REVIEWSDAY 11.25.25
An American Carol, Le Tigre Tour Diary
AN AMERICAN CAROL (2008)
Dwelling in the depths of streaming is a shocker of a feature made, in 2008, by David Zucker, part of the duo that made Airplane! And The Naked Gun films. The film’s Rotten Tomatoes score of 13% feels deceptive. This is one of those films where it’s entirely appropriate for Amazon to show ads in their already paid streaming services. The first racist joke comes two minutes in, and it is this: “We need a guest worker program so the Mexicans can do the job the Taliban won’t.” It’s a nihilist fever dream of satirical premises, without the wit, warmth or humanity of Mad Magazine.
It takes them a bit, but this turns into A Christmas Carol parody, hence the title. Get it? It’s like Christmas but with America! Kelsey Grammer plays General Patton, who I think is meant to serve as all three Christmas ghosts rolled into one. Patton visits the slovenly degenerate version of the real-life filmmaker Michael Moore—hot off his new film, Die You American Pigs!, and heading a campaign to eliminate the Fourth of July—who is played by Kevin Farley[1] for the meager yuks of fat and fart jokes. Paris Hilton makes fun of herself, a thing I’d forgotten was once a thing, and the real Bill O’Reilly squares off against a fake Rosie O’Donnell. Dennis Hopper fights ACLU zombies, which are just what they sound like. Kevin Sorbo, viciously mocking himself, plays a man who has won 11 Oscars. In the grand finale, Jon Voight appears as George Washington, leading fake Michael Moore through the debris of 9/11 as he intones in that scratchy madness voice he now uses for doomsday videos (Kelsey Grammar said the scene made him cry). None of it is fun.
There are an astonishing amount of surprise bummers. Even you, Mary Hart from Entertainment Tonight? Leslie Nielsen was filming a spree of bargain basement parody films, so maybe he didn’t grasp the politics of this one. David Alan Grier stings, although Zucker later told Entertainment Weekly “I’m pretty sure David Alan Grier was appalled.” More disappointing are the extras and bit players. One joke ten minutes in—“We’re not shaving until they bring all the troops home!”—humiliates both women on screen. So many people colluded with this film, in the toilet humor it presumes its audience laughs at, and the slavery and Auschwitz jokes it assumes they laugh off.
A decade ago, An American Carol would have seemed a concise explanation for why the 2008 election went the way it did. Watching it in 2025, I am burdened with the knowledge that these are the people who eventually won, not in spite of their howling vortex of bullshit, but precisely because of it. Someone in the distant future wouldn’t get even this differentiation. To them, this film will probably read as one more marker of how America slid into oblivion. Maybe someday this will be remembered as a rare example of AI slop crafted by human hands. Christ, what a nightmare.
An American Carol is now streaming on Amazon Prime.
YOUR CRITIQUE IS SUPERFICIAL: A LE TIGRE TOUR DIARY
Tour diaries for indie bands can be rough terrain. Either you’re new to touring and everything is exciting, or you’ve toured enough that nothing is exciting, and either way the bulk of what you have to write about is repetition: drives, soundchecks, fast food, sleeping bags. If you’ve graduated to the non-sleeping bag levels, you trade a cushier repetition for a far lower chance of adventure. In Johanna Fateman’s Your Critique is Superficial, she picks up with the newly reunited Le Tigre in 2023 touring with a crew twice as large as the band, traveling in comfort, staying in hotels. Financially, the stakes are high. Covid hangs over the entire tour.
So does the band Pavement. Inspired by Mina Tavakoli’s Pavement tour diary in The Paris Review, Fateman sets out to contextualize as well as document. But the bands travel through separate realities.
Kathleen often wonders aloud if “this” would be happening to Pavement. When we are asked questions by journalists that men would not be asked, when we are paid unfairly, or find ourselves repeatedly in almost comically abject or dangerous circumstances that other bands somehow never encounter, this is her question.
Fateman has the observational skills I mourn I didn’t possess 30 years ago. She has a great ear for moments of weirdness. At one point, all three band members find themselves preparing to go onstage in Day-Glo taffeta costumes, wearing custom molded earphones requiring wires painstakingly looped through cloth. “Wearing our in-ear monitors, we can’t hear each other talk. We mouth phrases and mime. We’re like astronauts.” Later, there’s this: “I think that’s been one of Le Tigre’s enduring lessons for me, though: it’s okay to be inelegant, to be obvious—to be cringe, as one of our defining qualities came to be called. We withheld very little in our art.”
A vein of self-awareness runs throughout, not just in Fateman’s writing, but in the act of reunion itself. Her bandmates, JD Samson and Kathleen Hanna, seem equally self-aware to a degree that few band members are, or need to be. TikTok made their song “Decepticon” go viral, but the band still had to operate in an extra dimension, navigating all the threats and indignities never faced by Pavement. Anonymous men glare from every audience. Hotel rooms are booked under fake names to thwart stalkers. But when the covid cancellations happen, it’s a matter of insurance claims, not verbal meltdowns. “This is a reunion tour; when it’s over, we’ll have our real lives to go back to,” Fateman notes. “If it doesn’t work out, that’s fine, we’ve already broken up.”
Your Critique is Superficial can be downloaded for free here.
[1] Chris Farley’s brother. From Kevin’s IMDb bio: The minute he relocated to Los Angeles he began landing roles in films such as Tommy Boy and Black Sheep.