A return to watching movies

When Donald Trump won the presidency on Tuesday, which was Wednesday my time, I vowed not to repeat the mistakes of 2016.

Namely, there was no way I was watching a movie that night.

In 2016, over the next couple nights, I watched the movies Mascots and I Saw the Light. Neither of those were movies I probably would have liked very much even without post-election malaise, but in the dark shadow of that awful time, I hated them. I was then forced out to see Arrival sooner than I might have liked because I was on deadline to review it. I didn't hate Arrival, of course, but it's possible I would have liked it more if my mind hadn't felt diseased by grief.

This time, I was just going to take a couple nights off from watching movies.

Now, I had to watch something. Yes I could finish the night reading, or listening to music, or whatever the alternatives are to the boob tube. But those seemed like situations where my mind was much more inclined to go down rabbit holes it did not want to go down. Pass.

But anything I would watch, whether it was a movie or TV, would be something that would taste sour to me, even if it was good.

So I watched three episodes of Friends. 

This didn't come out of the blue. I started a periodic project of rewatching the series at some point earlier this year, can't remember when exactly. A friend of mine did this a couple years ago, which planted the seed, and that seed germinated into starting that project myself. 

But I haven't been doing it intensely. For example, it hasn't ever taken the place of an evening where I might otherwise watch a movie. The project's role has been to finish off an evening when I got home late, or had some other project that occupied me until 10:30 or 11. Cap off the night with Ross, Rachel, Joey, Chandler, Phoebe and Monica, and steadily make it through the series that way.

On Wednesday night, I chose to watch three episodes, which are shorter than a movie. I probably could have watched one more and made it feature length. In fact it was the classic three episodes in Season 2 where Rachel leaves the drunken message telling Ross she's over him, leading to their first impassioned kiss at Central Perk, which he immediately screws up by making a list of pros and cons about Rachel and Julie that Rachel finds, and then the episode after that. 

And this helped immensely, swaddling me in a blanket of some sort of comfort. I even laughed a few times. I watched another one the next night, along with the second episode of the Netflix series about the 2004 Boston Red Sox, The Comeback.

The irony is not lost on me. Friends is a show featuring, essentially exclusively, white characters. Symbolically, it is not the thing I should have watched on a night when white people elected the worst white person of all time. (The worst American white person, anyway.) (And yes, I am considering him worse than serial killers and other awful people because his potential to inflict damage is so much more widespread.) It's not something I should have watched if I wanted to symbolically protest what had happened. 

But comfort is comfort, and this comfort got me through two nights. And besides, there was no one to judge the symbolism or lack thereof other than me. (And now you, because I'm telling you about it.)

Honestly, though, I am doing better than I was last time. That's for several reasons:

1) A few weeks ago I reminded myself of a few important things about the candidacy of Kamala Harris, in preparation for this possible outcome. I reminded myself that the replacement of a presidential candidate from a major political party only 100 days before the election is essentially unprecedented in American history, if not actually unprecedented. The conditions of desperation that exist to make that sort of move must be so profound that it's effectively a Hail Mary. Probably 95% of Hail Mary passes in football are not caught. That this one almost was was a miracle.

2) People, in general, seem to be racist and sexist, so I should not be surprised by this. I was surprised in 2016. I didn't want to be surprised again. (The optimist in me takes a lot of hits, unfortunately.)

3) I vowed to do what I called "robot mode." I would intentionally divorce myself from feelings of sorrow and despair in order to model composure for my kids and to trick my own brain into feeling better than it actually did. It worked. In fact, I am surprised at how well it worked. By forcing myself to try to feel better, I actually did feel better. And this was even without intentionally avoiding coverage of the election on social media or the news. I still haven't read many news stories, but I've read some, and I've engaged on social media about it. All while feeling less sick to my stomach and more able to be productive. I am now a firm believer in mind over matter, if I wasn't before.

4) I told myself if Trump won the election, my reaction would not be shock and rage but acerbic laughter. If a country knowingly votes in someone like this, you just have to laugh because it just means human beings are weak and docile and mean. 

With all these things combining to give me actually a pretty okay mental state, I thought I could have returned to watching movies on Thursday night. But I allowed myself one more night to be sure.

Then I dipped my toe in the water with a movie that I doubted would be either a big hit or a big miss, and I ended up being right about that.

On Friday night I watched the new Netflix time travel serial killer movie, Time Cut. And yes I did think about how there was a time travel serial killer movie on Amazon last year called Totally Killer. And yes I did think fondly about the real-world desirability of having a time machine right about now.

