Last week I decided against linking to Jeffrey Ressner‘s 7.23 Politico story about David Zucker‘s An American Carol because the basic plot — a documentarian named Michael Malone [read: Moore] finally sees the conservative light in the way Ebenezer Scrooge got beyond being a selfish miser — sounded sickening to me. Three or four graphs into Ressner’s story and I was muttering, “I don’t know want to know about this…I’ve read enough.”

Jon Voight as George Washington and Kelsey Grammer as Gen. George S. Patton in An American Carol

But people here and there started writing about Zucker’s film anyway, the latest being CHUD’s Devin Faraci. He was so struck by one of Ressner’s graphs that he ran it twice. “In a climactic scene, Malone finds political clarity at the smoking ruins of the World Trade Center,” it reads, “while the admonishing ghost of George Washington (played by Jon Voight) hovers nearby.”
This evening a reliable source passed along this verbatim quote from a friend who’s seen An American Carol: “This thing goes beyond heavy handed. It reminds one of the sensation of watching Burn, Holllywood Burn. It tries to be outrageous but just comes off as a paean from a Republican who wants to continue getting tax breaks. I rank it right out there with Skidoo and Can Hieronymus Merkin Ever Forget Mercy Humppe and Find True Happiness as far as the WTF nature of it all. The laugh quotient is right up there with The Love Guru and confirms that David Zucker was always the Fredo of the ZAZ comedy mafia.”
Vivendi Entertainment will release An American Carol on 10.3. Keep in mind that the major distributors all saw it and passed, even the Weinsteins.

David Zucker