BEFORE: I've got a couple of choices tonight, after watching "The Darwin Awards". I could watch "Creation", a bio-pic about Charles Darwin, or "Sunshine Cleaning", a film about cleaning up crime-scenes. But this one has Nora Dunn, who had a cameo appearance last night, plus it provides a tie-in (through the title, anyway) to Easter week. If tomorrow's Good Friday, then tonight would be the (theoretical) anniversary of the (alleged) Last Supper.
I went to an interesting dinner event tonight, at the New York Athletic Club (a very upscale Manhattan health club, my boss is a member). They hosted a food + beer pairing event, in which the stations represented 10 baseball stadiums from around the country (chowder + baked beans for Fenway Park, fish tacos from San Diego's PETCO Park, etc.) I have to admit it was a unique idea - but I had to follow the club's dress code, which meant dress shirt, jacket, and no jeans or sneakers. Let me repeat that - I had to wear dress shoes to get into a GYM. And then wear a suit jacket while eating messy foods like hot dogs w/mustard, crabcakes with tartar sauce, baked beans and fish tacos. No, I can't imagine how that could go wrong at all...
THE PLOT: A group of idealistic, but frustrated, liberals succumb to the temptation of murdering rightwing pundits for their political beliefs.
AFTER: I think that I made the right choice (not that it's possible for me to make a scheduling mistake, but still...) because this film ended up name-checking both Darwin AND Hitler. One of the thought experiments used as dinner discussion in this film is that old saw about time-traveling and encountering Hitler when he was a young, naive art student. Should you kill him and attempt to alter history, or does he count as an innocent at that point? Can you hold someone accountable for their future crimes?
This film apparently believes so, because they end up inviting ultra-conservatives to dinner - and then dispatching them like a bunch of left-wing Sweeney Todds, before they have a chance to do more damage to the political landscape with their right-wing principles. Geez, I disagree with Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, but it doesn't mean I'd want to kill them...
There's much debate among the group about who deserves to die and who doesn't - from a racist PTSD veteran to a homophobic priest, and the group eventually gets over their feelings of guilt because they truly believe that they're making the world a better place. Hmmm...let's see, who else killed people who didn't agree with his ideologies, mistakenly believing he was making the world better. Could it be...HITLER? (And yes, this irony was apparently lost on the characters portrayed in the film)
The ending is left open to interpretation - so if you agree with these liberal murderers, you can just imagine they're still fighting the good fight. But if you disagree, you can easily imagine them getting their just desserts (pun intended) and it's possible that efforts produced the exact opposite result of what they meant to do, and they inadvertently created the next Hitler-like pundit. Oops.
What year was this released? 1995, in the middle of the Clinton administration? That doesn't seem right. It must have been written at the tail end of the Reagan/Bush years and took a few years to get produced and distributed, that's the only possible explanation.
Fortunately, one of the checks in our otherwise nonsensical two-party system is that it seems like the most liberal and most conservative candidates can't get elected as President - because each needs the support of mainstreamers and moderates to win a majority of votes. Pat Robertson, Ralph Nader? Un-electable. However, since office-holders need to make compromises to their ideals in order to pass legislation, it's virtually guaranteed that, once elected, no one can possibly please everyone, especially the extremists on whichever side worked so hard to get that person elected.
Starring Cameron Diaz (last seen in "The Mask"), Ron Eldard (last seen in "Black Hawk Down"), Annabeth Gish (last seen in "Double Jeopardy"), Courtney Vance (last seen in "Space Cowboys"), Jonathan Penner (later a contestant on 2 seasons of "Survivor"), with cameos from Bill Paxton (last seen in "Predator 2"), Ron Perlman (last seen in "Blade II"), Mark Harmon, Charles Durning (last seen in "The Man with One Red Shoe"), Jason Alexander (last seen in "Shallow Hal").
RATING: 4 out of 10 dirt-mounds
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