Film pokes fun at 'Bushisms'
2004-11-01 11:28
Marc Lavine
Los Angeles - "I know how hard it for you to put food on your family," a sympathetic US President George W Bush told baffled single mothers in one of his inimitable foot-in-mouth utterances.
Just days ahead of Tuesday's US presidential election, a new political film is taking a light-hearted poke at the lexicon of unique words and phrases invented by the leader of the free world.
The one-hour film titled Bushisms gently lampoons 50 of the president's most memorable verbal gaffes, welding them together with commentary by US comedian Brian Unger and author Jacob Weisberg, who has compiled three volumes of Bushisms into book form.
"It'll take time to restore chaos," Bush reassured people in a speech on the situation in war-torn Iraq featured in the movie.
Producer and director Elizabeth Reeder said she sifted through a "mountain of material" when searching for the president's most quotable quotes.
"We wanted to have some political fun in the middle of a very heavily charged political atmosphere," said Reeder, who this year produced the political documentary Bush's Brain, widely seen as an anti-Bush film.
Film 'not intended to influence the election'
"This film is not intended to influence the election in any way. It's political comedy, with more emphasis in comedy," she said adding the Bush had the ability to laugh at his own gaffes and mangling of the English language and had done so publicly.
But she conceded that the timing of the film, released just weeks before one of the tightest presidential races in years, was sensitive and that some retailers had been loath to carry copies of the DVD.
Reeder and her team said they had fun picking Bush's most amusing slip-ups from hundreds of hours of news clips.
"If you teach you child to read, he or her would be able to pass a literacy test," the president memorably noted a few years ago. 'Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning," he said in another.
Another of the clips featured in the movie recalls the president's thoughts on the complex business of keeping an eye on the country's spending. "It's clearly a budget," he said "It's got a lot of numbers in it."
In a speech in Washington in October 2003, Bush spoke of his long-term aspirations for Iraq following the US invasion of the country earlier last year.
"A peeance, freeance secure Iraq in the midst of the Middle East will have enormous historical impact," he said without pausing or stalling, even as audience members scratched their heads over what "peeance and freeance" means in any country.
Among the new words coined by Bush, the film picks out "subliminable" - which the sporting Bush gamely repeated in a joke at his own expense on a US television satire show ahead of the 2000 election.
Ingrinable, strategery, hopefuller...
Also recalled are "ingrinable" - as in prescription drugs will be an ingrinable part of the medical plan - "strategery" and "hopefuller."
But Reeder said she did not believe the film was "mean-spirited" because even Bush had laughed at some of his own slips and even quipped this month that his wife Laura "speaks English better" than he does.
"It just so happens that President Bush has come out with quite a few 'Bushisms,' but if (former Democratic presidential candidate) Al Gore had won in 2000, I'd have made an Al Gore dance music video," she said of the famously stiff former vice president.
Bush's Democratic rival in this year's election, John Kerry, is himself frequently pilloried for his brand of windy public rhetoric that is sometimes so over-embellished and opaque that it is tough to understand.
"I would never reduce the happiness of any two people," he said when asked the sensitive question of whether he would attend a homosexual wedding if invited by someone close to him. "I've been to a commitment ceremony."
- AFP