The Campaign (4/5 Stars)

Five-term incumbent congressional candidate for North Carolina, Cam Brady, played by Will Ferrell, has invited his challenger, the local tour guide/novice political contender, Marty Huggins, played by Zach Galifinakis, to a civility brunch. Marty unwittingly attends it. Both candidates step up to the podium and profess their wish to have a civil campaign for Congress devoid of all the negative smear tactics that mar the American political landscape. Then as Marty sits down, Cam comes up and announces that he has a slideshow of his opponent, a helpful introduction he has put together for the press corps. Cam shows several embarrassing photos of Marty, digs in a few passive aggressive slights, and shows a picture of Marty's two pet pug dogs. Pug dogs, Cam explains, are Chinese, just an interesting fact for everyone in the press ought to meditate about. Then Cam sits down and as Marty is confusedly trying to figure out what just happened, Cam whispers with venom, “Welcome to the fucking show.”

Above all, “The Campaign,” is funny. Its best attribute is that it allows two veteran and extremely skilled comedians with vastly different styles to play off each other. Will Ferrell uses his best alpha male aggressive egomaniacal man-boy techniques to play Cam Brady, a politician who will remind you of several of the more alpha male aggressive egomaniacal man-boys of American politics in the recent past. He has the hair of Jon Edwards, the libido of Bill Clinton, the grammar of George W. Bush, and the camera techniques of Anthony Weiner. Marty Huggins, will remind you less of American politicians than of Zach Galifinakis himself, in that he has an out-of-shape physique, an out-of-style facial hairstyle, and an effeminate weirdo aura. This generally plays out with Marty trying to attack in a terribly feeble and ineffective way, while Cam counterattacks with far too much power ending up causing himself as much if not more damage than he inflicts on Marty. See the scene where they trash talk each other in the first debate or the attempt to kiss the same baby afterwards.

The movie also does a great job of setting up a comic technique that let’s just call “Line-o-Rama.” A “Line-o-Rama” is a set-up that allows several punch lines to fit into the same joke. The best instance of this is when Marty tells his family at the dinner table that he is running for Congress and thus they will all be under much media scrutiny. Marty promises his sons that he will not be mad as long as they come clean to him about anything embarrassing before the press does. What follows is a series of confessions about increasingly weird and perverted things, all of which are funny because Marty has promised he would not get mad no matter what they may be. Comedically speaking, “Line-o-Ramas” are great because of the efficiency they entail. For every one setup you can get five-to-ten laughs and “The Campaign” does this several times in the span of the movie.

The movie also does a fine job of playing comedic jujitsu with its marketing trailers. A huge problem with trailers for comedies is that they invariably give away the best jokes. Jokes generally need to be a surprise, so it is always a bad idea to put the best ones in a trailer. But here, either the jokes in the trailer are actually not in the movie, or they are tweaked in such a way that they still work as surprises. The hunting scene in the trailer where Marty shoots Cam in the leg with a crossbow actually works better in the movie because of what they changed. In fact, the trailer may have even made what happened in the movie funnier. How “The Campaign” was marketed is something that should be imitated by other comedies.

The movie’s main weakness is its length. At 97 minutes it sometimes feels like it is skipping scenes. It usually is a good idea to make a comedy as lean as possible in order to keep up a fast pace, but were losing something in terms of character development and targets for satire. There is too much to make fun of with this subject and too little of it gets onto the screen. What is there though works is relevant scathing social satire. 

The satire comes from how either of these candidates could ever reasonably get elected. The movie employs the Motch brothers, a pair of billionaire brothers played by Jon Lithgow and Dan Akroyd to pull this off. They have supported Cam Brady with untold amounts of money in the last five elections and have succeeded getting him elected each time. This time however Cam has drunk-dialed and left a very salacious and adulterous voicemail on the wrong answering machine (Seth Macbreyer’s to be exact). His numbers plummet and the Motch brothers look for someone to replace Cam. They settle on Marty Huggins, as he is the son of a well-known ex-politician (Brian Cox). The Motch brothers hire a campaign manager, played by a snaky Dylan McDermot, to form Marty into less of a weirdo and more of an American. First step is redecorating Marty’s house with lots of rustic wood paneling and replacing Marty’s beloved pugs with a Chocolate Labrador and a Golden Retriever. As the campaign manager explains, focus groups want their politicians to be Authentic. So Marty is completely re-tailored in order to achieve Authenticity. And it works too because I don't know, Americans (or at least the majority of them) tend to view eccentricities of character (i.e. what makes a person an individual) as phony fakery. 

