Posted 6:07 PM by Gene

While idly searching Footlight Records' site (which has had a reprieve since its closing notice, for which we and other record nuts are grateful), scanning the foreign-soundtrack albums for the ultra-cheesy seventies crime potboilers whose covers are far sexier (and perforce far better) than the movies ever could be, we came across an excerpt from this French cinema masterwork: Michael Kael Contre la World News Company, based on an alleged TV news satire on Ca-NAL PLEW and starring Victoria Principal (who judging from her face must have been desperate for a job) and the bulbous shrimp Mickey Rooney (a long way from the PTL Club) and the former Mr. Barbra Streisand impersonating an actor. The disco font in the poster art leaves little guessing who World News Company is; in truth this is one "satire" that makes CNN look good. As the AllMovie gang describes it:

Christophe Smith made his directorial debut with this media satire, set on December 14, 1999, about a TV news network in cahoots with Washington on Operation Crazy Guru -- a plan to get a U.S. president re-elected for a third term.

Pause for a second. The agents of these three American has-beens were so hungry to let their clients make asses of themselves they forgot one minor detail: the Twenty-Second Amendment. Ah, but what's a little piece of scrap paper when you're making a farce? Not intentionally, it would seem. Then again, by THE CONSPIRACY's standards, this is hyperrealism. (Then again, ask these maroons what the Twenty-Second Amendment is and they'd say it ended Prohibition.)

Just one question: Why is that phone bleeding?

(We steeled ourselves up for the video. Awful is a compliment. Where to begin? The cheap opening sets suggesting a third-string French public-affairs program and an ad hoc telemarketing center, complete with laptops [?]; Babs's ex seated in front of a creased wall-map from National Geographic, with a hurriedly printed name plate on his desk [we think even MOUTH OF THE SOUTH would have been classier]; two of the -- principals climbing up a stopped escalator so the camera could track them...and we presume Tammy's friend's voice box was an attempt to find the rollicking humor in cancer. Obviously Messieur Smith must have had great faith in Dolby to render him intelligible. [And it doesn't even sound like a voice-box. Stupide!] But as we said, this is hyperrealism. The American dimwits were dubbed for the French audience which at least would have rendered their sailor-cussing romantic.)

(Update on 1/19/2008 at 6:40 p.m.; I forced myself to look at the video again and evidently the escalator was moving, but the monitors are maybe five inches thick, which made me think of laptops; it still looks like an ad hoc telemarketing center, and the clip is still and expulsion of hydrogen sulfide.)