At Home with John and Debbie

The tilers are in, and we are exiled from our living room and our proper TV. We rented some DVDs from Choices to watch in the spare bedroom, on a 17in computer monitor. We decided that this meant subtitled films were a bad idea.

So, last night we watched:

A History of Violence. The critics went mad for this when it came out in the cinemas. I liked it well enough, but I wasn’t overwhelmed. Perhaps it’s too subtle for the likes of us. There’s certainly some fine acting going on, and it makes me wonder how great the earlier Cronenberg Scanners era films might have been if the budget had stretched to better actors (Micheal Ironside excluded of course!).

And so I find myself comparing the award winning and critically acclaimed A History of Violence with the mostly ignored brightly coloured American comedy film American Dreamz. Yes, Dreams with a zee. To my surprise I find that American Dreamz is the better hour and a half of entertainment.

There seems to be a trend at the moment for imitations that aren’t quite impersonations. The weaselly president Logan in 24 was 49% Nixon and 49% Bush Jr. (with 2% wiggle space). In American Dreamz Hugh Grant “does” Simon Cowell, without actually impersonating him, while Dennis Quaid leaves you in no doubt that you’re watching George Bush, even though he doesn’t look like him nor does the character have Bush’s name.

The story has three strands.

First, Mandy Moore is a serious contender for Grant’s reality talent contest, so we get to see the comically cynical agent she hires, and the way she manipulates her doe-eyed halfwit boyfriend to win votes.

Second, the president, post re-election, is having a PR crisis. To his advisor’s horror, he’s started reading newspapers. Not only that, foreign newspapers. The Guardian! Canadian papers! He’s starting to doubt what his briefings tell him. Things that used to seem black and white seem “kinda grey”. To help him regain public trust, his PR machine books him as a guest judge on the American Dreamz final.

And finally, the story strand they skirt around in the box blurb. Omer has been sent from his terrorist training camp to become a sleeper agent in America — mostly because he’s hapless and his trainers wanted rid of him. But, he also loves showtunes, and through a series of unlikely events, finds himself asked to compete in the talent show.

When his terrorist bosses find out, they coerce him to compete (”They don’t call me Agha the Torturer because I, you know, don’t like to torture people”) so that he can detonate a suicide bomb as he meets the president: cut off the serpent’s head.

So, this is a mainstream hollywood comedy about suicide bombing. How subversive is that?

I laughed several times, I never got bored, so it’s good.

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 20th, 2006 at 07:53 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.