The movie was almost the perfect three-star viewing experience: A clever enough story of a watchable cast of people who were unfamiliar to me, with a little bit of heart and some interesting causation conundrums, but not excelling enough in any of these areas to truly be memorable. In other words, just what I needed to get back on the horse.

What will I be watching tonight? Is it safe to watch something I actually might love?

I don't know, but my mind is there I think.

Look this is an awful time. Anyone who mopes for the next two weeks is well within their rights. Anyone who mopes for the next four years is well within their rights. It's that bad.

But for me? Mind over matter. Movies over despair. 

Liking Donald Rumsfeld

I'm a good liberal. Let's get that out of the way right at the start.

And let's also draw a distinction between liberal with a lower-case L and Liberal, which is the name of a political party in Australia -- a political party that is, paradoxically, conservative in nature. If you want the liberal (lower-case L) belief system in Australia, your party is called Labor.

So I'm a liberal and a Labor and yet I still found myself drawn in by the version of Donald Rumsfeld I saw in Errol Morris' The Unknown Known.

I kind of think Morris did too.

Rumsfeld is supposed to be the epitome of the Republican boogeyman, the insidious heart of George W. Bush's administration, sharing blame pretty much evenly with Dick Cheney for a bunch of nasty acts committed under the name of American patriotism.

And darn it if I didn't really like watching him in this documentary.

I guess Rumsfeld was initially known as a bit of a media sensation, a guy who had a knack for memorable, if frequently illogical and self-deceptive, quotations. I guess I wasn't following press conferences too closely in 2003 and 2004, because my impression of the man was of a buffoon who had blundered his way out of office. He may have been that, too, but seeing him in this movie, I was fascinated by how intelligent the man seems -- specifically, what a gift he has with language.

The title The Unknown Known is supposed to be a bit of mockery of a famous speech Rumsfeld gave that, I think, was supposed to illustrate his buffoonery. It did the opposite for me here. There's something very pleasurable about the semantic reasoning in the following four phrases:

Known knowns = things you know you know

Known unknowns = things you know you don't know

Unknown unknowns = things you don't know that you don't know

Unknown knowns = things you thought you knew, that it turns out you did not know

I kind of love this.

And as we see a flurry of memoranda from Rumsfeld in this movie -- which he called "snowflakes," and many of which he reads aloud -- we also see a number of other ways the man was interested in linguistics. We see him frequently asking his staff to get him dictionary definitions of various words, which was his attempt to spin doctor himself out of some recent or would-be blunder. It kind of reminds me of Bill Clinton's classic "It depends on what your definition of 'is' is."

Clearly, it's the height of insidiousness to try to talk your way out of legitimately poor decisions or actions taken in bad faith, by throwing the literal meanings of words back at people. But then there's a part of me, a part I'm not necessarily proud of, that devotes a certain percentage of listening to what anyone's saying to me to picking out double entendres and making jokes. That part of me kind of loves Donald Rumsfeld's gleeful relationship with the English language.

There's also something undeniably cuddly about the retired Republican politician. We've seen it before. You didn't like Bob Dole when he was running against Bill Clinton, but the retired Bob Dole? Who doesn't love that guy? I even think W himself seems like a harmless old coot these days, even though he's probably not that old. Once I thought he was the devil.

I doubt Dick Cheney would do that for me, but Donald Rumsfeld? Why not?

There's something about him that seems sincere. He seems like he believed what he was trying to do for this country, and has the reasoning to back it up. But really, it's just that he's that good of a politician. (Did you know he was considered a strong vice presidential candidate when Reagan ran for office? That was an unknown unknown for me.) The leer we see in the poster above is supposed to be Morris reminding us who this guy is -- even though he comes off very well in this movie, and Morris himself seems to have been seduced by him.

And let's get to that part now. Morris is also a liberal, and would call himself a Labor party member if he lived in Australia. So why did he even want to make a movie about Donald Rumsfeld, one in which the intimate participation of Rumsfeld himself would virtually guarantee it being a whitewash job on some level?

I think he too was a bit seduced by how interesting Rumsfeld is as an interview candidate -- that same quality that seduced the media back in the early days of the Bush administration. I certainly wouldn't say he lets Rumsfeld off the hook, as he includes newspaper clippings and news footage that directly contradict some of the things Rumsfeld is saying now. However, if he wanted simply to "get" Rumsfeld, he wouldn't have agreed to a format in which Rumsfeld's interview is basically the spine of the whole movie, knowing that Rumsfeld was shrewd enough to come across well even in the face of pointed and uncomfortable questions.

