We are pleased to present the first (and possibly last) installment of Unseen Movie Reviews. This column is devoted to the review of movies that have as yet been, well, unseen by the reviewer. With all the cliché anti-intellectual crap coming out of Hollywood these days, it has become unnecessary to see more than a preview to know not just that a movie sucks, but exactly why it does so.
And now, for our first installment. The Unseen Review of I Am Sam:
I Am Sam stars Sean Penn as a differently-abled man (meaning, he uses a different part of his brain to survive in the world, namely, the part that most of us use to wipe our ass).
Sam, an unfunny Forest Gump who can't play ping-pong let alone take care of a goddamn kid, proves to us by the film's teary-eyed climax that mental retardation, like skin color, is just one of society's many arbitrary labels that succeeds only in dividing, rather than uniting.
People are just different, we learn from I Am Sam, they're not "better" or "worse". That man over there is black, this woman is white. She's fat, he's thin. You say "tomato", I say "duhh duuh fuuhh fflurff", followed by drooling, tripping over myself, and painting the wall with my own feces.
Of course, most of the characters learn something from Sam. It makes us wonder why we don't have more retards as teachers, if people can learn so much from them. Oh, I know. Maybe it's because they don't know the difference between square roots and popsicles.
The audience also learns, via a not-so-subtle comparison with an annoying, bitter old stereotype, that "love is the answer", and what really counts is not whether you have a brain or not, but whether you have the capacity to love. So the next time your mentally retarded buddy force-feeds two-dozen bottles of baby food into a kid's mouth, causing little Sidney to eat too much and die, remember that it's the thought that counts. At least Rodney the Retard loved that baby. Could you say the same thing about the family who fed their baby the "correct" amount of food and changed her diaper on "regular" intervals? What kind of cold-hearted, ruthlessly logical bastards are those people, anyway?
The character of Sam is the "My Left Foot", no, make that "My Left Brain", of Penn's acting career. Penn's simultaneously touching, embarrassingly obvious, and torturously idiotic portrayal of Sam makes us react just as we did to his character in "Dead Man Walking". By the end of the movie, we are shouting aloud at the screen: "Somebody strap that bastard to the chair and let him fry already! Jesus Fucking Christ!"
The obvious message of the movie, the message that's painted onto the end of a pick-axe and swung handily right up your ass, is that retarded people have feelings, too. If you deny them the right to raise a kid, then you'll hurt their feelings. It's much less stressful to one's bleeding heart to risk the life of a child then to admit that maybe the retard should stick to playing with teddy bears.
The more subtle purpose of Sam I Am, however, is the powerful outlet it provides to leftists and wannabe leftists of all shapes and sizes, an outlet for the leftist's most cherished desire: to look down upon others. Nothing makes a whiny liberal bastard feel more virtuous than to see someone more pathetic than himself and say "Shit, am I one compassionate asshole, or what?"
The "virtue" of compassion, i.e., getting all misty-eyed when the world points its collective finger at Sam the Retard and laughs, is a hell of a lot easier than figuring out what you want to do with your life. Feeling bad about other people's struggles is a hell of a lot easier than partaking in your own struggle. A struggle implies effort and potential failure. Crying about retards, emptying your pockets of spare change, and digging ditches for the Peace Corp. means instant virtue. Success or failure is irrelevant. Just start weeping or sacrificing and you win the gold star. Of course, if you want to be really virtuous, make sure to refuse the gold star, too.
If you choose to watch I Am Sam, just remember to bring a full box of tissues to wipe up the vomit that you'll expel all over your chair. It's hard enough for those guys at the theater to clean up all that soda and popcorn, so give them a break. Better yet, ask one of the employees at the refreshment stand to give you an empty popcorn bag, which can easily double as a barf bag. Believe me, it works. You should see how much butter I get on my popcorn, and most of the time it doesn't even leak out through the bag.
Nothing is more painful than a movie that tries to pull on your heart strings, but ends up dangling them in the back of your throat until you puke. I Am Sam is one of those movies. It's a movie during which any intelligent person will feel disgusted from beginning to end, while the rich and guilty Hollywood moguls try to atone for their material success. Like other compassion-induced pieces of propagandistic trash, such as Philadelphia (when AIDS was more fashionable than malfunctioning brains), I Am Sam attempts to manipulate and utterly fails, except of course amongst the most idiotic of audience members who probably just identify with Sam's stupidity.
Take it from me, someone who's seen the preview of I Am Sam: This is a movie you don't want to miss. Unless of course, you have an alternate course of activity such as shoving forks into your head or holding your toes over a fire.
Retards, unite!
