a conservative caricature of Michael Moore.

Hey, did you know that Michael Moore was fat? No, seriously, he's really fat. Also, did you know that fat jokes about Michael Moore never, ever get old? That's the opinion of this movie, anyway. Ha ha, a mouse pooped on a pizza and he ate it. Oh, a twinkie was smashed against the wall and he ate it anyway. Are your sides hurting from laughter yet? If not, I'm sure one of the 8000 other "Michael Moore is fat" jokes will make you chuckle. Anyway, the fat guy, in addition to making movies with titles like Die You American Pigs (seriously), also heads up an anti-American organization called Moovealong.org which is trying to abolish the 4th of July. In a callback to A Christmas Carol, Malone is visited by his nephew that has recently joined the Navy who invites him to celebrate 4th of July with him before he ships out to Iraq. Ignoring the Scrooge story parallels in his life, he goes home for his nightly gorging and is confronted by the ghost of John F. Kennedy who tells him that he will be confronted by three spirits to help him atone and realize how awesome America is because it fights needless wars against non-whites.

The first ghost he meets is George Patton (Kelsey Grammer) who helps Malone up after he gets trampled by a crowd (something that also happens a lot and, like fat jokes, apparently isn't supposed to get old). Patton takes him back in time to a World War II peace protest which, for some reason, is supposed to convince Malone that peace is bad. Or something. When Malone is informed that the people here cannot see him, he tries to fondle a woman's breasts and gets slapped (oh yeah, he also gets slapped endlessly, another example of the movie's Doctrine Of Repeating Jokes Endlessly). Patton then takes him to the 60s and that's where this plot recap ends. I think it was around the 40 minute mark that I decided life was too short to waste another second of it on this crap and turned the movie off. Maybe Zucker was saving all the funny jokes for the last half. If he did, I will never know.

So why did this movie so spectacularly fail? Very simply, it wasn't funny. I think I laughed three times (like when terrorist leader Aziz ends up blowing up his own car) in the 40 minutes I watched it, not good for a movie that had about one joke per minute. Thing is, Zucker and crew wouldn't have made this movie if they didn't think it was funny. The only reason anyone could have found any of this garbage to be funny is summed up by Filmcritic.com's Bill Gibron who said:

Just too insular to be engaging.

A lot of this stuff probably is hilarious to people who live on a steady diet of right wing radio, Fox News and conservative blogs. It has been pointed out in several places lately that conservatives have created their own insular mythology and have forgotten that outsiders have no idea what they're talking about when they reference that mythology. I predict it is only a matter of time before you turn on Fox News and see this:

Good evening all, I'm Chris Wallace. At the top of the news tonight, Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. Also, Shaka, when the walls fell. Fred Barnes, any thoughts?

With that in mind, I must amend my previous observation: The biggest problem with An American Carol was that it was funny to David Zucker and a very slim portion of the population, but no one else. I can see Zucker opening up Final Draft and wetting himself with laughter as he wrote yet another "Michael Moore is a big talentless fatass who hates America and loves terrorists" joke and then sent the script out to fellow hardcore conservatives who gave him positive feedback and validation. It simply never occurred to any of them that the bulk of the movie going public would disagree with them.

And so, I'm finally done with An American Carol. If it is ever mentioned here again, it will almost certainly be in the context of, "This movie was as bad as An American Carol," a statement I can now make with authority.

The Ghost Of Carol Present

I had almost forgotten about An American Carol until I got the email telling me that it was being released on DVD this week. Regular readers know my feelings about this offensive little crap pool of a movie but, in if you're interested, here's everything I wrote about it. If you don't feel like reading all my brilliant observations, I can quickly sum it all up this way: it sucked. That's why it failed. It had nothing to do with a brilliantly organized nation-wide liberal conspiracy of evil theater owners to intentionally under report its box office numbers. It wasn't funny and people could tell by the lack of jokes in the commercials that it wasn't funny so they stayed away. The only people who enjoyed it were movement conservatives who think that saying, "Michael Moore is fat," is a joke that never gets old.

