America: The Motion Picture - A Review and Commentary

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America: The Motion Picture is so stupid it actually thinks it’s smart, just like the country it parodies.

The movie is dreadful and relentlessly unfunny, but it’s unintentionally a perfect representation of the clownshow that is modern American culture.

America: The Motion Picture is a new animated feature film on Netflix that parodies the founding fathers and the American revolution.

The film, directed by Matt Thompson and written by Dave Callahan, boasts a stellar voice cast of Channing Tatum, Bobby Moynihan, Will Forte, Olivia Munn, Simon Pegg and Andy Samberg among many others, and some imaginative animation.

But the most distinguishing feature of America: The Motion Picture is also the most distinguishing feature of the country whose founding it parodies, and that is its condescending, blindly arrogant belief that it’s so smart despite the obvious fact that it’s so egregiously, relentlessly stupid.

Just to give you a taste of the absurdity and idiocy on display in this film, here’s a brief rundown of the plot.

George Washington and Abe Lincoln are best friends, and when Benedict “Cosby” Arnold, who is a werewolf, slaughters the signers of the Declaration of Independence, steals the document, and then murders Lincoln at the Ford Theatre, Washington vows revenge and to stop the British Empire from taking over the world.  Oh, and Washington has chainsaws that pop out of his arm like a founding father Wolverine when he does battle.

Washington then gets his team together, which include Geronimo, Thomas Edison – who is a Chinese woman, Sam Adams – who is a party hound frat bro, and Paul Revere – who is friendless and quite possibly a human/horse hybrid, to fight back.  

The plot staggers around like a drunken hobo from one extraordinary inanity, like King James coming to America on the Titanic to finish his super weapon, to another, like Paul Bunyan boxing with Big Ben as double decker buses transform into Imperial Walkers.

Of course, that all sounds incredibly stupid, but the stupidity is the point. The filmmakers are trying to not only make a parody of the American myth, but also satirize the historical ignorance of the viewing population.

As intentionally absurd as the plot of America: The Motion Picture is, the joke is that there are probably lots of people who will think, Washington’s Wolverine chainsaw hands aside, that it’s somewhat true, no doubt duped by the official “based on actual history” tag that opens the movie.

Polls show that only four out of ten Americans would have enough knowledge of history to pass an American citizenship test. The only state in the country that has a majority of residents who’d pass the citizenship test is…Vermont, and I’d be willing to bet a majority of Americans don’t even know Vermont exists.

The problem with America: The Motion Picture isn’t its endless adolescent humor, which includes a plethora of sex jokes, gay sex jokes and inter-species sex jokes, or that it makes fun of the founding fathers, anyone sensitive about sacred cows like Washington and Lincoln being comedically desecrated is ridiculous, but that it’s so condescending enough to think that only the “other side” is filled with ignoramuses.

This bias, which caricatures only the American myth believing fools, flag wavers and rednecks who spontaneously sing the national anthem at Walmart as the idiots, is the movie’s glaring ideological blindspot.

Yes, those that buy into the star-spangled myth are, in my opinion, worthy of being mocked, as they often reflexively take a short cut to thinking and buy into America’s militarism and belligerent foreign policy, and adorn themselves with buffoonish bumper sticker slogans like “these colors don’t run” and “love it or leave it”.

But let’s not kid ourselves, no side in the American cultural and political landscape has a monopoly on stupid. Too cool for school liberals are just as moronic as their conservative counterparts.

For example, it was liberals who screeched about Trump’s “war on the press” but then cheered Julian Assange’s imprisonment and torture. It was the liberals in the media that shouted down any talk of the lab leak theory as racist. It was liberal medical professionals and scientists who declared that gathering in crowds during Covid lockdown was deadly, unless it was to protest for Black Lives Matter. It’s woke liberal jackasses who think the solution to their imagined pandemic of anti-black racism is to force everyone to identify with their race – even though America is an overwhelmingly white country. It’s these same liberals that over-estimate police killings of black people by over 10x, 100x and some even 1,000x the actual rate.

And remember, it was the majority of Americans, both left and right, that, unlike me, wholeheartedly embraced the disastrous and murderous Iraq War, Reagan and Clinton’s financialization of the economy and free trade - which gutted the working and middle class, and who fell for not only Bush’s normalizing trade relations with China but also his post 9-11 War on Terror scaremongering, as well as Barack Obama’s smoke and mirrors marketing campaign known as Hope and Change.

