On The American Political System And How To Fix It

P.J. O'Rourke offers his suggestion, caustic and brilliant as always.

Uwe Boll's New Low

German scheissmeister Uwe Boll has made a career of making shitty movies - he directed four of the 100 worst-reviewed movies of the last decade according to RottenTomatoes.com's count - but to this point you could at least say that he had the sense to turn his "talents" to the right kind of material, focusing as he has on lesbian vampires, zombie plagues, and other B-movie schlock. No more, however; Boll has decided that, like Stephen Spielberg, Roman Polanski, and Quentin Tarantino before him, he must make a film about the Holocaust. Furthermore, since previous films about the subject have been so tame - Disneyesque, practically - he wants to tell it to us straight: Auschwitz was a really terrible place, a "death factory". And he wants to show us, using the "talent" for "explicit depictions of violence" that he honed to oh-so-fine an edge by making all those latex zombie heads explode so realistically in his previous work. Unsurprisingly, preliminary reaction from critics has been less than enthusiastic. What's wrong, guys? You don't trust the guy responsible for Alone in the Dark and In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale to treat one of the most tragic and horrifying episodes in human history with the gravity and dignity it deserves?

Personally, I'm mystified as to why any movie studio would be willing to back this project. Are there really people out there clamoring for a statement on the Holocaust from Uwe Boll? I have a hard time believing that, much less that people will be willing to pay to watch it. I'm a big believer in free speech. But every time Boll is allowed to make a movie, I become slightly less so. Perhaps this film will give a boost to the online petition to stop Boll from making any more movies.