The funniest things about Carol were the emails you could receive when you put your name on their mailing list. The one I got this week had a line that definitely made me chuckle.

Didn't get everything you wanted from Santa?! Now is your chance to stock up...

No, not that.

Just because our economy may be depressed, that doesn’t mean YOU have to be.

Ugh, not that either.

Laugh like your country depends on it by picking up An American Carol on DVD or Blu-Ray TODAY! Available now at your favorite DVD retailer or online.

Definitely not that lame joke they told over and over about laughing like your country depends on it.

This Holiday season don't miss your chance to get the movie that the Washington Post called, “Radical and Brave!” and Ain’t it Cool News called, “Ingenious!”

Yeah, baby! That's the stuff. Not the line itself but what I found when I did about 45 seconds of research. The part of my brain that keeps me from believing in Bigfoot or that aliens like to kidnap people for the sole purpose of sticking things up their asses clicked into overdrive and kept me from believing that both the WaPo's film critics and Harry Knowles' crew wet themselves with laughter over something that the rest of the world hated.

The "Ingenious" quote came from an AICN reviewer called Dr. Hfuhruhurr who is described by AICN regular Moriarty as someone who's, "contributed some openly conservative perspectives on film, with reviews from the Libertad Film Festival as well as appearances on the Jedi Council." Those are credentials that just scream, "Take my opinion seriously," so you can see why the American Carol folks hitched their wagon to this nutty right-wing star. In addition to calling it ingenious, he also called it, "THE BALLSIEST MOVIE EVER MADE," and yes, the the idea to put that in all-caps was his. This does nothing to disprove my statement that the movie was only loved by movement conservatives, nor does the quote that allegedly came from the Washington Post.

I say "allegedly" since I couldn't determine if that column to which they are referring was ever actually published in the Post. It was written by Ann Coulter wannabe Kathleen Parker who said:

“An American Carol” may not be The Best Movie You Ever Saw, but it’s something. It’s radical in its assault on the left wing; it’s brave given the risk of peer ridicule and the potential for career suicide.

She also said the movie "will probably be panned by jaded reviewers who will point out the film’s flaws." Well God forbid that film critics actually point out a movie's flaws. Now, if you're thinking that Kathleen Parker is totally blinded by bias that she would overhype a movie just because it serves her agenda...

Zucker insists he needn’t be taken seriously, but he does believe that Islamist terrorism poses a greater threat than those Americans typically demonized by Hollywood and the left.

For delivering that message, maybe Zucker deserves not an Oscar, but a Nobel Prize.

...you'd be absolutely, 100% right. The reason the movie's marketers get to say the movie was liked by the Washington Post is because Kathleen Parker is part of the Washington Post Writer's Group. It should come as no surprise that, in the Post's actual review, critic Paul Farhi wrote:

This flamingly right-wing comedy is antic and energetic, all right, but so broad and toothless that it winds up just being lame.

The makers of American Carol somehow failed to include this in their little email. I'm glad I was able to help them correct their mistake.

The Terrorists Win

This will, hopefully, be the last post I do on An American Carol, a movie that for generations will be held up as an example of incompetent movie making. For years, conservatives have been openly wondering why war profiteers don't use some of the vast wealth they have raised at the cost of American blood to make propaganda movies that will convince Americans to keep the Iraq War going until the Iraqis see the folly of this whole Islam thing and start running television specials about the Liberal War on Christmas. Thus, tens of millions of dollars were loosened from the tight fists of rich conservatives who were assured that Americans would camp out for weeks to buy a ticket for a movie that dared to tell the world that Michael Moore was fat.