The irony of the fact that I'm writing this on September 11th -- September 11th in Australia, anyway -- hasn't escaped me. That was the event that pretty much gave birth to the Rumsfeld that we now know -- that gave him a reason for being, a reason for asserting his influence on American foreign policy, and ultimately, a reason for his downfall.

The difference in my perspective on Rumsfeld before seeing this movie, and now, is that I think he may have had genuine care in his heart when he made even some of his worst decisions. And I think that's the problem most liberals have with this movie, if they have one -- they don't think Rumsfeld is a person who deserves to get humanized. He shouldn't get to "win" in any way, shape or form.

Morris' last question of the film -- and you can consider this a spoiler alert if you want -- is "Why are you even talking to me right now?"

Some might ask that same question of Morris, but those are not necessarily the liberals I want to associate with. Morris may have a political agenda on some level, but first and foremost he wants to make an interesting, entertaining film. And he has done that.

And if Donald Rumsfeld had the skills to humanize himself, and the shrewdness to get Morris to give him the opportunity to do that, then more power to him and his ability to cleverly manipulate the semantics of our world.

Yes.

I'm going to take a day off from discussing movies and just enjoy.

These actors will be sad tomorrow (I hope)

If I were 10% less tired or 10% more willing to churn out something unoriginal, I would come up with some kind of movie-related list to honor Election Day. I mean, I've got to recognize the day somehow. Even with about four posts backed up, I don't feel like I can just write any ordinary old post on this first Tuesday in November.

But you've already seen other people tell you the best (or worst) movies about presidents, the best (or worst) movies about elections, and any other feature you can imagine as a variation on these themes: who would play Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in the movie, which candidate has a better favorite movie of all time, whether there are more good movies with red in the title or with blue, etc.

So instead, I just decided to give you a bunch of faces of Hollywood Republicans looking sad.

Yep, that was juvenile. But politics makes us all into infants throwing tantrums.

Go vote, everyone -- and while you're at it, vote for Obama, won't you?

Inadvertent politicking

This November is going to be hard for Democrats. Everyone knows that.

Ironically, the rise of the conservative right-wing Tea Party may actually make it less hard for the Democrats than it should be. Some Tea Party candidates will certainly cannibalize seats that probably could have been won by mainstream Republicans.

But it will still be hard.

And the movie Megamind seems to inadvertently be making it harder, if only on a subconscious level.

I have started to see this eye-catching advertisement for the movie, due out November 5th, up around town. There's actually one just a few blocks from where I live. It works as kind of a subliminal introduction to the title character of the movie, without it being 100% clear that it's a movie being advertised. In fact, it works kind of like a political advertisement.

An inadvertent negative advertisement against the already embattled Obama administration.

The "No You Can't" slogan in the Megamind poster is obviously a play on Barack Obama's famous "Yes We Can" presidential campaign of 2008. The design echoes the design of the most iconic image of Obama presented at that time, which was designed by prominent graphic artist Shepard Fairey, who was also responsible for the Andre the Giant sticker campaign. I've included it here for your reference, in case you're one of the many Americans who has already forgotten, just two years later, that change is not immediate, and that the candidate you supported then is still the same guy now, still trying to do the same things. That poster campaign most often read "Hope" instead of "Yes We Can," but the Megamind poster wouldn't work quite as well, I think, with Hope's opposite at the bottom: "Despair."

Unfortunately, this poster, while likely intended only as a clever visual pun, may help that sense of despair sink deeper into the electorate. See, this poster has an unfortunate real sense of truth, one that is probably totally accidental. Before the 2008 elections, we really thought we could; now, we don't think we can at all, and it all seems like a cruel joke. (I haven't given up hope; I say "we" to describe you ideological sell-outs who want to jump ship on Obama so quickly.)

What's worse is that because it doesn't immediately announce itself as a movie poster, the Megamind poster could read to some people as an actual political advertisement put forth by the right, in which Obama's face is warped into that of a sadistic alien on the verge of maniacal laughter. This would advance the conservative agenda in another way, since the conservatives have always been trying to make Obama seem like an outsider, an "alien," who is not entitled to the presidency, from questioning whether he was actually born in this country, to accusing him of being a practicing Muslim, to using his middle name (Hussein) every time they refer to him.

