Thursday, July 17, 2008

A Bad Situationist

In the spring and summer of 2001, Sam Seder and some of his friends (including Sarah Silverman and Janeane Garofalo) made a movie about Joe Lieberman's (entirely fictional) son Arthur. (Joe Lieberman has a son and a stepson, but the character of Arthur Lieberman is not based on either of them.) The movie opens with a scene, set in August 2001, of Arthur firing a bazooka at a high-rise in New York City. We then flash back a couple of months, with Arthur despairing that no one seems to take an interest in the fact that the 2000 Presidential election was decided by the Supreme Court rather than by the voters. He stands on the sidewalk outside a subway entrance, trying to sell his annotated version of the Supreme Court decision for $10, but is greeted with indifference or outright hostility. He's clearly more than a bit obsessed, with pictures of various figures from the election plastered on his wall, many of them with cartoon-style speech bubbles. A picture of the inauguration has Dick Cheney's daughter's head masked out with the notation that it should have been Arthur standing there.

That's about as far as I got, though, because some technical glitch required restarting the film, and I was too tired to sit through the beginning a second time. It's out on DVD, so maybe I'll take a second look, but not tonight. For more information, to view some sample clips, or to order the DVD, check out the official web site.

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