 Manohla Dargis in the New York Times hits American Dreamz hard -- but warns in her lede of her intent. She writes that in the movie, about a President who attempts to restore his popularity by appearing on an American Idol-type TV show, "the jokes don't just fizzle into insignificance; they flop about with gaudy ineffectualness, gasping for air like newly landed trout. Unlike fish, alas, gags about nitwit commanders in chief, oily television hosts and rabidly ambitious young performers with stars in their eyes and sometimes their beds can't be tossed back in the water; only a blunt instrument, like a hammer, will do. Consider this a hammer, humanely but firmly applied." Desson Thomson in the Washington Post dismisses it a "tediously facile satire" with a "sophomorically liberal agenda." But Jack Mathews in the New York Daily News finds it amusing enough. "In the softer realm of parody, it has a good premise, a couple of funny performances and enough giggles for a reasonably good time at the movies," he writes. And Joe Morgenstern in the Wall Street Journal suggests that moviegoers not enter the theater believing they are about to watch biting satire. The movie, he writes, speaks "the universal language of commercial TV sitcoms, with their constrained cultural vocabulary and their subtext of harmlessness: Don't be offended, none of this really means anything, it's just a goof about a lot of dumb stuff going down around us." |