So, how'd all that work out? Did the vast movie going public swallow Carol whole and crap out a fortune for its filmmakers? Not only was it beaten out by a Mexican dog but, despite the fact that it opened in over 1600 theaters and had a decent ad budget that made me have to sit through commercials for it every time I watched The Daily Show, it opened at ninth place with a surprising 3.66 million dollar gross. To put that into perspective, Bill Maher's pro-atheist documentary Religulous opened for 3.5 million dollars despite being in only a third as many theaters. To put it into even sharper perspective, give me the ad budget that Carol had and I could get the movie Mike Clear Scratches His Nuts to open at ninth place for 3.66 million dollars.

I'm honestly surprised it didn't open for more. I was figuring it'd open somewhere around 7 million simply because that's usually where heavily pushed conservative films open. A Kirk Cameron movie marketed to the church group audience called Fireproof opened at around that amount last week and still managed to make more than Carol did in its second week.

Well, that's that, right? HA! If you thought that was that, it means you've never read right wing blogs. To my surprise, I've been unable to find anyone trying to spin the ninth place opening into a victorious sign of conservative ascendancy but I have found a couple of examples of right wingers trying to place the blame on something other than the sheer craptitude of the movie itself.

Dirty Harry's Place tried to blame the state of the election. Had John McCain been ahead by 20 points, theaters would still be trying to get the smell of millions of right wing douchebags out of its seats. This, of course, fails to explain why the new Tim Robbins anti-war film The Lucky Ones, something that should appeal to the liberal Obama loving crowd, which opened in limited release this week, managed to gross $183,000, a per screen average of just $425. Again, we're down in Mike Clear Scratches His Nuts territory assuming it had no ad budget but, somehow, I managed to get Tim Robbins to star in it.

My favorite defense, though, comes from a blogger called Little Miss Attila who said this:

Mpower pictures and Vivendi are starting to hear complaints about unorthodox treatment of An American Carol by employees of theaters that are carrying the movie. So far, ten theaters have been implicated in irregularities regarding the handling of this movie in cineplexes and other theaters—particularly as regards ticket sales.

This accusation is based on two pieces of evidence. The first piece is jack, the other, shit. LMA provides no links which would prove she hadn't merely reached up her ass and pulled out a conspiracy theory.

• The theater suggested that the movie was rated R (its true rating is PG-13);

• Posters for the film are not visible inside or outside the theater;

• An American Carol is not on the marquee, even though the movie is playing there;

• The film title not listed behind the clerk in the box office, so you have to ask if that movie is playing at that theater, never mind that you checked on the internet and called in advance (this actually happened to me);

• Showtimes are given on the theater's outgoing message machine for every movie playing except for An American Carol (this is also out of my personal experience: somehow the local four-plex only had showtimes listed on the phoneline for three movies . . . . hm);

• technical oddities: image or focus issues, problems with sound, and the like.

Again, no evidence is supplied to back up any of these accusations, but the sheer numbers of accusations couldn't all be bogus, right? So, there you have it. An American Carol's box office numbers actually rivaled those of The Dark Knight but only 3.66 million dollars of that got reported thanks to a nationwide liberal conspiracy of corporate theater owners.

Also, Mike Clear Scratches His Nuts actually beat out Titanic for top grossing movie of all time but you'd never know because of the massive conspiracy of theater owners to make people think the movie doesn't exist.

Carol Burn Net

Just thought I'd point out that, as of this writing, An American Carol has scored a staggering Zero Percent at RottenTomatoes.com* Of the revieq quotes up so far, this one from Kevin Carr of &M Pictures is the nicest:

It's neat to see a movie from another point of view... Still, the movie has a message, and that message gets in the way of the comedy at least half of the time

This confirms the prediction I made months ago, that this movie was doomed because it was made to push and agenda and not to entertain. I wonder if the filmmakers are shocked that their "If we get a guy whose last good movie was made 20 years ago to make a movie that preaches the neocon worldview while also finding hundreds of different ways to say that Michael Moore is a fat traitor, we'll score box office gold and guarantee a McCain presidency," has failed to come to fruition.

Personally, I can't wait to see this just to see how big of a trainwreck it is though it may be a while since the closest showing is 50 miles away and driving 50 miles is now a major investment thanks partly to the right wing agenda that is preached by this movie. Is that irony or a paradox? I always get those two confused.

