A little Political Satire To Prove You Aren't Crazy

            Who knew that the election of a black president and talk of healthcare reform would transform conservatives into impassioned protestors?  In less than a year, America’s conservative base has gone from defenders of big business, to the self-proclaimed champions of free speech. They have organized protests, they shouted at elected officials in town halls, and they have suggested America is becoming a tyrannical dictatorship. Sound familiar?  

Well it should.

Somehow, conservatives have manipulated the idea of the counter-culture revolutionary to fit with their political agenda. Instead of the voice of the union-man, the environmentalist, and the bleeding-heart, the rebel has become a god-fearing, suv-driving, global warming questioning, gun-loving, straight-laced voice of the apocalypse.

   I don't know how it happened, but conservative have become the oppressed minority. If you watch the Daily Show then you’ve seen Jon Stewart’s great running gag about how Fox News and their viewers have become the new liberal media, but he isn’t the first point out this absurdity.

            If you've watched the Teabaggers call for succession in my home state of Texas, housewives accuse gay Jews of pushing Nazi policies  on the American public, and modern day minutemen bring loaded weapons to anti-healthcare rallies and thought that these right-wingers would be the ideal candidates for a political satire then you’re right. The only thing is somebody already did it nearly twenty years ago.

In 1992 Tim Robbins released a little mockumentary about the rise of the modern Right. The film is called Bob Roberts, and the similarities between Robbins’ zany characters and today’s real life protestors are striking.

The story takes place during the early stages of the first Gulf War and focuses on a fictitious conservative folk-singer turned politician named Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins) and his 1990 campaign for the Senate. The character Roberts is hugely popular among white middle-class voters who have become disillusioned with post 1960s. All across the state of Pennsylvania Roberts fills up entire concert halls with scared Red-blooded Americans, playing songs about the dangers of welfare, drugs, and the need to bring back traditional American values. His songs mirror the rhetoric of the modern day Fox News host which only goes to show that the complaints of the conservative haven’t really changed since 1992.

My favorite character in this film is Robert’s campaign manager, Lukas Hart III (Alan Rickman). Though we never see it, the film suggests that Hart is the broker behind shady deals with defense contractors and drug cartels in South America, the murder of a journalist, and even the mastermind behind a fake assassination attempt.  What makes Rickman’s performance so hilarious is his ability to use that abstract thing we call American morality as a means to an end; through his religious rhetoric he is given the license to be amoral. Not much of what he says makes sense but you'll feel like you've heard it all before. If anybody ever makes a movie about Dick Cheney, Rickman’s performance in Bob Roberts should make him a top candidate for the role.

When it is all said and done, Robert’s character is nothing more than an inverted Bob Dylan, a point that Robbins really hammers home with album titles like Times Are Changin’ Back and a hilariously cheesy spoof of Dylan's 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' called 'Wall Street Rap.'

In the film, Roberts’ followers are just as enthusiastic as Dylan's were for him. But instead of stone faced beatniks and flower power groupies, the Roberts crowd is made up almost entirely of housewives and suburban white males waving American flags. And Roberts’ most devoted fan, played by a young Jack Black,  shows that celebrity worship is just as popular in conservative circles. Although Black only has a bit part in Bob Roberts, he proves to be one of the funniest characters in the film.

What makes the commentary in Bob Roberts’ so interesting is the how music is used as a way to convey the ideologies of the characters in the film. One of my favorite songs is called ‘Drugs Stink,’  a sunny country tune that calls for the execution of casual drug users. Roberts’ corny songs get their power from their honest portrayal of conservative pop-culture. If you look at the stuff coming out of conservative pop-culture today, you’ll see it is nothing more manipulated version of a sub-culture originally thought to be dangerous to the American Public. However, the second these art forms become a part of mainstream popular culture they have the potential in the promotion of specific political agendas. Don't get me wrong, the Left has done this too, but they haven't been nearly as tasteless.  If you don’t believe me, then look at the Young Cons, or better yet Click Here. Is there really any difference between Mike Huckabee and Bob Roberts? 

I don’t think so. 

  Some other satires worth checking out:

-Network

-Wag the Dog

-Nashville

-Bananas  

-Dr. Strangelove

For better or for worse, Tarantino is Back.

