Friday, August 15, 2008

An American Carol: What Happened to David Zucker?


Photo from source, ACE Showbiz

I'm a huge fan of David Zucker, and ZAZ, the trio of producers/directors/writers he used to be a part of. Airplane!, The Naked Gun, Hot Shots!, Top Secret! and Ruthless People are among my all-time favorites. The ZAZ-style of movie making was what I would call either "smartly stupid" or "stupidly smart."

They are part of my litmus test for a person's sense of humor. If a person says, "I don't like Airplane! It isn't funny," it usually means the person isn't funny.

The closest David Zucker has gotten to that early greatness since his heyday, was Scary Movie 3. Inheriting the franchise from the Wayons Brothers, he made a sequel that was a dramatic improvement on the dreadful second installment. Scary Movie 3 was a hilarious spoof primarily of The Ring and Signs. It was boosted by its cast, but was funny throughout. It was only after seeing the extended DVD scenes that I realized the movie is sort of good by accident. It was drastically altered before it hit theaters. And it suffers from the delusion that many spoof filmmakers seem to suffer from: put Leslie Nielsen in your film, and it will be automatically hilarious.*

Now, it would seem, David Zucker is wearing his politics on his sleeve. He made a political commercial a couple of years ago--something about Madeline Allbright and basketball--and now has made a full-blown anti-liberal spoof film. And his big (pun intended) target is Michael Moore.
I like Michael Moore's movies. Bowling for Columbine, Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko were enjoyable movies despite their dire subjects. But the right assumes that Moore has far more power on the left than he does. Every couple of years he releases a new documentary, and that's sort of it. If he was on MSNBC with the frequency that Ann Coulter appears on FOX "News", I would understand their focus on him. But he isn't. So this seems like an odd target to me.

One thing is for sure. People can be funny whatever their politics. But when the comedy is coming from the political perspective, conservatives have a lousy track record. And from the preview clip below, I think the new movie, "An American Carol" will have a hard time selling tickets beyond the built-in FOX "News" audience.

[Excerpt]

Bill O'Reilly Serves Up More Hilarious Comedy From the Far Right





Fans of Bill O'Reilly were recently given good cause to stop throwing feces at the wall of their cages and enjoy a much-needed laugh: a preview of the new conservative comedy film, An American Carol. . .

Read more at: Comedy Central
And more at: ACE Showbiz

*EDITOR'S NOTE: I personally love Leslie Nielsen. He was terrific as Frank Drebin in Police Squad! and the Naked Gun movies, and of course as the Doctor in Airplane! He's been good in other films too. But check out his IMDB profile, and look at the list of other spoof films he's been in. You'll see what I mean.

1 comment:

  1. I mean consertatives have in the past been funny (South Park, P.J. O' Rourke) but the problem often is that that the hard right isn't funny. The left often has a easier time doing humor because they want to get a criticial point about something across. The right just keeps screaming "You critized some part of something in our country...You hate America!" and if you bash all criticism, then human isn't coming easily.

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