An American Carol

You know the story by now: bitter documentary filmmaker, inadvertently assisting terrorists, is visited by the ghosts of Americans past. On that tiny bit of structure is hung a lot of comedy. Funny stuff, well made, fast-paced, constantly shifting in tone, and always full of fun cameos. Also, stuffed with snarky conservative and/or libertarian comments and jokes. I’m still not sure whether this rapid-fire approach to political comedy is the best one, but it made me laugh and keep laughing.

I loved our craggy-faced Robert Davi in his role as a terrorist leader, alternating between straight man, funnyman, and freakinscaryman. Everybody else is various shades of good.

One inadvertent source of comedy? The trailers chosen to run before the movie. They were all for left-wing political movies about Republicans, who are all baaaaaad. Since one of the morals of Zucker’s story is that Hollywood should write movies that will appeal to their audience, it was lovely to see such timely examples of Hollywood obviously not caring about audience appeal. (Why would any advertiser waste valuable ad time like this? What use is trying to persuade evilbad Republicans at an evilbad conservative/libertarian movie that they should go watch movies vilifying evilbad Republicans? Why not run trailers for movies about kitties and puppies, or something?)

Meanwhile, Zucker paid attention to his own preaching, and toned down the sex and violence of his comedy to something PG-13, instead of the R rating of previous projects like Airplane. Why cut off part of his audience, when a slight change of tone will enable people to come to the movie, and bring their older kids and grandma?