*This statistic could change as more reviews come in.

Carol Watch

I'm putting together a bookcase today so don't have time to write the review of Eagle Eye I'd planned for today so instead here's a quick rundown on what critics are saying about An American Carol:

So far, they're saying jack and squat. In what I'm sure was an act of negligence, the producers of An American Carol have yet to do advance critic screenings, hence the "N/A" rating on the Tomatometer. This couldn't possibly be because the reason producers always have for not doing advance screenings, that being they think they have a huge pile of crap on their hands. After all, this was made by a guy who made a couple of funny movies two decades ago. That means he's been saving up his creative wad for 20 years so he could blow it on the movie audience of 2008. The only advance screenings done so far have been for right wing bloggers like Ed Morrissey who said this:

When looking at a rough cut, one has to take into consideration the fact that the finished product may look significantly different. From what I saw, the timing will need to get tightened, and some dialogue spaced out better in order to keep laughter from stepping on punch lines. With that said, the movie seemed to go over well enough with the audience, but significant laugh gaps remain, even with an audience as sympathetic as yesterday’s.

Oh well, I'm sure loads of laughs have been squeezed into the movie since that rough cut and the movie will be chock full of comedy goodness by this Friday.

Thank goodness the country will have Beverly Hill Chihuahua to fall back on in the unlikely event that An American Carol stinks.

Cry Like Your Sanity Depends On It

I honestly hadn't thought about An American Carol for a while. I had envisioned doing a series of posts about it but a quick search shows that I haven't even mentioned it since September 2. For those of you who don't know, An American Carol is an alleged comedy about a Michael Moore look alike who suffers through a takeoff of A Christmas Carol made by Airplane director David Zucker whose purpose is to make America stay in Iraq until it's the 51st state and change the Constitution before Election Day so George W. Bush can have a 3rd term. For a nice refresher, let's look at the trailer:

Here are the trailer's main points:

1. Michael Moore is fat.
2. No seriously, he's freakin huge.
3. Look, he's eating a donut. Fat guys do stuff like that.
4. He thinks that Cuba has better health care than America does. (Actually, healthcare-wise, we rank #35 in the world while Cuba sits way down the list at a lowly #37. U-S-A, U-S-A.)
5. In some alternate world, Michael Moore owns slaves. Just imagine if Moore actually did real horrible stuff instead of the horrible stuff we make up.
6. Michael Moore hates America so much he wants to abolish the 4th of July. Again, what if he actually did bad stuff like this? Worse yet, how can liberals like a guy who does imaginary bad stuff like this? This proves that liberals are America hating racists.
7. Michael Moore can't tell women from men. Michael Moore is really stupid. And fat.
8. Slapping fat guys who can't fight back is funny.
9. Arab stereotypes are funny here even though they are exactly the same as Arab stereotypes that have been seen in countless other comedy venues.
10. Rosie O'Donnell is fat too.
11. Michael Moore is a perv who would grab a woman's breasts without her knowledge. Man, all these fake situations that we pulled out of our asses and put on the screen really make Michael Moore look bad. Still, he deserves it because he said bad things about President Bush and he wants all Americans to have good, affordable healthcare.
12. The Christmas Carol story model of being visited by 3 ghosts in order to change a person's attitude had been done before approximately 8 billion times. Still, Michael Moore is fat so our version will be funny.
    

Now that we're all caught up, the reason I suddenly thought about An American Carol was the email I received recently from David Zucker. "Golly Mike," you say, "I didn't know you were so tight with the Zuck-meister." I'm not. I got that email along with everyone else who signed up for the movie's mailing list. Previous emails have urged me to become Part Of The Movement by becoming a theater captain. Also, I'm supposed to piss off at least 10 people by dragging them to see the movie. They are also supposed to drag another 10 people each and so on. This leads to the 2 separate emails that have borne Zucker's name. In the first one, he says:

All my Hollywood friends say I'm out of my foolish mind (this being Hollywood, they don't actually say "foolish," but you get the idea.) They were fine when I made people laugh in Airplane!, the Naked Guns, and Scary Movies, but now that I'm making them laugh with a movie that dares to love America and support our troops, they think I should be committed.

