By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
It's Showtime: Dante's Homecoming
At its Turin world premiere, VOICE’s Dennis Lim talks to Joe Dante about “Masters of Horror” and his episode, Homecoming: “In an election year, dead veterans of the current conflict crawl out of their graves and stagger single-mindedly to voting booths so they can eject the president who sent them to fight a war sold on “horseshit and elbow grease.” The dizzying high point of Showtime’s new “Masters of Horror” series, the hour-long Homecoming (which premieres December 2) is easily one of the most important political films of the Bush II era… Its dutiful hero, presidential consultant David Murch… reports to a Karl Rove–like guru named Kurt Rand… and engages in kinky [sex] with attack-bitch pundit Jane Cleaver… a blonde, leggy Ann Coulter proxy… Murch’s glib, duplicitous condescension is apparently what triggers the zombie uprising: Confronting an angry mother of a dead soldier on a news talk show, he tells this Cindy Sheehan figure, “If I had one wish… I would wish for your son to come back,” so he could assure the country of the importance of the war. The boy does return, along with legions of fallen combatants, and they all beg to differ.
“How fitting that the most pungent artistic response to a regime famed for its crass fear-mongering would be a cheap horror movie. Jaw-dropping in its sheer directness, Homecoming is a righteous blast of liberal-left fury… “If you’re going to code the message, which is the way horror movies have always done it, that’s fine, but it’s not going to reach an audience like a movie that’s overt, and this is not exactly subtle,” says Dante. “Somebody has to start making this kind of movie, this kind of statement. But everybody’s afraid—it’s uncommercial, people are going to be upset. Good, let them be upset. Why aren’t people upset? Every minute, somebody’s dying in this war, and for nothing. To establish a religious theocracy in Iraq? It doesn’t seem to me quite worth it.” … Homecoming [accommodates] a devastatingly specific checklist of accusations, from the underreporting of war casualties to last November’s dubious Ohio count. As if in defiance of the Pentagon’s policy to ban photographs of… coffins, Dante’s film shows not just the flag-draped caskets at Dover Air Force Base but their irate occupants bursting out of them. “There’s a lot of powerful imagery in this movie that has nothing to do with me… When you see those coffins, which is a sight that’s generally been withheld from us, there’s a gravity to it…” To [Dante’s] surprise, Showtime executives didn’t flinch… “I can’t conceive of any other venue where we would have been able to tell this story: You can’t do theatrical political movies; people don’t go to them. You can’t do them on television, because you’ve got sponsors… Michael Moore’s last picture made a lot of money, but he was vilified for it so much he’s practically in hiding… The New York Times and all these people that abetted the lies and crap that went into making and selling this war—now that they see the guy is a little weak, they’re kicking him with their toe to make sure he doesn’t bite back. It’s cowardly. This pitiful zombie movie, this fucking B movie, is the only thing anybody’s done about this issue that’s killed 2,000 Americans and untold numbers of Iraqis? It’s fucking sick.” … Dante says he’s eager for the right-wing punditocracy… to see it: “I hope this movie bothers a lot of people that disagree with it—and that it makes them really pissed off, as pissed off as the rest of us are.”