Already?

This movie stinks of too soon, is almost dripping with insufficient distance from its topic. I write about my life all the time, albeit with significant liberties taken in the amount of explosions and supermodels, and one of my chief concerns is always that I don’t yet have enough time between the event and my recollection of it to truly appreciate what’s happened.  In short, the reality or consequences behind anything take a little time to really set in.  If I’m thinking this sort of thing in regards to trivial moments in which I, for instance, ate a sandwich or farted, how can anyone have the audacity to film a reflective movie about the President before he’s left office?

I understand the compulsion to make the movie, because it’s the same one I foolishly slave under when I write anything about myself: the desire to gain some insight through reflection. The idea is that you’ll look at something differently through the new examination of it, and figure out something you didn’t realize before.

EXAMPLE:

When I farted that afternoon in the meat packing plant, I filled not just my boxers with poop – I filled my soul.

Unfortunately, one of the pre-requisites for that sort of intensely weighty self-examination is the ability to divorce oneself from a particular way of viewing or recalling a situation, to truly look at things in a new way. While the intentions might be good, I just don’t believe we’ve come far enough from the George W Bush era to make any sort of judgment on it besides sentiment like “That SUCKED, huh?” And hey, that may be true, but it doesn’t necessarily make it worth a whole hell of a lot of your time. We all know things suck – why dwell?

And to me, this film smacks of dwelling, of judgment not in the sense of being truly just but in the sense of name-calling. There’s a reason the actors in this trailer aren’t identified by their real names but by the famous political figures they’re portraying: they’re caricatures, not performances. We’re not going to be looking at insight or the uncovering of unforeseen layers to people’s personality – they’re going to be doing impressions so that all the liberal idiots in the goddamn world can sit in a theatre and guffaw, “Yeah! George W Bush is stupid! What a drunk and a bad public speaker! Hee haw!”

We all realize the man is an awful speaker, and has a sordid past when it comes to drug and alcohol-related indiscretions, but where does reinforcing that get us? Can’t we just watch Saturday Night Live for that sort of shit? Now, I will be the first to retract this if Oliver Stone comes through and this is a fantastic character study movie that says something for itself, but right now I worry that all we’re going to end up doing as an audience is wallowing in cynicism and disillusion. I don’t want to walk out of the theatre shaking my head and looking at the ground in disappointment when I could be blinking, almost optimistically, when I step outside and back into the light.

PS – isn’t it great that our president is now being played by a guy who got his start as the older brother in The Goonies?