All right, first off, I want to know who the hell is saying that the Scary Movies were funny. Zucker took over that franchise with #'s 3 and 4 and did the impossible feat of making the two previous entries made by the Wayans brothers look like pieces of comedy genius. Second, the "love America/support our troops" stuff consists mainly of slapping a fat guy and adding in a scene where the abused, obese man is taken on a tour of the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center by the ghost of George Washington. Ha ha. (I covered all this in a post back in August.

In a second email from Zucker, he tells me this:

AN AMERICAN CAROL is different than AIRPLANE! and my NAKED GUNS and SCARY MOVIES, but even more hilarious.

Dude, Schindler's List had more laughs than the Scary Movies. In the same email, Zucker again makes the claim that he supports the troops. Zucker, of course, "supports the troops" in the typical neocon way, by wanting them to stay in Iraq until they die. They can die of bullet wounds or old age, Zucker would "support" either one.

And that's why I started thinking of An American Carol. Man oh man, is this movie ever gonna suck. I can't wait till Zucker blames the liberal media when it tanks. The sad thing is that I'll probably go see it.If the movie's opening week gross is $10, that'll be my fault.

Carol In Peril, Not Hysterical

Ah, I can finally do a proper edition of Movies I Haven't Seen. Last week, I attempted to comment on David Zucker's upcoming neocon fantasy An American Carol. Unfortunately, at the time all I had were the observations of others. Now, they have released a trailer and set up a website, both of which remove all doubt that not only will this movie will not only suck but that, in the future, if you wanted to give something an award for sucking, the award would be called The Carol. Here's the trailer.

Okay then, what have we learned? Well, we all now know that Michael Moore is fat. I mean he's just fat. In case you're not getting this, he's super duper big, morbidly obese, El Moore Grosso. If you're wondering why this point is being hammered over and over again, it means that you're not a movement conservative or right wing nut. To those people, the fact that Michael Moore is fat is intrinsically funny. In fact, it never gets old. If you're ever working as a stand up comic at a big conservative get-together, just say, "Michael Moore is fat," over and over again throughout your entire set. I guarantee that the room will smell of urine because everyone there will piss themselves laughing and they will hire you again next year. Members of the Heritage Foundation, the writers at NRO's The Corner and the comments sections of right wing blogs will giggle the way 8 year olds do when someone farts every time the image of the fat old Michael Moore look-alike appears on screen. Unfortunately, you need many more people than that to make a movie into a hit.

This reminds me of the last time a conservative comedy used Michael Moore's weight for comic effect. That was the puppet movie Team America made by South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Unlike Carol, Team America was actually funny. The main reason is that Parker and Stone weren't trying to start a movement. They didn't try to recruit people to be Theater Captains or to go door to door handing out leaflets promoting the movie. Parker and Stone sat down and said, "How do we make the funniest movie possible that huge numbers of people will want to see so that we can both entertain people and make big bags of cash at the same time?" One of the ideas they had was to make fat jokes about Michael Moore. They showed him with hot dogs in each hand and covered in mustard. The main difference between that movie and An American Carol is that Moore's appearance in the film was very brief. He was in two scenes and I'd be willing to bet that total screen time was less than a minute. This is because, though they do possess many right wing beliefs which were incorporated into Team America, Parker and Stone aren't right wing nuts. They made a funny movie that even people who disagreed with their ideas could laugh at and, thus, managed to disseminate those ideas far beyond the conservative audience.