Then there's the little issue of timing. Megamind hits theaters only three days after the mid-term elections on November 2nd. That means that this "No You Can't" advertising campaign, should they continue using it, might only get more prevalent as the political season heats up, and as the Democrats' control of the senate and the house becomes ever more flimsy. The last thing Obama supporters on the fence need to see, as they're driving to the polls, is one final repudiation of the ideals of the president they voted for two years ago.

So how did this happen?

Like I said, it was surely an accident. If you're looking only at the three main vocal actors in the cast -- Will Ferrell, Brad Pitt and Tina Fey -- you have three very definite liberals. I mean, Brad Pitt adopts African babies and Tina Fey mocks Sarah Palin. How much more liberal can you get?

But of course, we all know that actors have as little to do with the campaigns for their movies as writers or directors or key grips do. So you have to look at the studio, really: Dreamworks. That's right, the company launched by Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffery Katzenberg. Three dyed-in-the-wool liberals. According to wikipedia, Geffen has been a big financial supporter of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, Katzenberg has made 95% of his political contributions to Democrats and less than 1% to Republicans, and Spielberg is ... well, Spielberg. Suffice it to say, if people in the marketing department are going rogue, they won't keep their jobs for very long.

So am I the only one who looked at this poster and thought that it could hurt the Democratic party?

If you asked Tina Fey what she thought of all this, she'd probably say "Lighten up. It's just a movie. And, it's funny."

She'd be right about the last part. But I think she'd be wrong if she were implying that this poster has no possibility of contributing to the din of negativity directed toward Democrats.

If the best advertising is subliminal advertising, then Megamind may be subliminally helping overthrow the politics of hope, and inadvertently helping put Sarah Palin in the White House in 2012.

Who knows -- maybe Fey just wants more work doing her Palin impersonation.

Dagnabbit

I feel like I should be writing something about the Lost finale this morning, considering that it's dominating my brain, and it prevented me from having anything close to a decent night's sleep. However, this is a movie blog, not a TV or pop culture blog, and besides, I don't want to send myself down the rabbit hole of theorizing about what it all meant. (For the record, though, I was very satisfied with it.)

Instead, I'll write about something as opposite from Lost as any piece of "art" can be -- a good old boy action comedy starring a popular country singer who's also an icon of American patriotism and/or hatred of foreigners.

Which doesn't mean, unfortunately, that I didn't like it.

I've discussed before that I'll review almost any movie that doesn't currently have a review on my site, and I'll choose it with all the more gusto if I predict that I'll hate it. Hatred is a very easy perspective to take in a film review, and it can lead to a person's funniest, most colorful writing.

Beer For My Horses, then, seemed like a movie that would be off the charts in terms of my hatred of it. Not only did it figure to be stupid -- I mean, just look at that poster -- but it also figured to be racist, homophobic, xenophobic, and every other negative thing I attribute to the worst conservatives out there. After all, it stars Toby Keith.

In case you need a refresher on the events of 2001, a bunch of Muslim extremists hijacked four airplanes, flying two of them into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon, while the fourth, which may have been headed for the White House, was crashed into a Pennsylvania field by its passengers.

Not long afterward, Keith wrote a song called "Courtesy of the Red, White & Blue," which immediately became a lightning rod for controversy. With good reason. Want a couple sample lyrics?

Soon as we could see clearly
Through our big black eye
Man, we lit up your world
Like the 4th of July

A reference to the retaliatory attacks on Afghanistan by the U.S. military.

And then:

When you hear mother freedom
Start ringing her bell
And it feels like the whole wide world is rainin' down on you
Brought to you courtesy of the red, white & blue

And:

Justice will be served
And the battle will rage
This big dog will fight
When you rattle his cage
And you'll be sorry you messed with
The U.S. of A.
'Cause we'll put a boot in your ass
It's the American way

Okay. So I'm all ready to watch Beer For My Horses, then tear into Toby Keith for 300 words or so.

Didn't happen like that.

Oh, this movie is macho and American alright. It concerns a team of Oklahoma police officers who stake out a spot where there have been reports of fertilizer theft, and cross paths with a Mexican drug ring specializing in the production and sale of crystal meth. And the movie is damn near a product placement for Ford trucks. Keith actually shills for Ford, if not officially, then at least unofficially. There's a segment on the DVD, before the movie starts, in which Ford trucks are overtly praised -- the F-150, specifically.