Tarantino’s seventh film Inglorious Basterds has just about everything you’d expect from the director who brought us gems like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. Unfortunately, Tarantino’s unwavering devotion to his own style hurts Inglorious Basterds more than it helps.

The plot of Inglorious Basterds, if you could even call it that, focuses on a rag-tag group of Jewish-American soldiers called "The Basterds" and their ruthless campaign against the Nazis. The Basterds are little more A-Team than they are Saving Private Ryan, something Tarantino exploits whole-heartedly by attaching ridiculous nicknames—like the “Bear Jew” and “Little Man”—to his main characters. By the time Hugo Stiglitz’s back-story appears on the screen, with its flashy jump-cuts and a soundtrack straight out of Superfly, the audience has forgotten about the 1940s completely, and the Nazis have become nothing more than another bad guy in the revenge plot of an average B picture.

The Basterds aren’t the only people in Occupied France who want to kill the Nazis either. There is Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a Parisian Jew whose family was killed by the Nazis when she was a child. Dreyfus’ motivation for revenge is remarkably similar to The Bride’s (Uma Thurman) in Tarantino’s 2003 film, Kill Bill. In fact, their stories are so similar, taht Tarantino uses nearly identical jump-cuts and zooms to communicate Dreyfus’ emotions. But the lazy reuse of old material isn’t my biggest criticism of these sequences. I was more annoyed with the half-hearted portrayal of Shosanna Dreyfus’s story—even the smallest interludes in Jackie Brown and Pulp Fiction had more to them than this. The audience never really saw anything more than a superficial sketch of this character--there needed to be more reminders of her pain and hatred of the Nazis. Blowing off a Nazi soldier who has a crush on you doesn’t really do it for me. When she finally decides to enact some kind of plan, the most the audience sees is a sloppy montage. Unfortunately, the audience never sees the transition from the crying girl in the country to the strong theatre manager in Paris so, Shosanna Dreyfus never becomes anything more than a stock character.

Despite Tarantino’s inability to the leave his devotion to the 1970s and its cinema at the door, this film does have some entertainment value. The Basterds’ leader, Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is about as back woods as you can get and Pitt’s performance is one of the film’s highlights. Pitt’s character speaks in hyperbole and brings in obscure southern references throughout most of the film, but Pitt’s charisma makes up for it and even the most ridiculous lines still sound natural. Tarantino’s decision to take the marketable, leading man stereotype and turn it on it on its ear is something straight out of Alfred Hitchcock’s playbook, and it pays off in spades.

The foil to Pitt’s Aldo Rain is Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), the “Jew Hunter.” Col. Landa proves to one of the most interesting and enigmatic characters in the film. Waltz’s Hans Landa is reminiscent Samuel L. Jackson’s Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction. What made Jackson’s performance so great in Pulp Fiction was the way he meandered through the dialogue, always casual, always in control. But the source of Col. Landa’s power is more mysterious than Winnfield’s and operates on a larger scale.

The way Col. Landa allows his suspects to slowly reveal information through seemingly innocent conversation makes audiences squirm the same way they did when Jules Winnfield asked Greg for a bite of his hamburger in Pulp Fiction. But while Winnfield’s authority comes from Marsellus Wallace, his boss, Col. Landa’s actions appear to be his and his alone. Even when he is around his superiors all of his actions are self-motivated; there isn’t a single character that tells him what to do. This implies that Col. Landa is not directly ordered to do these things, but he actually wants to do it, making the character something truly evil. I only wish the audience was given more background on his character so we could get a better understanding of Col. Landa’s motivation.

Despite the film’s overall sloppiness, diehard fans will be pleased with Inglorious Basterds. The long takes, quirky dialogue, little tributes to the mid ‘70s B picture, the chapter titles—it’s all there. But there aren’t any scenes that steal the show and Tarantino’s normally fresh dialogue starts to get stale about halfway though. At its best, Inglorious Basterds is a superb action film, but the tricks that made Pulp Fiction, Reservoir Dogs, and Jackie Brown so interesting are sorely lacking here. And while this film is distinctly Tarantino, but by the end it starts to look like another homage to Tarantino’s ego.

Overall rating: 7/10

Here is a link to the trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sQhTVz5IjQ