Writer-director Paul Weitz and his younger brother Chris may
have gotten their big break behind the camera with American Pie, but much of the rest of their respective individual
and collective filmographies — dating back to their script for the animated
flick Antz, and including In Good Company — have had some pretty
interesting, radical and progressive things to say about culture, corporate
ethics and accountability.
Dreamz only further ups the ante, and is bound to produce uneasy feelings
in mainstream audiences not prepared for the churning, potentially incendiary
mix of elements at its core. A comedic casserole existing at the intersecting
planes of love and fame, politics and pop culture, the movie is enjoyably
idiosyncratic if a little sloppy — a rib-nudging exploration of manipulated
“reality” that asks viewers to think about the true meanings of words like hero
and martyr.
American Idol-type singing
competition that is far and away the most popular show on television. Hugh
Grant stars as Martin Tweed, the smarmy and secretly self-loathing host at the
center of it all. Desperate for fresh angles that will translate into even
higher ratings,
(Judy Greer and John Cho) to find a colorful roster of freaks, including an
Arab and a Hasidic Jew that can be plugged into the format and played off one
another.
Among the most promising new contestants is a shrewdly
calculating small town girl, Sally Kendoo (Mandy Moore), who promptly dumps her
loyal boyfriend William Williams (Chris Klein). A more unlikely crowd favorite
proves to be Omer (Sam Golzari, above, in his screen debut), a bumbling, would-be
suicide bomber who loves show tunes and is discovered — after having washed out
of a terror training camp — living with his well-off aunt and uncle in Beverly
Hills, where he’s been sent to await instructions from his handlers.
Dennis Quaid, meanwhile, costars as recently re-elected
President Joe Staton, a divisive but genial figure. When he starts reading
newspapers and magazines, currents of nuance drift into his previously
black-and-white view of the world, and he starts questioning his decisions on
the war in
and against terrorism. (We could only be so lucky in reality.) After weeks of holing up inside the White House, rumors
begin to spread regarding his mental fitness, so Staton is fit with an earpiece
that allows him to stay “on message,” funneled information by his sycophantic
consigliore chief of staff (Willem Dafoe), a blend of Dick Cheney and Karl
Rove. It’s then, too, that Staton is booked as a guest judge on the season finale
of American Dreamz, in a desperate
attempt to score some good publicity.
You can see where this is heading. Realizing their potential
to strike a devastating blow on live television, Omer’s terror handlers make
plans for him to kill himself and the president with a small bomb they smuggle
into the studio. Orphaned Omer, though — who has come to enjoy both the
States
deep misgivings about his mission, and tries desperately to figure out a way to
thwart the plan. This all dovetails, meanwhile, with Sally’s increased manipulation
of
level being enthralled with the other’s coldhearted ambitiousness.
Owing to his American
Pie roots, Weitz still has somewhat broad comedic instincts, and definitely
a shaggy puppy’s desire to please. While it doesn’t indulge in gross-out gags
like the aforementioned movie, there is a certain glossiness to American Dreamz, which consequently
makes it lack some of the bleak-hearted glee of a film like Wag the Dog. Whereas everything in that
film was played seriously, if tongue-in-cheek, there are self-contained pockets
here that know they’re in a comedy,
and it interrupts some of the movie’s sense of consistency and flow.
Still, the film’s satire of pop songs (“Rockin’ Man,”
“Dreamz with a Z,” “Let’s Not Be Friends”) is spot-on, and Weitz truly has a
gift for smart, surgically incisive dialogue, be it in small comedic moments
(agents are at one point derided as “people who act greedy and mean so you can
pretend to be nice”), or when he’s trying to hammer home his points on fame
versus love or any of the other at-odds sensibilities under the movie’s
sociopolitical microscope. This is what drives American Dreamz and, in the end, makes it such a winner. The
political stuff, to me, was engaging and hearteningly robust, but the
underlying story is also colorful enough to drag you along on pure
entertainment value.
Packaged in a single-disc Amray case with snap-shut hinges, American Dreamz comes with full-motion
menus and a paper insert touting other Universal releases. The movie is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen, which preserves the aspect ratio of
its original theatrical presentation. The colors are sharp and consistent, and
there are no problems whatsoever with edge bleeding or artifacting. The only
area of inconsistency in the title has to do with the set design choices for American Dreamz, which come off as a bit
too dark in comparison to what we’re used to from many other actual live
television shows. Still, this is a piddling detail.
Satire goes multilingual, as American Dreamz comes with parallel Dolby digital 5.1 sound mixes
in English, French and Spanish. The sound design is robust, with an obvious
emphasis placed on the movie’s performance scenes, which come through loud and
clear. Rear channels get a nice workout in these scenes, especially with crowd
support. Dialogue is for the most part consistent and discernible, though a few
outdoor sequences — as with Sally and Martin in his rented sports car — are
under-mixed with relation to surrounding atmospherics. Optional English SDH,
French and Spanish subtitles are also available.
The disc’s supplemental
extras are a mixed bag, and kick off with two featurettes. A four-minute bit billed
as Center Stage: Sally Kendoo finds
in character, showing us around the set of the titular show within the movie.
There’s absolutely no bite to the piece, though, so it’s hard to tell if this
was excised footage from the film or just some misguided EPK promotional
effort. Either way, it gets boring fast, and offers no replay value. A
seven-and-a-half-minute featurette on the film’s choreography, meanwhile,
includes fun, lighthearted chats with dance instructor Jennifer Li (erroneously
billed as Lee on the DVD’s back cover) and cast members Golzari and Tony Yalda.
interesting, at least once you get past the two minutes of non-moderated
promotional bumpers (again, for the show within the movie) that open the
collection. These have such significant overlap as to leave one crying out for
an editor. A scene with Quaid’s president sobbing to screen wife Marcia Gay
Harden about his earpiece is interesting for its judicious exclusion. Greer and
Cho, meanwhile, enjoy a bit more character development, as does the
just-back-from-Iraq cameraman who accompanies them to film Sally’s hometown
segment.
Finally, wrapping things up is a superb feature-length
commentary track with Paul Weitz. Erudite, engaging and self-effacing, Weitz
doesn’t give himself enough credit for the depth and quality of his
observations. Sure, he talks “highbrow,” about his interest in relativistic
art, but he also gives up a variety of great anecdotes, and additionally has
good insight on his actors, like Hugh Grant (“He has an incredibly developed
technique, but still wants to get to a place where he’s surprised”) and Mandy
Moore (“She nailed the audition — she was arch without commenting on it”). The
track is peppered with a few enigmatic asides (“My brother and I have to have a
monkey in every film that we do”), and Weitz alternates in tone between the tongue-in-cheek
(“We went to
to film this sequence, so that’s where most of the budget went. In hindsight, I
should have actually shot outdoors when we were there”) and more
straightforward. Halfway through, though, Weitz gets bored chatting by himself, so
he calls Golzari to vet his memory on a detail in a scene, and Golzari promptly
drives over and joins him. This track is a real treat, and inarguably the
highlight of the bonus slate.
The bottom line: American Dreamz is stocked with familiar faces and cameos, and driven by
fun, pinprick-smart dialogue — enough so that the movie stands on its own as a
lighthearted romp of only slightly heightened absurdity. But American Dreamz is also a plea for
pluralism, a film at its core about the fallibility of a singularly and
fervently held worldview. American self-importance is the fuel that drives the
movie’s comedic engine, but dogmatic principles of all ideologies get tweaked
as Weitz asks whether one person or people’s suffering can in fact be eased by
making other people suffer. In other words, you’ll laugh… and whether you also
think is entirely up to you. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) B- (Disc)