American Dreamz

The Movie Snob sounds off.

American Dreamz (D). I wanted to see this movie because it got a good review in the Dallas newspaper and because I enjoyed director Paul Weitz's last two efforts -- In Good Company and especially About a Boy. (I never saw his earlier masterpiece American Pie.) This movie has some laughs, but the humor curdles when Weitz also weaves in a tasteless plotline about a suicide-homicide bombing. I have never seen American Idol, but the unifying element in this movie is a clone of that show called American Dreamz, hosted by the unctious and self-loathing Martin Tweed (Hugh Grant). In one strand of the plot, Mandy Moore plays a ruthless, white-trash Britney wanna-be who will do anything to win the contest, including play with the affections of her hapless dope of a boyfriend (a solider who is injured on his first day in Iraq). In another, Dennis Quaid plays a clone of our current President, complete with a doting wife (Marcia Gay Harden) and a Machiavellian Cheney/Rove figure played by Willem Dafoe. And finally, the most unlikely figure of all is Omer, a nice, show-tune-loving guy from the Middle East who wants to be a terrorist because his mother was killed by an American bomb. He washes out of terrorist training camp in the opening scenes, and he is sent to America to await further orders -- which would never come except that he becomes a contestant on American Dreamz at the same time the President agrees to appear on the show as a guest judge. The terrorism stuff makes the film way too dark, and at 1:45 it is also at least 15 minutes too long. Skip it.