The bottom line is that while Covid has slowed down, the pandemic of stupidity in America is accelerating at an astonishing rate across party, ideological, racial and class lines.

As for the dopey America: The Motion Picture, it’s a perfect representation of America because it’s so stupid it thinks it’s smart. By the way, the movie isn’t just dumb, it’s dreadful and gratingly unfunny, so like American lectures on “exceptionalism” and “democracy”, you can skip it. You’d be better served watching Mike Judge’s prescient 2006 film Idiocracy, which at this point feels like a documentary.

 A version of this article was originally published at RT.

©2021

Logan Lucky : A Review

****THIS REVIEW CONTAINS ZERO SPOILERS!!! THIS IS A SPOILER FREE REVIEW!!!****

My Rating : 1 out of 5 stars

My Recommendation : SKIP IT. No use seeing this clunker anywhere or at anytime. 

Logan Lucky, written by "Rebecca Blunt" and directed by Steven Soderbergh, is the story of Jimmy Logan, a down on his luck West Virginian from a perpetually unlucky lineage, who decides to pull off a heist of a NASCAR race with his family and friends. The film stars Channing Tatum, and features supporting turns from Adam Driver, Daniel Craig, Seth MacFarland, Katie Holmes and Hillary Swank.

A few years ago, director Steven Soderbergh announced he was retiring from directing movies. I know people who hold Soderbergh in the highest artistic regard, so much so they would place him on the Mount Rushmore of American filmmakers alongside Kurbick, Scorsese, Malick and Altman (or whatever filmmakers you may choose for such an honor), so when he retired they were downtrodden.  I have never disliked Soderbergh, but I have never held him in such high esteem either. Soderbergh is worshiped by critics, which, considering my tepid opinion of him, always makes me think of what Van Halen's frontman Diamond David Lee Roth said in 1984 about another critical darling, Elvis Costello, who is the musical equivalent of Steven Soderbergh. Roth said, " I think music critics LIKE Elvis Costello, because they LOOK LIKE Elvis Costello". I believe the same can be said of Steven Soderbergh. 

I think Soderbergh is a very skilled director, but if I am being honest, I think his greatest talent is in elevating otherwise mundane material into moderately above average films. Even his great films (meaning most successful financially and critically) like Traffic, Erin Brockovich and the Ocean's Eleven trilogy, are anything but transcendent. Traffic is arguably Soderbergh's best film and won him a Best Director Oscar, and while it is certainly an interesting film, it never rises to be a truly great one. 

That said, I did enjoy Sex, Lies and Videotape, Traffic and Che (maybe my favorite Soderbergh film), and was even entertained by the technical proficiency of the Ocean's Eleven franchise, so when I heard Soderbergh was returning from his self-imposed exile, I thought I'd go check out the fruit of his labor. 

The thought that came to my mind while I sat through the first third of Logan Lucky was…Steven Soderbergh came out of retirement for this? At the half way point of the film, the thought I had was…Soderbergh definitely should've stayed retired. In the final third of the film, it occurred to me…he did.

Logan Lucky is a derivative, repetitive, manipulative and painstakingly dull movie with no redeeming value whatsoever. The film is an homage to Soderbergh's Ocean's Eleven films, and even self-consciously describes itself as Ocean's 7-11, a play on the fact that it is a heist movie featuring hillbillies in West Virginia and not professional thieves in Las Vegas. The question remains though, were people clamoring for a redneck Ocean's Eleven? And why would Soderbergh return to moviemaking with such an insidiously frivolous and insipid film that, even giving it every benefit of the doubt, has no artistic purpose to it and is devoid of any greater meaning? I understand that not all movies have to "mean" something, and I readily accept that Logan Lucky is meant to be nothing more than pure entertainment, but that still doesn't explain why it would be Soderbergh's comeback vehicle.

In terms of entertainment and fun, Logan Lucky fails in the most conspicuous way because it contains absolutely zero laughs. The continuing and only punchline in the film are the hillbillies who inhabit it, which makes Logan Lucky feel uncomfortably like a modern day version of Stepin Fetchit set in Appalachia meant to belittle and demean working class White people. Everyone in the movie is a one-dimensional idiot and a walking caricature and if they were a racial or religious minority would undoubtedly be considered extremely offensive. 

