Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (4/5 Stars)

Earlier this year I was going through the movies of Bong Joon Ho and watched “Snowpiercer” for the first time. It was a decent movie about the last living humans spending time on a high-speed train whose cars were divided by class. The poor cars were in the derelict overcrowded caboose and each subsequent car being nicer and more luxurious. The content of each car was a mystery before the main characters invaded them, so there was a pleasant anticipation every ten minutes in the movie. The second to last car was a electronic music rave party. Lots of music, lights, drugs, and grinding. I felt that was an odd choice for the highest strata of society. Then I saw “Eurovision Song Contest: The Son of Fire Saga”. Now I get it. This movie is the last car on the apocalypse train.

This is a Will Ferrell comedy, written by Will Ferrell and a recent collaborator Andrew Steele. Andrew Steele was the main writer for the very funny miniseries “The Spoils of Babylon” and the just funny “Spoils Before Dying”. This movie has a certain comedic professionalism to it. The story telling is very efficient. Within the first five minutes we know the lifelong goal of the protagonists Lars Erickssong and Sigrit Ericksdottir is to win the Eurovision song contest, that Lars Erickssong has a disapproving father and that Sigrit Ericksdottir is secretly in love with Lars but Lars doesn’t know it (and they might be half-siblings?).

These are all well-worn comedic premises but they still work not less because of general wit of the screenplay and the performances of Ferrell as Lars, Pierce Brosnan as his father, and Rachel McAdams as Sigrit. Besides everything about Eurovision is a ridiculous music video fantasy. The freshness of the subject matter enlivens the entire movie.

Not that Eurovision is a new thing. Apparently it has been going on since the end of the World War II. Its huge in Europe and no-one in America knows anything about it. That dichotomy, Will Ferrell, says is what drew him to the project. Eurovision is a contest in which European countries sponsor home-grown acts in a singing contest held in a giant stadium and shown to millions of people on TV. We are shown a clip of ABBA singing a song about Waterloo in the early 1970s.

Lars and Sigrit are from a small fishing village in Iceland. When Lars learns that he and Sigrit get into the semifinals for Iceland, Lars rings the emergency bell in the local church tower. This is against the law and Lars promptly gets arrested. But in the police station, Lars and Sigrit plead with the local cops to just “be cool” and the cops just let Lars go. At another point, after Lars and Sigrit have inexplicably gotten into the Eurovision contest, they take part in what is called a Song-A-Long in a gigantic mansion. Every participant has ridiculous over-the-top makeup, hair, and costuming and check all the boxes in terms of ethnic and sexual identity. These people don’t have a care in the world. This musical interlude is the last car on the Apocalypse train.

Eurovision was directed by David Dobkin, who has done some pretty bad work in comedies before (see the lost opportunity that was Wedding Crashers). He is probably better appreciated for his music videos. The material here is a much better fit for him than his other movies. The movie has music throughout and Dobkin knows how to shoot in stage choreography for film. In particular, the closest this movie has to an antagonist, the Russian Alexander Lemtov (played by Dan Stevens), has two kind of ridiculously number involving taming lions, lions represented by male dancers with chiseled abdominal.

I had a lot of fun watching this movie. I enjoyed all of the songs, even Ya Ya Ding Dong. This movie is like the opposite of all the concurrent crises we have in America. We could probably use something like Eurovision here. The closest thing I guess would be American Idol, but that is a celebration of individualism and Coca-Cola, when it isn’t explicitly an exercise in sadism, not something that would bring people together.

Irresitible (3/5 Stars)

At a small-town city council meeting in the tiny town of Deerlaken, Wisconsin, the Mayor and city counsel are voting to impose a voter identification law. In walks Jack Hastings, played by Chris Cooper, who objects to the I.D. law. He makes a reference to what appears to be a latino couple in the back of the room, references high-minded democratic ideals and some tenets of Christianity and leaves. This is all caught on camera and posted to YouTube.

The video is shown to a Democratic political advisor named Gary Zimmer, played by Steve Carell, who absolutely loves it. It is almost too good to be true. Here is a white middle-aged man, veteran, and farmer, from a swing-state no less, that is taking a pro-immigration stance using the symbolic authority (founding fathers and the bible) of Republicans. Gary carpetbags his way to Deerlaken with the intent to finance the candidacy of Jack Hastings for Mayor of Deerlaken on the Democratic ticket. He wants to make a big national deal about this tiny mayoral race in rural Wisconsin.

