Satires about fake wars and the like

There's a genre or subgenre I don't really like all that much that I happen to have seen two of this weekend.

It's the satire about a fake war, or a real war concocted for fake reasons. There are not a huge number of these films relative to the total number of films out there (an obvious statement you could probably say about any niche corner of the cinematic universe), but I've now got two more of them under my belt.

The first I found randomly on Friday night, after my wife and I had finished our evening's allotment of television. I was really too tired to start Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon at nearly 10 o'clock, but I found it on Stan and started it anyway. I made it through 50 minutes before sleep overtook me, and I finished up the next morning.

We got an earlier start the next night as Ricky Gervais' Special Correspondents, a Netflix original, was our compromise out of a lot of bad options. Newly committed to considering Netflix movies as valid entries into my year-end list -- the ones it distributes if not the ones it commissions, necessarily (sorry Adam Sandler) -- I researched the origins of Special Correspondents and determined they had nothing to do with Netflix itself. So we queued this one up not long after 8 -- but I finished it by myself at nearly midnight, which should tell you something about its quality. (I'll tell you more if you stay tuned.)

One is about an artificial orchestration of hostilities between the U.S. and Canada in order to increase the approval rating of an American president who has no war to his credit and no natural enemies at this juncture. The other is about a pair of radio news correspondents who are supposed to be covering a military coup in Ecuador, but lose their passwords on the way to the airport and pretend they are actually in Ecuador while sending dispatches from the apartment across the street from the office.

I quite liked the one I didn't expect to like, and hated the other.

I'd been led to believe over the years that Moore's one foray into fiction filmmaking was an unmitigated disaster, a blemish on a "clean" record of liberal documentary rabble-rousing. Well, I beg to differ. It's not a comic masterpiece, but it's so much better and so much funnier than I was led to believe. It's got all of Moore's trademark satirical considerations and it certainly captures the spirit of an obvious source of inspiration, Dr. Strangelove. (Rip Torn as the aggressive general is practically channeling George C. Scott from that film.) Also, the characterization of laid back Canadians is wickedly funny, with the special standouts being Steven Wright as an excessively polite mountie and the elderly couple in rocking chairs who are charged with the night shift on the national power grid.

And I'd been led to believe that Special Correspondents was good. And by that I mean my wife said she heard someone had said it was good. But Special Correspondents is awful, a total failure of writing, directing, cinematography, editing and acting. Eric Bana's character is aggressively unlikable and never actually redeems those traits. Gervais is self-indulgently schlubby. Vera Farmiga is really slumming it as a woman who capitalizes on a hostage crisis by becoming a celebrity with her own recording contract and perfume line. And the wonderful Kelly MacDonald is left with literally nothing to do. The script is so belabored with painful exposition, most of it delivered by a wooden Kevin Pollak, and the film is just excessively mean-spirited. Avoid it.

If Canadian Bacon is indebted to Dr. Strangelove, I suppose Special Correspondents is more dubiously indebted to Wag the Dog in terms of its tone and general level of absurdity (though it is nowhere near Barry Levinson's film from a technical standpoint). Wag the Dog is the movie I think of when I think of not liking movies like this. There's a self-satisfied tinge to the satire in that movie that just leaves me cold. The absurdism on display there is too cynical, relying too much on people being total idiots in order to believe the fake war that gets concocted (for very similar approval rating reasons to Canadian Bacon, though Wag the Dog actually came two years after Moore's film). I guess I prefer the public to be dumb in kind of sweet ways, like they are in Canadian Bacon.

The other movies listed on AllMovie as similar to Wag the Dog kind of divide me. While I tend to really like movies like Ace in the Hole, Bulworth and Argo -- love in the case of Ace -- movies like In the Loop and American Dreamz do nothing for me. However, other movies on the list that I think are a little less like the movies I'm discussing in this post -- Birdman, Primary Colors, The Ides of March, The War Room, The Contender, Thank You For Smoking and Bob Roberts -- are movies I also like. So maybe I like this type of movie more than I think I do.

Better not see many more like Special Correspondents, though, or it will tip the scales in the other direction for good.

When documentaries aren't enough

When thinking of a fiction filmmaker, we tend to think of either someone who has a specific artistic vision, or someone who's trying to make a buck.