Another huge issue with a heist movie populated with idiotic bumpkins, is that it makes the heist seem totally unbelievable. In the Ocean's Eleven films you had professional thieves concocting elaborate schemes to rob a casino, and those films certainly strain credulity, but they are able to maintain a tenuous grasp upon reality because they have set up the premise of an all-star group of sophisticated con men attempting to pull off the job. In Logan Lucky, the exact opposite occurs, the set-up for the film is that everyone is a moron with "Born to Lose" tattooed in their chests, yet they are somehow able to conceive, coordinate and then pull off this complicated and convoluted heist in the most improbable way. The film suffers from this detachment from any sort of believability also because of its own disgust with the culture and people it portrays. 

The other problem with having a cast of characters that are all nitwits, is that you never connect with them, you only laugh at them. What this does is eliminate any sort of suspense or drama when they are trying to pull off the heist. You don't care if they get caught because you don't care about them. It is impossible for an audience to care about characters when the filmmaker doesn't, and in Logan Lucky, Soderbergh is holding up the rednecks for ridicule, not reflection. 

It doesn't help that uniformly, the cast does a second rate job of acting. The accents are all too big, too showy and hit too hard to be even remotely considered believable. And it seems everyone, with the notable exclusion of Channing Tatum, turns their character into a quirky  eccentric for quirkiness and eccentricities sake. The film is so stuffed with wacky, unreal characters it feels more like an homage to Hee-Haw than Ocean's Eleven.

Sadly, the film also boasts what may be three of the worst performances I've seen this year. Seth MacFarland, Hillary Swank and Katie Holmes are so bad in this movie it is staggering. MacFarland is so atrocious he should be banned from ever appearing on any screen, anywhere, ever again. Holmes  strains so hard to be her "character", I was afraid she was going to have a stroke. And Hillary Swank makes the unbelievably poor decision to try and imitate Clint Eastwood with her performance as an FBI agent. I am not kidding, she looks like a third-rate Rich Little trying to impersonate Clint, with everything from her voice to her posture mimicking the iconic tough guy. Not surprisingly, it comes off as amateurish, unreal and frankly embarrassing. 

What made the Ocean's Eleven films successful were that they were efficiently made, beautifully shot, and they allowed the audience to feel like they were hanging out with the biggest movie stars in the world. Men got to project themselves onto George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and company, while women got to project themselves with George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and company. At their core though, what the Ocean's films really did, was give the celebrity worshiping audience an opportunity to watch good looking famous people have more fun than they ever would, at a party they could watch but weren't invited to enter.

Why Logan Lucky fails is that, while efficiently, but certainly not exquisitely, made, it gives the audience an opportunity to hang out with people with whom they would never choose to be around. It gives male audience members no one to project themselves onto, and gives female audience members no one to swoon over. At Logan Lucky's most basic level, it is an utter failure. The blame for that rests on Steven Soderbergh, and on screenwriter Rebecca Blunt, who may or may not be a real person, and may be a pseudonym for Soderbergh himself. I can see why Soderbergh would want to hide behind a fake name for churning out the piece of excrement that is this script. 

In the final analysis, unlike say Detroit, which was an awful movie about an important topic, Logan Lucky is a meaningless movie about nothing, so it being as dreadful as it is didn't make me angry, it just made me bored. I had no interest in anyone or anything in this movie. I was daydreaming and even considered leaving, but I figured, if nothing else, I'd sit in the air condition and enjoy the full two hours of cool darkness. That said, even if you are desperately attempting to avoid sun stroke or dehydration, don't do it by sitting through Logan Lucky. I recommend you embrace your heat induced hallucinations rather than waste your time and money sitting through this dead-on-arrival piece of detritus. And even if you stumble across it for free on tv, skip it, life is too short to spend two hours of it watching something as inconsequential and moribund as Steven Soderbergh's latest, and hopefully final, film.
 

©2017

FOXCATCHER and the Problem of Perspective

WARNING: SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD!!! CONSIDER THIS YOUR OFFICIAL SPOILER ALERT!!! READ NO FURTHER IF YOU WISH TO REMAIN A FOXCATCHER VIRGIN!!

