MGM
September 22, 1995
Satire
DVD
C+
Michael Moore directed, produced, wrote, and Hitchcock-cameos as Redneck Guy #2 in this dizzyingly dated and sporadically funny non-documentary. Remember, this is pre-Wag the Dog and pre-"Blame Canada" (in the South Park movie), and it is very much pre-9/11, so that the president (Alda)'s search for someone new to have a "cold war" with is, well, chilling. As an over-the-top comedy, sort of Dr. Strangelove with (more obvious) dick jokes, it sometimes works, even if I was mostly amused by relatively benign stereotypes like Canadians being overly polite. And it was of course fun to see what familiar faces popped up in what felt like a low-budget film. (It cost $11 million and made $178,104!)
Some in the cast are so typecast that I thought things like "Oh, look, he's Alan-Aldaing" (and I like Alda), but then you get the delicious irony of making one of America's favorite Canadian actors (the dead-before-this-movie-could-be-released John Candy) as a simple-minded but oddly good-hearted (and romantic) American sheriff. I actually thought there would be more of the Perlman & Candy relationship, but her character being "held hostage" obviously prevents that. Unless a lot was edited out for final release, I swear I didn't notice Wallace Shawn until the Where Are They Nows at the end, but I'm tagging him anyway because of the reverse-casting of a Canadian prime minister played by someone so famously New York and New Yorker.
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