With “The Ides of March” playing out its age-old tale of political idealism and shocking disillusionment in theatres now, I figured this would be the perfect time for an MSN Movies gallery about other cinematic politicians.
Are they too good to be true? Why, of course they are! That’s the magic of the movies!
Caveat: I tried to stick to movies that focused on politicians, because opening it up to movies where politicians are key supporting characters would just be asking for trouble — there’s Senator Kelly in the “X-Men” movies, half the supporting casts of both versions of “Manchurian Candidate”, Charles Palantine in “Taxi Driver”, Hal Phillip Walker in “Nashville” … you see the problem.
Did I leave anyone out? Let me know in the comments … which you can find by clicking on the title of this post and then scrolling all the way down to the bottom of the resulting page. There’s supposed to be a link to them at the top of every post, but it’s not showing up; I’m still trying to figure out how to enable it.
Stupid WordPress.
As I went through your gallery, you systematically ticked off most of the big ones I could think of, except Primary Colors. I’d be tempted to throw in Election as well. In a stretch, maybe Air Force One, though it’s a crap movie that has nothing to do with politics anyway.
Does The Great Dictator count as a politician?
I think your inclusion of Love Actually is cheating against your own self-imposed rules. And I would not have excluded The Manchurian Candidate. He’s the title character, after all. 🙂
Movies about ficticious politicians? How about “W.”?
Shoot, that last line was meant to be surrounded by [ Michael Moore ] tags, but your blog erased them.
Now that Rick Perry — who looks much more like Josh Brolin than George W. Bush ever will — has emerged on the national stage, “W” seems strange and disturbing to me, like a transmission from an alternate reality.
I discounted “Primary Colors” because it ultimately was more docu-satire than fiction, and thought about “Election”, but dropped it because the office at stake didn’t seem important enough. (Of course, as the first step in Tracey Flick’s rise to Palpatinian levels of evil, it shouldn’t be ignored.)
Nice call on “Air Force One”, though — I totally spaced on that one, and it should have been in there.