And also notice how little attention is paid to actual issues during the debates. Supposedly Cam Brady is a Democrat and Marty Huggins is a Republican but you wouldn’t hear anything about either party’s platform in this movie. All the attacks and defenses are about personal foibles, suspicious alliances with Communism and Al Qaeda, and which one supports the troops or loves Jesus more. This seems less of the movie actually being ignorant of the issues and more as deliberate satire of actual politics. In one scene an intern brings up the idea of running an advertisement about how multi-national corporations get tax credits for outsourcing American jobs to other countries. Cam Brady yells the intern out of the room and decides to put out a sex-tape instead. Cam Brady is a Democrat keep in mind, but that is beside or may just be the point. The point might be that both parties should logically be against tax breaks for corporations who fire American workers, but neither candidate has any plans to change it or even talk about it because well, they have a better chance of winning the election by focusing on trivial bullshit. As for the Motch brothers, they don’t care at all whether they help elect a Democrat or a Republican just as long as the people they put in power remember who put them there.

Is this satire relevant? Take our current presidential campaign. Why should I know that Mitt Romney once put his dogs on the roof of his car for a road trip, or that he has a car elevator, or his opinion of the London Olympics, or that he beat up a gay kid in high school? There is no reason to know these things. None of it matters when it comes to actually running a country. Hell, you know how little personal morals matters to being an effective politician. Lyndon Johnson boned every woman he could get his hands on. He also happened to be one of the best senator majority leaders this country ever had. Shit, lots of it, was actually accomplished in Congress when he was in charge. As Cam Brady states during his Capra-esque moment of preposterous humanity at the end of “The Campaign,” being a great politician and being a great congressman are two entirely different things.

"The Campaign," is director Jay Roach's second great political movie of the year. (The first was HBO’s “Game Change,” about the vice presidential pick of Sarah Palin.) One is a fictional comedy and the other is a historical drama but the theme is the same, the idiotic way that we as a people tend to choose our leaders. The brilliant thing about “Game Change” was not that it bashed Sarah Palin. It was brilliant because it explained quite clearly why Sarah Palin was a choice that made sense and for a couple weeks looked like a home run. I figure we got lucky that Obama seems to have a brain, because quite frankly, we elected him because he looked nice and gave great speeches. That seems to be the most important ingredient nowadays and everything else is frosting. 

If I had a suggestion to the American people it would be to ignore national politics and the national media that covers it in general. Local politics are far more important. Those people actually affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. They are the ones that make the zoning decisions, administer the schools, pick up the garbage, and provide police and fire services among many many other things. What’s more, these are people you can actually influence. One, because your vote has much more power on the local level than on the federal level and two, nobody else gives a shit. 

  

Beasts of the Southern Wild (4/5 Stars)

A movie randomly dropped from the sky and landing in a cineplex near you…hopefully

Once in awhile a movie comes along that will make you walk out of the theater wondering, “Where the hell did that come from?” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” is one of those movies. It tells the story of Hushpuppy, the five-year-old daughter of Wink, a man who lives in the Bathtub, a fresh water island off the coast of Louisiana. The place is a primitive paradise. Its residents are dirt poor but as is happily explained by Hushpuppy's voiceover, they hardly work either. The movie starts with a community festival that seems to be held for no particular reason (TGIF?) and features lots of moonshine and fireworks.

The movie is told from the viewpoint of Hushpuppy who is at an age when all the world is sensational lights and magical places. She spends most of her time outdoors without the supervision of her absentee parents. One hobby she has involves picking up animals and placing them at her ear to hear their heartbeats. Her school consists of a class with only five little kids and a teacher who seems to know more wives tales than regular subjects. During one class she shows the kids a tattoo on her thigh of a cave painting of a prehistoric animal named the Auroch. Hushpuppy is told that the gigantic boarish Aurochs died during the last ice age. She also learns a little about Global Warming, represented by the ugly smokestacks on the other side of the levee. In Hushpuppy’s imagination, the smokestacks melt the polar ice caps, which unfreezes the prehistoric Aurochs that start marching South for a dramatic confrontation with the Bathtub, the first place in Louisiana (or the world) that will go if the sea levels rise.