Speaking of the desire to create a movement, let's look at the web site. When I first watched this yesterday, it crashed Firefox 3 times. That was because it suffered from incompetent web design. It had several graphics scripts running at once including movie clips, animated gifs and pop ups of Arab terrorists. It made many of the same web design mistakes that 16 year old boys make when they're trying to set up their Hayden Panettiere Worship Shrines. It's running fine for me now partly because they seem to have streamlined it and thrown out some of the clutter and partly because I'm not seeing it on a more powerful computer. However, even one day can be too late in a case like this. Just imagine all the bright eyed College Republicans taking a break from not getting laid to check on this web site and having their browsers crash. Instantly, they're worried that the term papers and pictures of the sweaty, buff King Leonidas contained on their hard drives may have been wiped out. They'll never go back and will now never enter in their names, email addresses and cell phone numbers which is what they want you to do right there on the front page which brings me back to the idea that the ultimate idea behind this movie is not to create an entertaining film but to start a movement. This website also contains the ultimate sign that you're participating in a movement. It gives you information on how to book group showings. If a movie is heavily marketing group showings, it's normally a sign that the movie will mainly appeal to church groups, but church groups are just another type of Movement.

An American Carol will be heavily promoted by right wing outlets like Fox News and Rush Limbaugh and will probably have a halfway decent ad budget. If recent box office history of other heavily promoted conservative films like Expelled are any indication, it will gross around 5 million dollars in its first week, the bulk of which will come from group showings organized by churches and conservative groups. Any chance of crossover appeal will be limited by boycotts from liberals who will dislike it for its politics and horrible reviews from everyone else who will dislike it for the fact that Holocaust documentaries have more laughs and the movie will quickly drop off into oblivion.

In the meantime, between now and October 3, I will have no trouble coming up with something to write about.

Digg This.

What The Dickens Is This?

Many of you have probably heard of David Zucker's new comedy/neocon fantasy An American Carol. When I read the Weekly Standard article about the movie and about Zucker in particular, I immediately figured that I should write about it here. For some reason, though, I just didn't want to. I'm not sure why. Conservative views on film fascinate me because conservatives, or at least their pundits, thinkers and operatives, don't really see movies as a mode of entertainment but rather as a delivery system for various agendas. That's why right wing websites love to scour scripts for signs of treason. It's why they tried to kill WALL·E in its crib by denouncing it as a Marxist style propaganda film designed to turn your children from cute little moppets into frothing-at-the-mouth global warming fanatics and, when they failed and WALL·E became a big hit, they refused to concede defeat and assimilated it into the Right-Wing Borg by declaring WALL·E to be a harsh criticism of the liberal nanny state.

Anyway, I wasn't at all inspired to write about An American Carol and I didn't have to as several other sites did it for me. I particularly liked the two part smackdown at YouAreDumb.net (part 1 is here, part 2 is here). So I figured, "That's all taken care of, now to write some one-liners about how I learned from The House Bunny that it's possible for a guy who has clearly never been laid to still somehow find he's able to resist the advances of a Playboy model."

That was all well and good until I read David Weigel's post about the movie at Reason.com. This confirmed that The Weekly Standard article only hinted at the depths of horror that are plumbed by An American Carol. This post was just the catalyst I needed to sit down and do something I haven't done for months. Thus, I present to you:

MOVIES I HAVEN'T SEEN: AN AMERICAN CAROL

Oh my freaking God, this movie is going to suck. There is no chance, none, that it will be good. Some of you may be shocked that David Zucker, a man whose film making career stretches back over 30 years, made such a horrible film. Then some of you will remember that Zucker's last good movie was 1988's The Naked Gun and that, since then, his career highlights have included Baseketball and My Boss's Daughter and won't be shocked at all.

Weigel begins by telling us how, at a Heritage Foundation rally for the movie, he was handed a card.

If I fill out the card, I can take one of four pledges, such as "Yes, I will send the trailer to my contacts" and "Yes, I want to be AN AMERICAN CAROLER or THEATER CAPTAIN." It's an induction to a movement, as the slogan on the card makes clear: "Finally, a movie for us."

