This week’s theme was “Friends, Romans, Countrymen: A crash course in politics, movie-style”. I was worried that it was going to be hard to decide which suggestions to watch, or that watching them would make me frustrated at politics, but it was surprisingly easy on both counts! Because of that we had a pretty easy-going weekend and watched only two of the five available.
We started off on Friday night with Election. Tracy Flick (Reese Witherspoon) is running for school president unapposed. Mr McAllister (Matthew Broderick) is going to be her supervisor if she is elected and doesn’t particularly want that, so he gets other people to run as well to create a “more democratic experience”.
This was… not what we were expecting. I think we both thought it was going to be more serious. I don’t think that it’s a bad thing that it was funnier than we thought it would be, it just took me a bit by surprise. There were a few absolute laugh out loud moments and the writing in general was pretty damn hilarious. The acting was good also; Reese Witherspoon worked perfectly as the over achieving Tracy Flick. Chris Klein’s character, Paul Metzler, was totally a big ol’ happy friendly dog personified. He was just a big dopey dude that never thought a bad thought in his life. To be honest it wasn’t until I looked at the imdb page that I realised Chris Klein was the actor; all throughout the movie I thought it was a young Keanu Reeves. I think he would have been another good choice for that character. I do feel that the film relied a little too much on the internal monologue narrative technique to make jokes, though. There were multiple times when the character narrated something which contradicted what was actually happening. This was funny but after the first few times it got a bit predictable.
Ben commented after it had finished that he felt like it had been one of those “embarrassment-comedy” kinds of films, which he doesn’t like in general, but I didn’t really feel it was. Maybe it was but wasn’t as over the top embarrassment that seems to have become more common these days. Those ones make me genuinely uncomfortable and have to turn them off. I would probably watch Election again if the mood struck.
On Sunday we watched Wag The Dog. The President has been accused of sexually assaulting some sort of Girl Guide-esque girl, so his advisers hire Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) to come up with a plan to distract the voters long enough to get The President re-elected. His plan is to start a fictitious war with Albania with the help of a Hollywood Producer (Dustin Hoffman).
I had watched this when I was in high school as an example of powerplay or something, and had subsequently forgotten almost all of the film except for the basic plot. Second time round it was hilarious. Straight up hits slightly too close to home hilarious. I was reminded how great DeNiro and Hoffman are, they played their parts brilliantly. There was a moment of realisation when I remembered a certain part of the plot and I got really excited to see it unfold. And Woody Harrelson plays crazy so well, it was perfect. The whole film was a very poignant commentary on how the media is so involved in politics these days and how artificial it all seems, but very sharply witty and entertaining at the same time. I can see why I had to watch it in high school, but now that I have a bit more intelligence and maturity I can appreciate it properly. It seems that a lot of the films I watched originally were at that point in my life where a lot of it went straight over my head, and I am a bit sad because I probably won’t watch a heap of films from back then because I initially didn’t like them. I’m glad this book is around to “force” me to rewatch some.
I read somewhere (probably on imdb or wikipedia, so nowhere reliable) that George W. Bush used lines from this movie in some of his speeches. I really wouldn’t be surprised if he did. Ben and I were talking afterwards about how this was made in ’97 but was pretty spot on about how Al-Quaeda had been handled in the press. It’s definintely making me more sceptical about what footage I see in the media; I was already pretty untrusting of all that, but this was just another reminder about how easily things can be manipulated these days.
The other films suggested for this theme were Primary Colors (John Travolta basically playing Bill Clinton), Power (Richard Gere helping politicians get into office) and In The Loop (a British black comedy about public servants). I think we chose well this weekend, it was a nice entertaining time. Next week is about Awesome Teachers, so that might be pretty interesting. It could be awfully clichéd, but it could be awesome. I guess we’ll see, eh?