But every time I thought the movie was going to reveal, and revel in, its patriotism/jingoism/xenophobia, it didn't go that way. The conflict with the Mexicans, for example, seemed like a perfect opportunity for a line of dialogue to the effect of "They should go back to where they came from." But no such line of dialogue ever materializes, and the closest you'd get to an overt disrespect for the Mexicans, as such, is Keith ending a line of dialogue with "Comprende?" That's the age-old convention for "I mean the shit I am saying to you, person who speaks Spanish."

If this were a conventional Hollywood film, rather than a film financed by CMT (Country Music Television), they would probably have to have at least one Mexican character who was as angelically good as the drug dealers are bad. But I don't attribute the lack of that character to be an actual negative commentary by the filmmakers.

What's more, I was surprised to see a line of dialogue that actually made fun of Barbara Bush. They're talking about the Quaker oats man, and Keith says, "You mean that guy who looks like Barbara Bush?" If the movie's intention were merely to push forward a conservative agenda, surely they would not tease a sacred cow like that, totally unprovoked.

And so yeah, I found the film to be light and affable. Did I like it like it? It's hard to say. It is eminently competent, and plenty likable at times. Plus there's a really funny turn by Ted Nugent as a crazy cop who has a hunting knife, a crossbow and a machine gun for each hand in his arsenal. I found myself inclined to laugh whenever Nugent was on screen.

What's more, the film had a pretty legit supporting cast. I had never heard of co-star Rodney Carrington, who is Keith's comic relief -- I have to assume he comes from the Redneck Comedy Tour (or whatever it's called) or some such origins. But the rest of the cast was pretty well known: Claire Forlani, Tom Skerritt, Barry Corbin, Gina Gershon. In other words, people I don't necessarily associate with staunch conservative politics (especially Gershon).

And Keith himself? More than capable. Pretty easygoing, and can deliver his lines effectively.

I feel like I should really hate myself for the fact that I am not going to write a scathing review of Beer For My Horses, but in researching Keith I found out a couple more things about him that may place this film in a context it's easier to understand. For example, although he's a patriot, he has never actually classified himself as a Republican. That's right, he called himself a "conservative Democrat who is sometimes embarrassed for his party" in 2004. He did get into a public spat with noted Democrats the Dixie Chicks over his infamous song, and he did support Bush for reelection in 2004. But in a 2007 interview he said he "never did" support the Iraq War. He supposedly has a close personal relationship with New Mexico governor Bill Richardson (a Democratic Latino). And in August 2008, after previously praising Obama's speaking and potential leadership skills, he described Obama as "the best candidate we've had since Bill Clinton." The usage of the term "we" was fairly short-lived, as he soon re-registered as an independent and said he would probably vote for the Republican ticket because of his admiration for Sarah Palin. (Points lost there.) However, about a year ago, he also said he supported Obama and was taking a wait-and-see approach. (And that's the last wikipedia has about his political views.)

So I guess Toby Keith is a good example of the nuances we would like to think we're all capable of having -- the way our beliefs can shift and adjust within a predictable overall framework. He's more complicated than I ever would have given him credit for.

Complicated, kind of like the limited affection I feel for his movie.

The times, they have a-changed

Steal This Movie is the second cinematic representation of Abbie Hoffman, the self-described "long-haired revolutionary freak," I've seen in the last two years. While Robert Greenwald's movie is basically the biopic of the infamous hippie/yippie, Hoffman also appeared as the most prominent character in Chicago Ten, a rotoscoped documentary recreation from director Brett Morgen, in which his character was voiced by Hank Azaria. I slightly prefer Azaria's characterization to that of Vincent D'Onofrio, but then again, Azaria has made a career with his malleable voice.

It's not the last Hoffman movie we're likely to see, either. I read on wikipedia that Sacha Baron Cohen had been cast as Hoffman in Steven Spielberg's The Trial of the Chicago Seven, though I can find no evidence of that film on either of their IMDB pages. (The movie itself does appear, with a projected 2012 release date, but has no talent attached.) I'd like to see that one. Maybe Hoffman would bring a bag of his own poop into the courtroom, or try to "freak out the system" by acting like a gay fashion reporter.

Watching these two representations of the late 1960s "yippie" movement -- a more radical, activist offshoot of the hippie movement, founded by Hoffman and several others -- reminds me just how much times have changed. Oh, not in the obvious ways we always talk about, like the fact that we have the iPad now, and back then, we only had Maxi Pads. But a change in the actual philosophy about activism.