It's a bit different with documentarians. Documentarians have a purpose.

Sure, there are plenty of purpose-driven directors of fiction films. But we can never fully know what their motivations are. Wanting to be rich and famous might be one of them.

Now, we know that's not why people get into documentary filmmaking, or if it is the reason, then they're deluding themselves -- a quality that tends to fly in the face of being a good documentarian. The reason people become documentarians is that they have a story to tell, or corruption to uncover. They want to stand up for the oppressed and take down the giants. They want to save the world.

Seth Gordon may not have been saving the world with 2007's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. But it's for damn sure he wasn't saving the world with Four Christmases, his first studio feature the next year. And no matter how good Horrible Bosses may be -- it's got a promising cast, that's for sure -- he won't be saving the world here either.

Come on, Seth. I thought you were supposed to be "enlightened." I thought you were supposed to not need the glitz and glamor of Hollywood. In fact, I thought you were supposed to shun it.

I don't know why I feel disappointed that Seth Gordon wanted to be "more" than a documentarian. If I were trying to be a filmmaker myself, I'd want to make fiction films. Why should I fault him for getting his foot in the door with one of my favorite documentaries of the past decade, then bolting for the greener pastures and paychecks of Hollywood as soon as the opportunity presented itself? Even if his debut feature was such inferior schlock? Maybe he always wanted to be a fiction filmmaker, and the documentary was the exception.

But I do. I do feel disappointed.

I guess it's the same way you feel disappointed when a public defender starts chasing ambulances. When a crusading journalist takes a cushy PR job. We expect documentarians to be serving a higher purpose than just creating entertainment. It may not be a purpose we ourselves want, but it's an honorable purpose that the world needs.

Of course, there are all kinds of documentarians. Some really are not serving a higher purpose. Seth Gordon made a movie about two grown men competing for the high score in Donkey Kong. It wasn't about human rights violations or a corporate scandal. It was about men seeking a certain type of personal transcendence by moving a joystick better than anyone else. I'd probably be much more disappointed if someone like Alex Gibney directed Four Christmases and then Horrible Bosses. For Gordon, it's not such a big transition.

But I'm still disappointed.

I think part of that has to do with the fact that I just pieced it together that Gordon directed both King of Kong and Four Christmases, so I'm still stinging from that realization. He also played a role in the multi-director effort Freakonomics, which I saw last month and wrote about here, and in looking at his credits at that time, I made the discovery: The same Seth Gordon who directed King of Kong directed Four Christmases. I loved the first and loathed the second, so this was like a kick in the stomach. It felt beneath him. It felt like he traded in quirky insight into human behavior for a rancid Christmas comedy in which the supposed funny parts involved Jon Favreau giving Vince Vaughn noogies and wedgies.

And I think that's really what gets at the oddness of the transition from documentarian to studio hack: It's not even the same skill set. Even if someone makes the greatest documentary you've ever seen, does that then mean they're capable of getting big Hollywood stars to emote? In the case of Four Christmases, the answer was "no."

Take Michael Moore, perhaps the most famous/notorious documentarian working today. As pure as we seem to think his documentary instincts are -- even if he bends the rules in well-documented ways -- Moore too was lured by the temptations of fiction filmmaking. Like Gordon, he had one wildly successful documentary (Roger & Me) and followed that up with his fiction film debut, the satirical Canadian Bacon, in which the U.S. and Canada come to the brink of war. The film was a massive failure and sent Moore scampering back into the documentary world, where he made a name for himself as the polarizing figure he is today. (And, has made a buck or two along the way as well.)

I haven't seen Canadian Bacon, but I'm guessing that the reason it didn't work is that Moore is not good at making fiction films. He makes documentaries, and satisfies his fix for fiction by inserting staged or fictitious elements into them. (Well, maybe that's taking it a bit far -- but he certainly doesn't take the stand-back-and-watch approach taken by most documentarians.) In any case, he's found his niche and it's working for him.

So especially if Horrible Bosses is a flop, it's time for Seth Gordon to scamper back to documentaries. He may have made only one, but it was a darn good one, and a person who can make one good documentary can make two, or three, or four.

There are plenty of other people who can make bad studio comedies.