In continuing to use his movie blog as a platform for Hillary Clinton hate wrapped in the thinest of pop cultural guises, is Jeffrey Wells doing some kind of brilliant, absurdist theater, or has the presidential election simply driven him insane? First, when Baby Mama was announced as the opening night film for the Tribeca Film Festival, Wells admitted “a certain part of me would like to see Baby Mama go down as a kind of karma payback for [Tina] Fey’s Hillary shilling.” I went to SXSW and ignored Wells’ blog for a week; when I came back, I discovered a post titled “Funny Games = Hillary Campaign.” Note the lack of prevaricating question mark in the headline: this is an unequivocal statement.
So what’s Wells’ evidence that Michael Haneke’s English-language remake of his own 1997 thriller has anything materially or spiritually in common with the troubled campaign of the first serious female presidential candidate? It’s specious, of course––amongst other things, he notes that the antagonists played by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett “are clearly monsters, a term that has recently been used to describe Senator Clinton by former Obama foreign policy adviser Samantha Power”; they and Hillary also have “similar” haircuts!––but Wells’ balls-out committment to his own craziness is, as always, engaging.
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