Tuesday, May 27, 2008

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Monday, May 26, 2008

Well, neither my brother nor my girlfriend had any desire to watch this, probably because they are tools. Well I can laugh in their fucking tool faces now, because this was a pretty good one. Really entertaining, and a real charmer. And of course Jimmy Stewart is great.

Back in the day, I had always assumed that Frank Capra made really corny ass movies, because I hadn't seen any of them. Then I saw Arsenic and Old Lace, which turned out to be a dark comedy where two old ladies like to poison people and bury them in their basement, and Cary Grant is repeatedly under threat of being tortured to death with some very unsavory looking tools. A bit of a paradigm shift there for me.

Mr. Smith gets a little corny in places, especially this one montage of patriotic American images set to sickeningly triumphant music. But it's earnest, pro-America message actually works because of how upfront the movie is about how fucked up our political system is. It's nice to know that even back in 1939, people knew that politicians were a bunch of assholes.

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