Amy's Robot

Election Analysis From Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert evaluates the candidates for president and vice president through the lens that matters most to him: What are their favorite movies?

Examining their Facebook pages, he comes up with the following responses:

John McCain: Viva Zapata!, Letters From Iwo Jima, and Some Like It Hot.

Barack Obama: Casablanca, Godfather I and II, Lawrence of Arabia, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

Joe Biden: no response.

Sarah Palin: no response.

Well! Ebert is very disappointed by the VP candidates' failure to appreciate the importance of sharing their taste in movies with voters. He also believes that no campaign aides selected these movies for the candidates, but that they reflect the true views of the candidates themselves: "Something as important as choosing your favorite movie, you don't delegate that to underlings." He might be giving them too much credit on that, but let's hope he's right.

Obama's choices strike me as very safe and impersonal (come on, The Godfather?) but One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is pretty interesting. He clearly likes movies about one man standing up to an oppressive regime or bureaucracy.

McCain has some easy choices too, though I was glad to see he had the guts to include a comedy. But he blows it out of the water in a recent EW interview, which Ebert references, in which he more fully explains his Viva Zapata! choice. McCain's a bit of a film buff:

But Ebert says that Bill Clinton has them both beat, based on an interview he did with him in 1999. It's a pretty incredible conversation: Clinton can really talk movies.

Today's Ebert column offers another look at Sarah Palin, who he calls The American Idol candidate. People like her because they think she's just like them, he says, which is exactly why Ebert doesn't like her: "I don't want a vice president who is darned near good enough. I want a vice president who is better, wiser, well-traveled, has met world leaders, who three months ago had an opinion on Iraq."

categories: Movies, Politics
posted by amy at 4:51 PM | #