American Dreamz = Zhitty

I just got back from the free test screening of American Dreams, directed by the Load responsible for American Pie, In Good Company, and (the exception that proves the rule) About a Boy. You might have seen the preview for this movie. It's the one that presents the film as a satire of both the Bush presidency and American Idol. How exactly would that work as a narrative? Similar to the way cancer efficiently destroys cells within the human body. This movie is the equivalent of Hitler's reanimated, chlamydia-powered dick skull-fucking Mother Theresa on a pile of stillborn babies in the lobby of the exploding World Trade Center. And the lobby's blasting Billy Corgan's solo album. Hard.

Hyperbole?

Eat shit. You didn't witness this. I was lucky to jump ship on Rumor Has It about fifteen minutes in, right about when I realized that I wasn't in the target audience of twelve-year-old sluts with Down Syndrome. This time I wasn't so lucky. I sat for what must have been seven hours through this piece of shit. I sat through it, so you don't have to.

I'll try to summarize the story, but I might have equal luck trying to face-fuck Jessica Simpson while transcribing The Wasteland into Hindi. Hugh Grant plays an unlikeably depressed Brit (go figure) who happens to be the host of American Dreamz, a knock-off of popular crapshit, American Idol. Hugh Grant is a character with needs, ones so deeply important that they remain completely indiscernable to the audience for the entirety of the movie. We join him just as his show hits #1 in the ratings and as he dumps his girlfriend, managing to muster up every piece of cliched romantic comedy dialogue that's graced the screens of middle-America in the past ten years. It should be no problem for a man like Grant, a tenured actor in many remarkably bad movies, to force the lines to work despite their innate awfulness. Unfortunately, rather than characterize Grant's role, writer/director Paul Weitz relies heavily on the deja-vu effect, hoping that people will remember Grant from better movies (like the one where he was a mobster?), thereby bucking the need for passable writing. Suffice it to say, Hugh Grant is sad. He wants his own show to fail, because he's too emotionally-contrived to remember that money can't buy happiness, but at least it supports a healthy coke habit.
Enter Mandy Moore, playing a self-concerned, chubby cunt with a metaphoric hard-on for singing. Her performance was startlingly believable. Moore should be commended for the sheer amount of willpower it must have taken her to pour over her own autobiography for hours in preparation for the role. Also, her character is from Ohio, which apparently exists only in the 1970's if careful observation of set design can be trusted. Basically, Moore wants to be on American Dreams. Chris Klein, her dopey boyfriend (start preparing next year's Oscar speech, buddy!!!!!), is supportive, but she dumps him, so he joins the army, gets shot, comes back, and she forgives him so that she'll look better on camera. You following this? It's not important.
Meanwhile, our protagonist(?), a radical muslim terrorist named Omer (Sam Golzeri) moves to America to live with his extended family. He's inexplicably chosen as another American Dreamz contestant, and his terror cell buddies decide to exploit his newfound fame to kill the President (Dennis Quaid, doing a commendable Bush impersonation) who has been chosen as a guest judge on American Dreamz as a way of upping his PR. Don't think the President doesn't have problems of his own though! He's sad, because he started to realize that the world is bad, mostly because of him. Not-Dick-Cheney-But-Actually-Dick-Cheney (Willem Defoe) pushes him around--possible romance here, not explored--and so he's sadder.
After the first four hours of setting this nonsense up, the director masterfully avoids muddying his film with climax, and heads straight for the falling action, letting all the pieces play to their most obvious and moronic capabilities. Mandy and Omer make it to the finals. Omer decides not to blow up the president. Hugh Grant and Mandy fuck. Chris Klein gets sad, takes Omer's bomb and threatens to kill himself. I'm not going to tell you who dies (Hugh Grant, Chris Klein) but I will tell you that this all takes place in the last fifteen minutes of the movie, which are so retardedly rushed together that they manage to make A Mighty Wind's "six months later" sequence seem likeable and appealing.
Granted, a lot of this movie is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but somehow winds up tongue-in-ass. It's supposed to be a comedy, and there are about fourteen successful jokes across two full hours of otherwise dead space. Quaid and Defoe are excellent in their roles, although there's no material to work with. Nothing is sadder than watching an actor deliver what both performer and audience know is intended to be a punch-line, each side knowing that there is no hope for joy in an outcome. This experience repeats endlessly in American Dreams, like some torturous mobius strip in comedy Hell.
Also, could someone explain to Paul Weitz that there are other shots than medium close-up? As fun as it is to see the world from the perspective of a shoulder, I'd also like someone with talent to take the helm as cinematographer from time to time, you know, spice things up with some--I don't know--vision?
The only thing this movie has going for it legitimately is SNL's Seth Meyers as Mandy's agent. His asshole smirk and delivery keep a few scenes from sinking, although he's barely onscreen enough to merit more than a blip on dead radar.
Paul Weitz is a bad writer. American Pie is not a funny movie; it's stupid and obvious. Could we therefore reason that Weitz himself is stupid, and doesn't understand comedic execution? Think for a minute about a man whose success relies on the baudy predictability of jokes revolving around bodily functions and formulaic delivery, and then imagine his attempt at writing a thinking man's comedy about the state of American life. The result is American Dreamz, a failed satire that refuses to take risks until its bizzarely morbid conclusion, and even then, the movie fails to deliver a cohesive message except that it'd be nice if people stopped exploding so much.
90 minutes of "Bush is dumb, American Idol is dumb," man-handled by a writer incapable of reconciling the two concepts. Could it be that America's increasing willingness to accept televised images and words as their own opinions leads to a (to quote the Simpson's) "dumbening" of our culture as a whole? Who knows. Paul Weitz refuses to make a point, instead taking ineffectual potshots based on banal stereotypes.
You know your comedy is bad, when the things its mocking are funnier on their own than as viewed through the lens of fiction.

American Dreamz? Eat It.