In January of 1996, John du Pont, heir to the massive du Pont family fortune, shot and killed Olympic gold medal winning wrestler Dave Schultz in front of the house Schultz lived in with his wife and two children on the sprawling du Pont family compound. I remember when this incident occurred and watching the national news stories about it, which were heightened because of du Pont's famous family name and tremendous wealth and Dave Schultz's standing as an American Olympic hero. After committing the murder John du Pont locked himself in his home and refused to come out. It all had the shades of a sort of O.J. Simpson type of situation. The stand off with police lasted two days before John du Pont was apprehended. It was a riveting, fascinating and incredible story. The one thing I remember most from watching the story unfold in real time was asking myself the question, why would a guy with so much money and power, the things we are taught to value the most here in America, throw it all away by killing an olympic hero? What was the real story? It was a compelling mystery and I always thought that answering that question would make a great movie. Which is why I was so excited to see the story made into the film Foxcatcher, directed by Bennett Miller and starring Steve Carrell, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo.

In the film, Channing Tatum plays Mark Schultz, an olympic wrestler and Dave Schultz's younger brother, Mark Ruffalo plays Dave Schultz and Steve Carrell plays the eccentric John du Pont. The main focus of the film is the odd relationship between Mark Schultz and John du Pont who is one very strange wrestling enthusiast and philanthropist.

Since nearly twenty years had passed since the murder, I had forgotten the majority of the details of the crime, and only vaguely remembered the basics of the story, and upon seeing the film I realized I had mis-remembered a lot of the actual story, so consequently I was surprised by how the story played out. Usually being surprised by a film is a really good thing, but in the case of Foxcatcher, the reason I was surprised was also the reason the film fails, and that is because the film has a gigantic problem with the basics of storytelling perspective. To illustrate my point I have to give away the end of the film, so even though I've already given a SPOILER ALERT at the top, here is your final SPOILER ALERT. 

The biggest issue with the film is that it never comes to terms with it's perspective problem. The film is shown from Mark Schultz's perspective. We see everything play out from his point of view. Miller uses the camera to show us what Mark sees through his eyes, and we hear what Mark hears, we experience the world as Mark experiences it. This technique creates a connection between the viewer and Mark. We empathize with him, we root for him, we project ourselves onto him. The choice to do this is a really critical error in telling this story. The filmmaker had basically four perspectives to choose from in telling the story. There was Dave Schultz's perspective, John du Pont's perspective, Mark Schultz's perspective and there is the 'God' perspective, where the audience sees everything and knows everything. Miller chose Mark's perspective, which to me is the weakest perspective to choose of the four because in reality, Mark is a secondary character in the story, but in the film they make him the main character. The main characters in the real-life drama are Dave Schultz and John du Pont. They are also the more interesting characters. That is not to say that Mark isn't interesting, it is just to say that he isn't AS interesting as Dave Schultz and John du Pont.

An example of how Miller establishes that this is Mark's story, and why he shouldn't have, is one sequence where Mark, who at this point in the story has turned against his one time benefactor du Pont, must work out extra hard prior to a weigh-in in order to lose the twelve pounds he gained in a self-loathing binge the night before, in order to be allowed to wrestle. In the sequence Mark rides a stationary bike in the bowels of an arena trying to sweat out the weight while brother Dave encourages him. Then we see du Pont enter the hallway in front of them and Mark is obviously unhappy to see him, so Dave intercepts du Pont before he can get into ear shot of Mark and he has a conversation with him. Just like Mark, we don't get to hear that conversation, we only get to see it occur through Mark's eyes and through the glass of the door. That would have been a great scene to watch and listen to. The older brother protecting his little brother from the strange du Pont, but also keeping du Pont happy because du Pont was Dave's benefactor at this point too, and Dave has a wife and young kids to feed. We don't get to see that scene up close or hear it at all, that is the choice director Bennett Miller made. That is okay, and could have worked in the film if the actual, real-life story turned out another way, with du Pont shooting Mark instead of Dave (which is what I thought would happen since I mis-remebered the true story and since the film was showing us everything through Mark's perspective), or with Mark at least being present for the shooting. But it didn't. In the end, when du Pont shoots and kills Dave, Mark is all the way across the country when it happens, and entirely off-screen.  In the climax, we see everything that Mark couldn't see after spending two hours seeing only what he could see, and on top of that, we are never even allowed to see Mark's reaction to the news of the murder. We never get any closure with the story because we have been forced, through the choice of the director, to project ourselves onto Mark for the first two hours of the film, now in the final act of the film, we are abruptly and jarringly pulled from that perspective and thrown into the "God" perspective of seeing all. The film ends with Mark in an arena about to go into an octagon and compete in an MMA fight, but as the scene begins he sits backstage waiting to go on. I kept thinking someone would come up and say "Mark, phone call" and he'd go to a pay phone and get the news that the creepy du Pont had killed his brother, but we never got that.  That scene never happens and it is such a massive mistake on such a basic storytelling level that is is absolutely shocking. The ending of the film undermines the entire choice to use Mark's perspective to tell the story. It makes absolutely no storytelling or filmmaking sense. Never getting to see the impact of Dave's death on Mark is not only a truly baffling filmmaking decision, but an unforgivably wasted opportunity.