Jack Hastings, along with his daughter Diana Hastings, played by MacKenzie Davis, allow Gary to serve as campaign manager to the upcoming campaign. Deerlaken has major problems. Its economic base was centered on a military base that has since closed, throwing many local companies out of business. The population of Deerlaken has collapsed from 15,000 people to just 5,000. With problems like that, an astute observer may wonder why the locals would care about national immigration policy.

Gary Zimmer does not connect those dots. And he knows he does not have to meet his ultimate goal. With his connections, money, and election apparatus behind him, he knows that he can simply outspend the other side to victory. The mayoral race does not really matter to national politics, but because of the immigration issue, the location of Deerlaken, and the identity of Jack Hastings, it will make a great story for the national news cycle. A Democrat wins in this rural town with Democratic sound-bytes for the first time in fifty or so years. When the Republicans catch wind of what is happening, they send down Faith Brewster, played by Rose Byrne, to dramatically up the spending game. Gary loves this because it means even more time and money are going to be spent on this symbolic election. Even if Jack Hastings loses, the Democrats would still win because they would have been able to beat expectations.

This is Jon Stewarts’ second feature film as a writer/director following Rosewater. We all know him from his fifteen years at the The Daily Show, an excellent fake news broadcast on Comedy Central. There is a twist to the story which he springs in the final twenty minutes. I hesitate to discuss a twist, but I will because I believe if the movie had not concealed the twist, it might have made for a more effective and funnier movie.

As it is, the movie follows Gary Zimmer around as if he is the main character. But he is not the main character, and he makes a poor main character while the movie allows him to take on that role. The main character is Deerlaken and the people in it. The Youtube video was fabricated and the election is a scam. The people of Deerlaken, helped by an astute understanding of campaign finance laws, know that if their town’s local election can catch the attention of the national media, their local economy will be the recipients of a vast amount of unfiltered unaccountable cash. The town intends to use this sorely needed cash to rebuild the local infrastructure, stimulate the local economy, and do other things that actually matter (as opposed to a purely symbolic national immigration debate).

But you will not know this for the first 90 minutes of “Irresistible” and the marketing campaign for it has gone even further in pulling another bait-and-switch on the expectations of the audience. Jon Stewarts’ fan base is urban and liberal, which is why the marketing is presenting a political comedy between the idealistic democratic strategist Gary Zimmer and a nihilistic republican strategist named Faith Brewster, played by Rose Byrne. But Faith Brewster is not a main character of this story and the movie is not really about a tussle between Democrats and Republicans. Faith shows up, finds Gary’s scheming mostly boring, and does not pretend, like Gary, to patronize the locals. She is here to shower money on the local economy and remind the people that Gary doesn’t actually care about them. She doesn’t care about them either, but her straightforward unashamed manner is less annoying.

Jon Stewart does not actually have much to say about the Republican party here, which makes sense if his purpose is to enlighten and inform those in his audience, his audience being mainly urban and liberal. All his criticism focuses on Gary Zimmer, the out-of-touch liberal elitist, who likes to describe the rural white residents of Deerlaken, Wisconsin as small-minded to the intelligentsia at NYC dinner party fundraisers. It is the urban elitist who ultimately gets outmaneuvered by the small-minded rural folk. I admire Jon Stewart’s willingness to not preach to the choir. That man has got some big ol’ matza balls on him.

As a director, Jon Stewart is still a little happy-go-lucky with his camera. He has some distracting camera angles and shots here where a more straightforward and simple style would have been appropriate. He has an eye casting though. I always appreciate when Will Sasso, from MadTV way back when, shows up in any movie to play anybody. “Irresistible” is not all that funny in the first half. However, as things become clearer, it picks up more and more laughs as it gains speed through the midway point.

The movie ends with a conversation with Trevor Potter, the lawyer brought on screen in many Daily Show and Colbert Report segments to talk about the ridiculous of campaign finance laws. Jon Stewart asks, could a town actually do this? Could they raise all this outside money, funnel it into Super Pacs, and then spend that money on local issues instead of advertising for an election? Yes, Trevor Potter, states. There are no rules for Super Pacs. You can raise any amount of money for them, ostensibly for the purpose of influencing an election, but spend that money however you want. Jon Stewart, wisely suggests, that more people should abuse the law and use the enormous amount of money circulating through our election ecosystem to actually help local communities. I feel like that idea may have had the comic potential of the accounting scheme in “The Producers”, which as you know, was laid out very clearly in that movie’s first scene. I wonder what this movie would have been like if Jon Stewart had led with his great idea.