An American Carol

Review by Jason Gaston

 

There is an delicate balance that one must achieve when creating a politically charged motion picture.  Perhaps the best example of a politically charged movie I can think of is Team America: World Police which raked the left over the coals and did everything it could to show that people who immediately oppose war are pansies who can't see past the tips of their own noses.  This is not an opinion that I share, but I was able to enjoy the movie because never once did I find myself personally offended by the subject matter.  It wasn't demeaning, it wasn't mean-spirited, it was simply a movie espousing a point and, even though I find myself at the polar opposite of that point, I still quote the movie and laugh about scenes in it.

That was the best example I can think of.  Now, let's talk about An American Carol which is everything that Team America is not.  An American Carol is a mean-spirited right-winged propaganda movie made solely for the purpose of attacking an individual, in this case Michael Moore who is parodied in the form of Michael Malone played by Chris Farley's brother, Kevin Farley.

An American Carol is just too preachy to be funny and too simply to be insightful.  What this movie represents is just a straight out attack and, if being an unfunny comedy isn't bad enough, it is so insulting to anyone who slightly disagrees with its very limited dogma that it's impossible to enjoy it if you're slightly to the left of center.  It's a movie built for a very limited audience, the cinematic equivalent of a small group of immature and spoiled junior high girls sitting at their own little table and whispering and giggling at everyone else in the room who won't sit with them.

An American Carol tells the story of filmmaker Michael Malone who is such a tried and true Democrat that he wants to abolish the 4th of July (because, you see, being a democrat means you're unpatriotic) and is visited by three spirits who preach to him the benefits of conservative and "right thinking."

It's really a shame that no "right thinking" went into the construction of his awkward piece of misinformation because a spoof of Michael Moore would be brilliant.  Perhaps a brilliant spoof of Michael Moore will be made some day, after all, the man has a gigantic target on his back.  The problem is, that brilliant spoof hasn't been made yet.  All An American Carol can say about Michael Moore seems to be "he's fat."

That's... not even satire.  It's too stupid for satire.

An American Carol seems to be made up of those anonymous right-wing e-mails that clog my inbox every election full of information that falls apart the moment you start investigating them - those cowardly  hit-and-run messages that start getting quoted as truth.

Kevin Farley plays the role of Michael Malone with all of the charm and vigor we can expect out of the obscure brother of a famous comedian.  Truthfully, I think that if you dug Chris Farley out of the ground and propped up his corpse, you would have probably gotten a better performance out of it than we see from Kevin Farley who brings an annoying shamelessness to the role to the point that watching him for an hour and a half makes you feel like you're getting punished for something.

I can almost respect An American Carol for daring to do right-wing comedy and taking such an unpopular position during the nations great ideological shift away from conservatism, but the movie is so smarmy and self-important, too wrapped up in its own superiority to really take seriously as a comedy and, to be perfectly frank, if I had never watched this movie I think I could have led a happier life.

This movie is awful, preaching to the already converted and happily slapping itself on its own back for its laurels.  Sorry, but if I want to watch a bad comedy with actors preaching the one-sided benefits of conservatism, I'll watch FOX News.