First off, to all you College Republicans out there, and particularly to the male ones, you may think that being a Theater Captain or An American Caroler sounds cool. Let me assure you that wearing tags like this sends to every girl who sees it the message, "No thanks, I am not now nor will I ever be even slightly interested in receiving oral sex from you, but thanks anyway." You may as well try to impress them with your elaborate knowledge of Monty Python and I can personally assure you that girls suddenly find a reason to stand on the other side of the room when you demand that they bring you a shrubbery or yell, "THIS IS AN EX PARROT," in their faces.

We learn a bit more about the movie's plot than we did in the Stephen Hayes piece. It centers around a Michael Moore clone called Michael Malone played here by Kevin Farley, brother of the late comedian Chris Farley whose strengths as an actor included screaming, running his hands through his hair and falling face down in cow flop so you know there's going to be some quality acting there. Apparently there is a scene where Malone grabs a woman's boobs and, out of nowhere, Bill O'Reilly appears and slaps him for sexually harassing an innocent woman and then says, "I just like doing that." This would be the same Bill O'Reilly who was once forced to pay out millions of dollars to a woman in order to settle a sexual harassment lawsuit. Part of the harassment included a taped phone conversation where he talked dirty to the woman while masturbating with a vibrator. I could have left that part out, but I just liked doing that.

We also get scenes of the ghost of General Patton in a gun battle against, well, read the quote:

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.

I hope that none of you wet yourselves from laughing at that. I'm sure the description of this scene killed at the Heritage Foundation, a place where they still get laughs from Billary jokes. And then we get the money scene where Michael Malone is confronted by the ghost of George Washington. That's where...this happens:

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."

That's producer Myrna Sokoloff stating the obvious to which I would like to add a hearty, "DUUUUUUUUH!" That line about the World Trade Center would have been hard to put into the movie World Trade Center.

All this reminded me of a couple of things. First, this is not the first time an outrageous comedy has been made about the post-9/11 world. The first one was Uwe Boll's Postal which I talked about back in May. This movie, especially the scene in which crashing a plane into the World Trade Center was played for laughs, was roundly trashed by the right wing. They wondered what sort of soulless bastard would do something so insensitive as to make light of something as serious and perilous as global terrorism. Now we find out that they meant, "How could you do something like that without advancing the conservative movement?" I was also reminded of the last time that conservatives tried to make something funny. It was conceived as "The right wing Daily Show" and was called The 1/2 Hour News Hour. It was produced by 24 executive producer Joel Surnow who said he wanted to make something that would make Michael Moore's hair stand on end and, as you can see from the YouTube link, not only was it not funny but it was so densely unfunny that light can't possibly escape it. It also shows that conservatives have no idea about what Jon Stewart does. Jon Stewart is a liberal and often fiercely and brilliantly takes conservatives to task on his show. What he does not do is sit with his writers and say, "Ok, how do we use this show to advance the liberal agenda?" Jon Stewart does not try to make a LIBERAL show, he tries to make a FUNNY show. In fact, anyone who's ever seen The Daily Show knows that they show no mercy to Democrats or liberals. Why do they do this? Because it's funny and therein lies the difference between him and Joel Surnow.

Stewart tries to make people laugh while Joel Surnow tried to make Michael Moore's hair stand on end. That's why he failed and that's also why David Zucker has failed so miserably in his attempt at conservative comedy. When he made The Naked Gun, Zucker was trying to make a funny movie. When he made An American Carol, the comedy came second to advancing his agenda. Zucker more or less says this himself in the Weekly Standard article:

He adds: "I don't have any desire to be taken seriously. Really, I really don't. But having said that, I really believe this stuff. Why can't I put it out there? And I'm scared to death of Obama. If I didn't do something about it I would feel--My kids would ask: 'What did you do in the war Daddy?'"

"I donated my career to stop this s--."

Yep, nothing says "laugh riot" like imagining yourself to be the equal of the people who are actually fighting and dying on the front lines. Surely, he can't be serious.

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