Part of why that is a wasted opportunity is because it would have been a great scene to see Channing Tatum sink his teeth into. I must admit, I have never really understood the Channing Tatum phenomenon. I know women go crazy for him, but I just don't get it (not surprisingly), and I have never seen him be anything other than passable in terms of acting on film. I don't think he's terrible, I just don't think he's ever been very good, or much of anything for that matter. But to his great credit, he does a really good job as Mark Schultz, and I would've appreciated seeing him tackle the scene where he learns of his brother's murder. What I did really admire about his performance was that he fully committed to the part physically. He had a very distinct gait and carriage and even transformed how he held his jaw and forehead. When you are Channing Tatum, you don't have to do stuff like that. He could have just gotten all ripped physically and been a piece of eye candy, but instead he decided to actually become another person and inhabit a character. I commend him for the hard work and putting thought and time into it. It is a sad thing to say, but an actor actually committing to their work and doing their job is worthy of praise in the Hollywood of today.

Mark Ruffalo is fantastic as the older, and more successful, brother, Dave Schultz. His complicated relationship with his younger and more emotionally fragile brother Mark is a really rich and layered piece of work. We don't get to see too much of his relationship with du Pont, which is a shame because it really would have been fascinating to see him handle the eccentricities as deftly as possible while trying to keep the money train flowing in order to provide for his family. Again, another wasted opportunity that is all the more glaring since the majority of the film is undermined by the final fifteen minutes. I think using Dave's perspective to tell the story would have been a much wiser storytelling choice and also would have let us see much more of the subtle and intricate performance that Ruffalo delivers.

Steve Carrell's work as John du Pont is good but I have to say, through no fault of his own, it feels incomplete. Carrell embraces the oddities and eccentricities of du Pont, and there are lots of them, and he believably transforms himself into the character, but once again, the choice of using Mark's perspective to tell the story robs us of the chance to really get to know du Pont, to get into his head and to understand him on anything other than a surface level. I would have loved to see just a single scene of John du Pont by himself in a room, for instance. Carrell is much more than just a comedic actor, and I would have really loved to see him get the opportunity to do more with such a fantastic part, but sadly the script does't permit it and the film suffers for it. A really fascinating film would have been one told from John du Pont's perspective because he is the real mystery in all of this. The film never really even approaches the topic of why, exactly, John du Pont killed Dave Schultz. I have done a bunch of reading on the murder since seeing the film, and the more I read about it, the more obvious it is that the story of John du Pont, and the twisted and dark world residing in his head, is the real treasure that the filmmakers should have gone after.  But I guess they didn't have the courage to reach for that brass ring. Their film is so much the lesser for it.

Foxcatcher is one of those films that really could have been great. It is a fascinating story with really unique characters and is populated by a cast of very talented and interesting actors. It has all sorts of intriguing issues boiling just underneath it's surface…America's corruption, moral decay, and hypocrisy, class warfare, the degradation people will sink to in order to get money, fame or success.  But sadly, the film, not unlike John du Pont the man, is a failure, and not unlike the murder of the great Dave Schultz, I think it is a senseless and tragic waste.

© 2014

FOR REVIEWS OF OTHER FILMS RELEASED DURING THE HOLIDAY SEASON, PLEASE CLICK ON THESE LINKS TO THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING , WHIPLASH , BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE) , WILD , AMERICAN SNIPER , THE IMITATION GAME , A MOST VIOLENT YEAR , NIGHTCRAWLER , STILL ALICE , INHERENT VICE , SELMA , MR. TURNER , CAKE .