I heard about this movie for the first time the other night. A spoof of Michael Moore-type documentaries with a Christmas Carol bent. Chris Farley's brother Kevin would play the fictional Moore and be a total anti-American, complete with a rally to end the 4th of July. It seemed like a funny idea and the cast was top notch: Kelsey Grammar, Dennis Hopper, Jon Voight and Leslie Nielsen. Airplane/Naked Gun/Kentucky Fried Movie vet, David Zucker would direct.
But as I read about it, something seemed off. Was it a good-natured spoof or a conservative response to supposedly Liberal Hollywood? Certainly Moore is a big enough target for a genre spoof, but sometimes if these things aren't gone into with the best intentions they turn out wrong. And the fact that I have seen every major comedy this summer and not one had this movie in its mix of trailers struck me as odd. It's coming out October 3rd and I'm hearing about a Zucker film two weeks before by accident? What's going on here? The last movie he directed was the awful Scary Movie 4, but that made a ton of money.
In fact, the only people who I spoke to who did hear of it, were regular watchers of the FOX News Channel. And they and FOX complained of a Hollywood conspiracy to sabotage this film's release. That might be true, certainly Hollywood tried its best to sabotage The Passion of the Christ, but that was more about the movie's perceived anti-Jewish sentiment. Could Hollywood be so afraid of a film coming from a conservative point of view that they would jeopardize turning away all the money its constituents might spend on it?
Well from viewing the trailer, that might be the case, but I'm guessing they are squelching it because it is an embarrassingly unfunny, amateurish production that would not see the light of day without its director's pedigree. My friend still wants to see it and if the reviews are better than what I experienced then I might go too, just to see what all the fuss is about. But even if it is roundly panned, the conservatives might still spin it as conspiracy by the nation's film critic elite. The same people who think the Blue Collar Comedy Tour is actually funny.
The Freditor