Not that this movie is at all a political statement about Global Warming. It is far more interested in Nature, period, and it shows it in all its grandeur being both good and evil. Hushpuppy given her height and childish inclination is extremely close to her ecosystem. The natural world is a terrifying wonder to her. Take the scene where she accidentally burns her house trailer down (Yes that is a five year old in a scene with a huge uncontrolled fire that is taking over the kitchen) and the scene with the great storm that bears down on the Bathtub, putting the entirety of it underwater.

Go ahead and say that this is a veiled allusion to Hurricane Katrina. The important thing, movie-wise, is that it would work with or without knowledge of the history of that storm. As I said: no politics here. Keep in mind that the Bathtub is on the wrong side of the levees anyway and none of the residents are expecting or asking for help from the inside world. In fact, the residents completely ignore the government helicopters telling them to leave the now ruined Bathtub/disaster area.

There was one part though that did remind me of the documentary about Katrina, “Trouble the Water,” which was composed entirely of on the ground informal camerawork by people in the area of the worst flooding. There was a scene in that movie right before Katrina hit when the filmmakers were going around the neighborhood and asking fellow neighbors whether they planned to leave before the storm hit. There was this one guy who instead planned to smoke and drink his way through the storm. Which is what he did. He got black out drunk and stoned. The next week they found him dead drowned in the first floor of his house. I would say it was one of the less tragic deaths resulting from Katrina. I bring this up because the Bathtub residents sort of have the same attitude about hurricanes, in that a bunch of them get really drunk and stoned as the great storm hits. And then they die. Of course, I want to make a point that this is not dealt with like it is some sort of cruel tragedy. In fact, sometimes it is rather entertaining. For instance, I got a big kick out of when Wink got mad at the storm, went outside into the brunt of it all with a bottle of moonshine and a shotgun, let off plenty of rounds, and cursed up a storm of his own.

In many ways this movie could not have been made fifty years ago. To have made a movie like this back then, with the special effects that this movie beautifully pulls off (fireworks galore, Gigantic Aurochs), you would have needed a ton of money. And if for some unlikely reason, huge rich producers did make an expensive movie about people so poor as the residents of the Bathtub it would certainly condescendingly pitiful. The culture is so far removed from most of American life, that it constantly surprises senses of decorum. Wink by all means is not a good father. He yells at and hits his kid. He goes awol for days at a time. He leaves her during a hurricane to get black out drunk and shoot shotguns shells at a force of nature. At the same time though, and this is perhaps the biggest point I want to make here, is that the movie is extremely full of life. It is not a downer in any sense of the word. It just contains a lot of elements that more privileged filmmakers would handily use in a highbrow adaptation of Les Miserables. The fact that this movie can be made by people who must know the characters intimately is a promising sign of the democratization of movies that comes from the boon of new digital technology. Young poor filmmakers should go see this movie and be inspired by what is now possible with very little.

Some movies need an unknown cast to make it work at all. This is one of them. You won’t recognize anybody in this movie and that’s a good thing. Wink for instance is a character that sort of needs messed up teeth. If you casted Jamie Foxx or Will Smith and their perfect teeth it would not make any sense. As for Hushpuppy, because of her age, casting a known actress is almost impossible. In any case, this is by far the best acting I ever seen from someone her age. The field is rather narrow I know, but the performance is perfect. As I said before, Wink isn’t the most pleasant man in the world, but Hushpuppy is never cowed by him. She matches him with toughness in every scene they are in. There is one great seen where she is being taught how to eat a crab. Another resident makes the mistake of trying to teach her how to break open the crab with a knife. Wink gets pissed off and insists that Hushpuppy tears apart the crab with her hands like a man. Hushpuppy is up to the challenge. She rips open the crab, eats it right with gusto, and then stands on the table screaming in triumph and flexing her arms as the entire room cheers. “Who’s the man?” Wink yells. “I’m the man!!!” Hushpuppy yells back. In a way, a performance like this one kind of lowers my impression of acting as a whole, because really, if a five year old can pull off one of the best performances of the year (and this one will certainly be bandied about for perhaps a possible nomination come Oscar time) than how hard can acting in general be?

I know you have never heard of the director, writer, or actors of this movie. I know you’ve never seen the place or witnessed a plot like this one. I know you’re wondering what the hell are Aurochs doing in a movie at all. Think of it this way: If this movie without a recognizable plot, director, writers, or stars somehow made it to a Cineplex near you, then it must be good. Otherwise why would savvy theater owners show it? Nobody is going to want to see a bad movie with no recognizable plot, director, writers, or stars.  You, says this critic, should not be afraid of seeing it yourself.