I saw American Dreamz last night. I’m not going to link to anything or look for an image, for fear of giving some web hoster the wrong impression – that I liked it.

The movie was just so, so bad. I thought from the commercials that it looked like it’d be fun, lighthearted satire. I thought moments like the mother saying “Oh she’s been singing since she was six months old,” and then showing a home video clip of the mom going “Sing! Sing!” would be smart, isolated events.

The movie, beyond just being not funny, is bad in so many ways. Its depth of political satire paints a picture of someone taking their first poli sci class and thinking “A ha! I will make a statement!”

Biting jokes like “The president is dumb” and “Other people make decisions for him” and “He doesn’t read” is about as intense as it gets. Okay, thanks buddy.

For satirical humor to work, there has to be some level of insight. And the things criticized should at least be asking for some type of jab. I mean, does having an American Dreamz contestant singing “I’m a Rocker!” or whatever take any kind of effort? Yes, we know that American Idol contestants are often archetypes. What exactly is the problem there?

Beyond the attempts at satire, nobody is consistent, yet so much of the humor is reliant on situations where someone does something out of character. If there’s nothing standard from which actions can deviate, they have no effect. We are just supposed to laugh because things like terrorists having TiVO are apparently inherently funny, even though the terrorists do nothing BUT act unlike terrorists.

And you’d expect the brain behind American Pie to at least be able to pull of some kind of situational humor. Nope.

Truly, this movie fails on every conceivable level. I think I laughed once, and I can’t even remember why.

This entry was posted on Monday, May 1st, 2006 at 7:57 pm and is filed under blog. 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.