Specifically, I was struck again last night by the fact that the liberal protesters were demonstrating against a Democratic ruling party. That's right -- Lyndon Baines Johnson, the president they were labeling a "war criminal," was a Democrat. Not only that, but he was John F. Kennedy's vice president and successor. And when Mayor Richard Daley in Chicago arrested numerous youth protesters in 1968, leading to the trial alluded to above, not only was he a Democrat (from one of the country's most famous Democratic families), but they were protesting the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

Can you imagine something like that happening today?

Can you imagine, for example, a group of latter-day flower children organizing a rally against the government of Barack Obama?

And it's not like Obama hasn't done anything to potentially deserve it. To be clear, I'm totally in his corner, but not all of his policies have been what liberals thought they would be. In fact, by sending more troops to Afghanistan, Obama could theoretically wear the title "war criminal" in the minds of the most radical peace activists out there.

But you will never see it. And that has everything to do with how partisan this country has become.

Back then, it didn't matter what political party The Man was affiliated with. If The Man was sending people off to war, he was bad. Which is as it should be, if you think about it.

But today, it seems like we hold our tongues in criticizing our president, in deference to the bigger picture. And there's no coincidence in my using the word "our." Today's liberals really do feel ownership over Barack Obama, and rightly so -- in a way, he's their/our biggest victory ever on a national political level.

In more ways, however, Obama is basically a centrist, as eager to maintain widespread support (more cynically) and help the greatest diversity of Americans (more charitably) as he is to please the liberals who helped elect him to office. That should and probably does piss some liberals off.

But will they protest him? Not hardly. Any perceived weakening of Obama, which protest would seek to create, would give the conservatives inroads to taking control back, to returning this country to the stagnation of George W. Bush. And there's an enemy now that's even greater than Bush, personified by Sarah Palin and her Tea Party. Strangely, they are now the protesters, shouting moronically at public meetings about health care, even if they don't understand what they're shouting about. While traditional hippies are now The Man.

I guess The Man is defined only by what opposes your own way of thinking. But that's what interests me so much about the late 1960s: There were really three groups, the most radical of which considered both the others to oppose it. Hoffman and his yippies certainly weren't trying to effect change in the White House, at least not in the sense of changing the political party in control. Surely, they must have known they would be even worse off with a Republican, and sure enough, Richard Nixon was what they got. Nixon almost immediately surpassed LBJ in all the things they hated about the government, but ironically, they probably helped put him in office.

It's strange to think that liberals are, at their core, believers in big government, yet historically, liberals have also been the government's most outspoken critics. Politics are defined by such apparent contradictions. I love to think about the idea of free speech, and how both Democrats and Republicans champion it as they see fit. Democrats support free speech in terms of a person's right to burn the flag, but they oppose it when it comes to non-politically correct language. Republicans are pretty much the opposite of that.

Vance, this is a movie blog. It seems to me you're writing about politics.

Am I? It's true. But bringing it back to movies, I'm thankful that I saw both Chicago 10 and Steal This Movie, because before seeing these movies, I didn't really understand who Abbie Hoffman was. In Chicago 10, I learned about him in the context of the famous trial of him and his fellow protesters, which turned into a circus. In Steal This Movie, I got more of an appreciation of what came after that, when Hoffman went underground, was diagnosed with bipolar disorder (a factor in his eventual suicide), and became estranged from his young son, named america with a lower-case A. (As a side note, I was tickled to see Michael Cera playing the 8-year-old version of america. Cera was technically 12 at the time the film was released in 2000, but he's such a pipsqueak here that it's hard to believe Arrested Development was only three years ahead in his future.)

And without those movies, I may not have realized just how much the times have, indeed, a-changed.

Not interested any Moore?

So what's happened to Michael Moore in the last two years that makes me not very interested in seeing his latest movie?

When Sicko came out in 2007, I saw it in the theater, and was incredibly moved by it, even if Moore was certainly manipulating my emotions with that whole "taking patients to Cuba to get treatment" scene. I liked the film a lot better than Fahrenheit 9/11, which I thought gave too much ammunition to Moore's critics, and I ended up ranking it in my top 10 for the year.

If anything, Moore's profile should have only improved since then, as Sicko can probably be viewed as some kind of catalyst for the health care debate that's currently dividing the country. Certainly, the election of a progressive Democrat to the White House plays a larger role, but let it not be said that Moore's movie played no role in getting this discussion going.

