Proud American

If America’s even half as great as writer-producer-director Fred Ashman’s almost unfathomably cheesy movie insists, her citizens will rise up to destroy this bathetic rubbish—or at least make a pitilessly derided cult sensation of it on the midnight-movie circuit. Ashman’s literal melting-pot approach to dramatization—think Reader’s Digest by way of corporate-training video—intends a tribute to our virtuous excellence: Turns out that with a little tolerance, optimism, elbow grease and bad acting by dimly familiar TV talent, the great experiment works! Well, shucks, it’s not that Ashman’s wrong, exactly; who doesn’t love bloated, feel-good arrangements of patriotic pop ditties and sweeping aerial views of national monuments? It’s just that those treacly up-by-the-bootstraps origin myths of Coca-Cola and Wal-Mart, which happen to be among the movie’s corporate sponsors, might benefit from a little ol’ American critical thinking. And no, Yakov Smirnoff’s “What a country!” routine doesn’t count.