Saturday, October 04, 2008

Movie Review: An American Carol

Conservatives often complain about the complete absence of their views from Hollywood entertainment. Whether you are talking about television, music, or movies, liberal views are expressed overwhelmingly. And conservatives? If conservatives do appear, they are often stereotyped as mean-spirited, narrow-minded, greedy and racist. And those are the nice ones.

Now comes unabashedly conservative An American Carol by David Zucker (of Airplane! and Naked Gun fame).

An American Carol is a conservative twist on Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. The Ebeneezer Scrooge character is Michael Malone (Kevin Farley), who looks suspiciously like Michael Moore. After winning yet another meaningless award for his documentary Die You American Pigs, which no one will see because no one watches documentaries, Malone decides to produce a feature film titled Fascist America.

Fortunately (or unfortunately) for Malone, a group of jihadis are looking for a Hollywood liberal to create a recruitment movie for them. The movie is simply a cover so that jihadis can enter America and blow themselves up at the big Independence Day celebration at Madison Square Garden. They pick Malone because he can be easily bought and his loathing for America makes him completely receptive to their ideas.

During the course of the movie, Malone is visited by three ghosts in the forms of Malone's hero John F. Kennedy (Chriss Anglin), General George S. Patton (Kelsey Grammer), and George Washington (Jon Voight). He's also visited by the angel of death (Trace Adkins), although this part doesn't make as much sense.

Like Airplane! or The Naked Gun movies, An American Carol is filled with irreverent jokes and slapstick humor. This is not a highbrow movie, and if witty reparte is your idea of comedy, this ain't the movie for you. If however, you enjoy pointed barbs as liberal icons (the Rosie O'Donnell lookalike is hilarious), then you will like An American Carol.