The Campaign (2012)
Directed by Jay Roach
Two rival politicians compete to win an election to represent their small North Carolina congressional district in the United States House of Representatives.
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4 films that influenced The Campaign
What critics say influenced The Campaign
Bernie finds Jack Black playing the same type of character essayed by Zach Galifianakis in The Campaign: a friendly, respectable and slightly effeminate Southerner who's greatly admired by those around him.
Another actor – ahem, Zach Galifiniakis in The Campaign – may have been tempted to turn this character into a caricature, but Black imbues with so much empathy and pathos that, despite the macabre series of events happening around him.
Zach Galifianakis plays Marty Huggins in a way that he kept reminding me of Jack Black in this year’s “Bernie.”
It seems like Galifianakis is pulling a page out of Jack Black 's performance from " Bernie " and Marty Huggins is just as likeable.
A sleazy incumbent initially running unopposed, he finds himself suddenly challenged by the civic-minded naïf and all-around family-man-cum-schmo Marty Huggins (Galifianakis, seemingly channeling Jack Black's Bernie character).
It’s also close to what Jack Black did with Bernie, but not as good.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Themes
Neither cleverly arch in the tradition of Dr Strangelove and Wag the Dog, or cleverly crude in the mould of South Park: The Movie and Harold & Kumar go to Guantanamo Bay, Roach ignores brilliant precedents for lampooning public figures, instead relying on a series of cheap shots at the expense of gay people, housewives and the American South.
Satire has been mixing low comedy and riled-up political observations for a very long while; look no further than the fratty sex comedy bursting at the seams of Dr. Strangelove for proof.
A very hilarious answering machine message scandal puts Brady out of favor with election-rigging job-outsourcing industrialists the Motch (as in "Koch") brothers, played with apt vampiric relish by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd (now old enough, as another writer has pointed out, to play one half of a duo that's mostly an homage to the betting brothers of " Trading Places " played by Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche ).
They're played by John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd, and their presence mostly serves to remind us that Aykroyd is now old enough to play the aged evil tycoons he battled in "Trading Places."
And John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd (in a nod, perhaps, to “Trading Places”) as the two old monsters who run everything, chuckling all the while.
I got excited when John Lithgow and Dan Ackroyd showed up as two characters clearly inspired by the legendary Duke brothers from Trading Places, but the script doesn't give them much to do.
And as the Motch Brothers, Lithgow and Aykroyd seem to be channeling Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy from “Trading Places” (in which a much younger Aykroyd starred opposite Eddie Murphy).
It straddles the “Fair and balanced” fence, making the naive, effeminate Republican (Zach Galifianakis) an idealist backed by the evil Motch brothers (Dan Aykroyd and John Lithgow, trying a “Trading Places” evil rich siblings thing) and the Democrat (Will Ferrell) a boozy, womanizing cynic whose idealism evaporated in high school.
Only Sarah Baker (2002's " Sweet Home Alabama ") gets a shot to play with the big boys as Marty's neglected wife Mitzi, an obviously (until now) untapped comic talent who runs away with her scenes.