Lots of people get their political news from comedians these days, Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Bill Maher, Saturday Night Live.  I happen to be a Stewart fan myself.  What if a glitch in the voting system gave Jon Stewart the presidency?  Would chaos ensue or would it be much-needed kick in the pants?  That’s just one obvious question that never gets answered in this film, but there were plenty of others.

Robin Williams plays the comedian Tom Dobbs and does a good job with the humor.  When he decides to actually hit the campaign trail he drops the jokes, sticks to issues and the movie starts to become something like a drama.  Laura Linney is an employee of the computer company handling all the voting in the country and she finds a surprising glitch in the system.  She alerts the CEO who promptly ignores her.  Dobbs is elected Linney’s character is drugged and fired so she has no credibility and the film then turns into more of a conspiracy thriller than a comedy or a drama.

The movie was a bust for me.  Some parts were good but the stupidity of Linney’s character was hard to watch.  And once Williams wasn’t cracking jokes he became about as interesting as last week’s newspaper.

The movie did halfheartedly attempt to tackle some real issues.  The most compelling part of the movie for me was Jeff Goldblum’s speech about the people thinking their vote counted was more important than their vote really being counted.  It didn’t matter if the right guy got the job.

“Perception of legitimacy is more important than legitimacy itself. That’s the greater truth.”

No matter where you come down on this it still generates good discussion.  Once Williams gets the nomination he and Linney both have to make a choice on whether he should keep quiet and accept the honor of being the president of the United States.  I thought this was also an interesting dilemma and one Jason and I didn’t quite see the same way.

The humor and the thought-provoking situations had potential but the movie was too scattered to be good.

Any political movie recommendations for next week?

I don’t know if any of you have heard but we have a presidential election coming up.  As a proud Buckeye I admit that I like the attention that comes our way every four years.  I like the fact that we do not always elect politicians from the same party year after year after year.  I actually take an interest in politics.  I’ve written a few posts over the years about how I think everyone should vote and if possible, work the polls (given the state of unemployment it pays well for a day or so of work), and try to make an informed decision.

Don’t worry I’m not going to endorse a candidate (but I do see that Roseanne Bar has made it onto the ballot in a state or two ;)) but I am going to take the next 6 Fridays and review 6 political movies.  There are 2 (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 1939 and State of the Union, 1948) that are on my Top 100 list and they will be re-runs for me.  Otherwise I’d like them to be new-to-me movies.

If you have a fun political movie that you’d like to recommend, I’d love to hear about it, but there are a few requests-US politics only, no bashing of one political party (it’s okay of both parties are victims) and, honestly, the funnier the better.  In the past few years I’ve seen Swing Vote (2008) and The Ides of March (2011), both of which I liked but am not interested in seeing again.  Other than that I am open to recommendations.  I have The Candidate (1972) with Robert Redford and The Contender (2000) on my radar.  Any thoughts?

At the library yesterday I picked up Man of the Year (2006) with Robin Williams and am halfway through.  Check back tomorrow to see what I think.