But maybe I've put my finger on it in that last paragraph. Maybe the election of a progressive Democrat to the White House has reduced Moore's relevance. Maybe his primary function was as a fly in Bush's ointment, as a rallying cry on the liberal side. After all, Moore's last three films -- the period when he gained international celebrity/notoriety -- all came during the Bush administration. Now that the liberals have rallied, and elected Barack Obama, maybe there's just not as much room for Michael Moore (no size jokes please) as there once was.

Then again, today's release of Capitalism: A Love Story is also well timed, in a way. After Obama got an initial honeymoon of about three to four months, the Republican backlash has hit him hard. All those people who called him Barack Hussein Obama last fall have come back out of the woodwork, their thinly veiled racism as thinly veiled as ever. They've poured into town hall meetings to throw the world "socialism" around, and basically created the appearance that the vast majority of Americans do not want the health care reform that would benefit most of those making the protests.

So is this a deceptively appropriate moment for Moore to rise again?

Well, it's hard to say, especially when Moore himself doesn't think so. In fact, the man has gone on record recently saying he may be finished with documentaries, at least for now. Before Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly go doing a victory dance on their anchor desks, they should know that Moore will probably touch on his familiar liberal concerns in the fiction films he's discussed making after his documentary career ends.

And maybe that's part of why Capitalism doesn't interest me that much, either: Even the man considers himself done, and wants to leave the scene before he becomes a parody of himself, if he hasn't already. I think when I saw the first trailers for Capitalism, I thought, "Oh here we go again -- Michael Moore and his microphone doing something outrageous." And this reaction is from one of his ideological soul mates, mind you. However effective your gimmick -- and I don't really mean to insult Moore by calling it a gimmick -- is, it always gets tired eventually. Like if we see Sacha Baron Cohen haul out yet another character he wants to send out to shock and offend people, we'll probably react to it even more negatively than we reacted to Bruno (which I still haven't seen).

But then there's the part of me that worries about that Beck/O'Reilly victory dance. Any tendency to recede from the public eye on Moore's part could easily be viewed as Moore "giving up," as a victory for conservatives. The last thing I want to do is let the conservatives think they fatally wounded their target last year when the execrable An American Carol was released. You may remember me discussing it here, but if not, I'll synopsize: A thinly-veiled -- okay, not veiled -- Michael Moore clone named Michael Malone wants to boycott the 4th of July because of his rampant anti-Americanism. (See, Moore is always accused by his critics of being unAmerican). What results is a sort of Naked Gun-style, heavily conservative spoof of A Christmas Carol, in which Malone receives his comeuppance (and numerous physical pratfalls) in the course of being visited by three ghosts, all played by famous conservatives (Kelsey Grammer, Jon Voight, Trace Adkins, etc.). The movie was downright terrible -- I'd like to think I would have ranked it last for the year on execution alone, even if I hadn't disagreed with its politics. But with Moore announcing that he's getting out of the game less than a year after its release, both the filmmakers and the film's ideological supporters will probably think An American Carol had something to do with it. Conveniently ignoring, of course, the massive victory Moore scored over them when Obama was elected president.

So I'd like nothing more than to contribute to a large box office haul for Capitalism: A Love Story this weekend, the same way I wanted to stick it to the religious people who boycotted The Golden Compass by boosting that film's box office.

But I just don't think I will, and I don't think I'll be the only one of Moore's former flock to make that decision. I've got too many other movies I'd like to see first -- Zombieland, Paranormal Activity, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Big Fan, Whip It, The Informant! ... the list staggers me without even including Capitalism. If other liberal movie fans are in my camp, and feel barraged by a surprising number of September releases they need to see, the movie may struggle to make $5 million.

Well, I guess we'll just have to be satisfied with our Democratic president and our Democratic majorities in the House and Senate. If we're still measuring our successes by the zingers Moore scores, and are so easily agitated by the conservative windbags who try to get under our skin, then we're just dropping down to their level.

And I for one am interested to see Moore's next attempt at a fiction film. I haven't actually seen the much-maligned John Candy vehicle Canadian Bacon, but it can't be the best he has to offer, can it?

Republican roll call

You know when you fall asleep watching Saturday Night Live, and you wake up all befuddled, and Showtime at the Apollo is on? And you have this moment where you think "Wow, this program really isn't intended for me?" (Forgive me, my readers of color -- I'm working a bit about white people here.)

That's how it is for a liberal to watch David Zucker's disasterpiece An American Carol.

