Do not watch “An American Carol”
There is exactly one scene in An American Carol that is even slightly amusing or clever. Appearing on Bill O’Reilly’s talk show, a Rose O’Donnell clone explains that she finds Christian extremists just as scary as Islamic extremists. To prove her point, she airs a clip of a documentary chronicling the numerous instances of Christian terrorism in action, and we’re treated to a montage of men in black suits and collars hijacking a commercial airliner, as well as an elderly nun suicide-bombing a tourist bus. “Hail Mary full of grace!” she yells before pressing the detonator. It’s a great scene because it jarringly illustrates just how bizarre and dumb it is to compare the bigoted excesses of evangelical Christianity with the murderous psychopathy of fundamentalist Islam. If American Carol was just a YouTube video of this one scene I’d give it five stars. But alas, it is not, and to view this one brilliant minute you have to suffer through the agony of 129 others.
The ostensible point of An American Carol, is that it’s supposed to be some sort of humorous right-wing rebuttal to everything that’s wrong with contemporary American liberalism. So the film follows the antics of a fictional character named “Michael Malone,” a fat, unshaven, far-left documentary filmmaker (he’s supposed to be Michael Moore, in case that’s unclear) who hates his country for all sorts of ignorant reasons. He hates America so much, in fact, that he’s decided to stage a protest to cancel the 4th of July. Before he can get around to this, however, he conks his head and is visited by three patriotic ghosts who attempt to teach him the errors of his ways (get why it’s called “Carol” now? eh? eh?). There are also some terrorists involved, and ACLU zombies and a bunch of other nonsense.
Look, ideologically, I sympathize strongly with where this film is coming from. I consider myself quite conservative, I hate Michael Moore, and I think the film’s main message — that the war on terror is a just war and we should all support it — is a good one. But An American Carol is just such an incredibly atrocious, vapid, unfunny, over-the-top, awkward, monstrosity of a picture I am embarrassed to even be nominally on the same philosophical side of whoever made this.
It’s an old adage that you don’t fight bias with more bias. Yet that’s precisely what An American Carol does. We all know that Hollywood leans left, but surely the absolutely worst way to point that out is to make a film that is as absurdly right-biased as this one. Like an Ayn Rand novel, all the liberal characters in Carol, from Moore on down, are ugly, crude, and stupid. The conservatives, meanwhile, such as the many heroic soldier characters (who always make much of the fact that they “enlisted” out of their own free will) are always upright, attractive, and moral. There is absolutely no self-deprecating humor at the expense of the right, nor any suggestion that conservatives have been anything but 100% loyal to the American cause.
Then there are scenes that are likewise so heavy-handed and childish in their politics they actually cross the line into jaw-dropping offensiveness. And the worst part is, these are the scenes that are intended to be the most powerful (I think). There’s a scene depicting an alternate pacifist universe in which the South won the Civil War, for instance, featuring a number of black actors running around yelling “massah!” that is literally painful to watch. Another, later scene displays the smoking remains of Ground Zero in a moment so corny it seems like something you’d find in a liberal movie mocking right-wing jingoism. Except, of course, it is actually supposed to be the exact opposite.
I suppose there are probably communities deep, deep within rural America that would be sheltered and close-minded enough to like An American Carol, but I doubt there are very many. It’s simply a bad, bad movie, and any conservative, except the most hysterically dogmatic, should be able to see that.
It especially baffles me that anyone would even think a movie as nauseatingly pro-Republican as this could possibly be a profitable movie to release in Canada. When I went to see it last week there was only one person other than myself in the theater, and he walked out. He had the right idea.
