"The Campaign"

I wasn't planning to see this - Will Ferrell isn't really my thing - but my newspaper's social club picked it for our movie night and I had nothing else to do, so what the hell.

In "The Campaign" (or "Citizens United 101 for Frat Boys" as I like to think of it), Ferrell plays Cam Brady, a North Carolina congressman running unopposed for his fifth term until he accidentally leaves a sexually explicit message for his mistress on a Christian family's answering machine.

The Motch brothers, two corrupt billionaires blatantly based on the Koch brothers, see this as a chance to buy the election so they can sell the district to Chinese sweatshops and save on shipping.

They pick an associate's son, Marty Huggins (Zach Galifianakis), to run against Cam, putting millions of dollars into his campaign. "When you have the money," Jon Lithgow's Glen Motch smirks, "nothing is unpredictable." But Marty is fat and silly and sounds kinda gay, giving Cam plenty of opportunities to make gross Will Ferrell jokes.

But then Cam's poll numbers take a hit when he accidentally punches a baby in super slow motion at a campaign rally.  So he accuses Marty of being in al-Qaeda, and Marty tricks him into driving drunk and he steals a police cruiser and hits a cow, and at some point Cam has sex with Marty's wife with her head in the freezer or something. I dunno, I'd had a lot of Budweiser by then.

Budweiser is exactly what you need to be drinking while you watch this movie, by the way.

It wasn't too bad for a Saturday night, really. Making politicians look stupid is always funny, especially when Jon Lithgow does it.  (Here he is mocking Newt Gingrich on the Colbert Report - hilarious.) As an added bonus, it included cameos from a raft of cable news stars like Wolf Blitzer, Chris Matthews, Piers Morgan, Ed Schultz, Bill Maher, Joe Scarborough and Dennis Miller.

No, Rachel Maddow wasn't in the movie; her cameo was in George Clooney's "The Ides of March," which is more the style of a poncy liberal like me. The only character in "The Campaign" that I could relate to was the poor intern who wanted to discuss the ethics of giving tax breaks to companies that outsource jobs, and he was only in the film for like a minute.

But if the average Will Ferrell fan comes away from this thinking about campaign finance reform, who am I to complain. The movie even pulled the actual Koch brothers into a media slap-fight with Zach Galifianakis, which kinda proves his point.