It's really rare to see fringe ideology -- let's face it, neo-con thinking is pretty fringe in Hollywood -- appear in a mainstream product that gets a theatrical release. And so as you watch An American Carol -- a jingoistic, mean-spirited screed against liberals, their documentaries, and Michael Moore -- there's a weird sensation of watching a piece of Republican propaganda break past all the invisible barriers Hollywood usually constructs against it. It's not that this movie shouldn't have the right to exist -- it's that this movie is just so downright different that it calls attention to itself.

It's kind of like liberal and conservative media. The liberal media is only liberally biased -- it's a totally subtextual thing, else it would really would be unavoidably scandalous. But to counteract that bias, conservative media has to be openly, blatantaly, unquestionably conservative. The way the public debate has been couched, that's an acceptable response to even a hint of liberal bias.

And so it is with movies. While movies with a liberal agenda are usually as subliminal as they can be about it (with the notable exception of Moore's movies themselves), movies with a conservative agenda are ... well ... An American Carol. And to think this man, David Zucker, once directed the first really great spoof -- Airplane! Someone who's dead from that movie rolls over in his/her grave.

The only thing that's fun about watching An American Carol (because it sure as hell ain't the least bit funny) is the conversation you get to have with yourself while watching it. And that conversation basically boils down to looking at the participants in this movie and thinking:

"Is he a crazy Republican, or is he just doing this for the money?"

So to save you the trouble -- and believe me, you don't want this kind of trouble -- I'm going to run down the cast for you:

Kelsey Grammer (as General Patton): Kook. Says he got screwed on an attempt to donate money to the Democrats years ago, and is now a card-carrying Republican. Ah Fraser, I thought people who spoke like Brits were supposed to be enlightened.

Kevin Farley (as Micheal Malone): Paycheck. Although Farley has supposedly told people he's been a life-long conservative, my guess is that he's trying to play along. He looked kind of like Michael Moore, and this was his chance for the "leading man" role once occupied so regularly by his brother Chris. So let's call it Paycheck combined with Stepping Out of Sibling's Shadow.

James Woods (as Agent Grosslight): Kook. He gets to tell Farley's Malone "Save it for your crazies" with a dismissive wave of his hand, and he means it. Besides, Woods is the guy who claimed he saw some of the 9/11 terrorists on a flight a month earlier and notified a flight attendant about them. Racial profiling to the rescue once again!

Robert Davi (as Aziz): Kook. That's right, the key Islamist extremists are all played by Americans. I was tempted to put Paycheck there just because Davi's career has been so bad, but he's supposedly pretty outspoken. (You're going to notice a pattern here.)

Jon Voight (as George Washington): Kook. Yep, Voight's politics differ significantly from those of daughter Angelina. Hey, he accused Barack Obama of "sowing socialist seeds in young people." What more do you need?

David Alan Grier (as Rastus Malone): Paycheck. This was before his surprisingly funny talk show on Comedy Central, Chocolate News, had proved to be as surprisingly funny as it is. If that show weren't enough to indicate Grier's political alliances, we have Zucker's comment about the very brief appearance (brief enough not to really know what the movie was about?) by the comic: "I'm sure David Alan Grier was appalled."

Trace Adkins (as the Angel of Death): Kook. Trace Adkins is a country singer. Nuff said. (The Dixie Chicks notwithstanding.)

Bill O'Reilly (as Bill O'Reilly): Total Kook. Dead giveaway of what kind of movie this is, if you ever had a doubt.

Dennis Hopper (as Judge): And this is the really sad one ... Kook. Dennis, what happened to the drug-loving hippie we used to know? Perhaps most dispiritingly, Hopper plays a gun-loving judge who starts blowing away zombified versions of ACLU lawyers. And there's no irony.

Leslie Nielsen (as Osama bin Nielsen/Grandpa): Paycheck. Favor to Zucker, and vice versa.

Notably absent: Patricia Heaton, Jim Caviezel, Clint Eastwood, the corpse of Charlton Heston, God

If you have a healthy skepticism, you're probably thinking I hate this movie because of its politics, not because it's mind-numbingly unfunny. But just to show you that's not the case -- or not totally the case -- I think there's a very funny idea somewhere hidden beneath the American flags and hateful jabs at Rosie O'Donnell. A guy -- and why not have him be based on the flawed liberal icon Michael Moore -- who wants to abolish the 4th of July is a funny idea. But what they do with it ... garbage. Absolute garbage.

In any case, now we also have a clearer idea of who the enemy is. Kelsey, Jon, James, even you Dennis ... watch your backs.