Bob Roberts
Dick
Good evening, my fellow Americans. We have survived another tense, tumultuous, highly-unpredictable midterm election, and if you care about basic human rights, then the results were actually extremely positive!! As Ted Cruz muttered through his pathetic tears, Texas is BLUE!!! We have done the impossible, and voted out the corrupt, hateful, downright evil republican lawmakers who have controlled my beautiful home state for decades, and several other historically-red states can say the same. I fully expected to begin this post with my usual hopeless, dejected tone of disappointment that typically follows an election cycle, but my fellow Texans and my fellow Americans somehow saw past the culture war-mongering and self-interested politicians and voted for human rights. We are tired of seeing our neighbors being abducted and brutalized by ICE, we are tired of engaging in unnecessary wars, we are tired of losing access to life-saving healthcare like abortion, we are tired of our queer and trans family members being singled out like they’re to blame for the ludicrously expensive groceries, gas, and rent, and we are tired of listening to the same, bigoted, old-fashioned, gun-loving, people-hating, charisma-lacking, education-shirking, environment-damaging, billionaire-protecting, tech-bro-dick-sucking, self-aggrandizing, hypocritical-faux-Christian, in-our-face-fascists, so we voted them the fuck out of office and collectively flipped the Senate and the House faster than you can say “counting or not counting gang violence?” I am still libbing out a bit; I just can’t help celebrating such momentous, history-making occurrences like the fact that we elected our first Latina woman Governor, and an Attorney General who isn’t embroiled in a myriad of fraud and cheating scandals. But as much as I’m celebrating, I am also ready to hold these elected officials accountable, I’m ready to get rid of more old, ineffectual, establishment politicians, and I’m ready to keep this momentum going all the way to the top of the crumbling executive branch. If you didn’t want political awareness with your film criticism, I suggest you go watch some smooth-brained superhero slop or Colleen Hoover content, or maybe you’re into those AI fruit microdramas on TikTok, but here, tonight, and forever on Double Feature Thursday, we are socially, politically-conscious, and we are dealing with good movies only. Mostly. Tonight, at least, I can confidently say, with bi-partisan certainty, that these satirical, farcical, political comedies I’ve chosen to watch were slam dunks. So let’s dive in to two uproariously funny, sharply-written, and expertly-performed comedies that perfectly portray the endless absurdities of the American political system.
Up first is a witty, salient, and star-studded mockumentary that was written, directed, and starred the random and newfound love of my life Tim Robbins, this is his directorial debut from 1992: Bob Roberts. Based on a skit he once performed on SNL, Bob Roberts transports us to October 1990 in Pennsylvania, USA, where poet, folk singer, businessman, and Senatorial candidate Bob Roberts (Tim Robbins) takes the stage at his rally to perform one of his popular country hits. Hearing his lyrics about how “praying isn’t allowed” and “god isn’t welcome in this country anymore” gave me a pretty perfect indication of what this film would be, even within the first five minutes. The documentary within this film is being directed by a British filmmaker named Terry Manchester, who offers narration to introduce us to this controversial republican candidate. “Backed by a team of novices without a major record label” we’re told that Bob’s first album made him an overnight success, and his songs, which are all about “drug users, lazy people, and the triumph of traditional family values and laissez-faire capitalism over the rebelliousness and social justice causes of the 1960s” really connects with disillusioned boomer right-wing Pennsylvanians who are tired of their current, liberal Senator, Brickley Paiste (Gore Vidal.) As Bob performs at rallies, for kindergartners, and gets escorted around by his already secret-service-level security team who applauds him every time he steps off his tour bus, we’re given hints large and small that this candidate might be a bit of a hypocrite. Whether it be his heavy-handed lyrics that push racist, sexist, homophobic buttons, or his associations with Wall Street, or his right-hand man and campaign chairman, Lukas Hart III (Alan Rickman), who was involved with a widely-publicized misuse of housing funds for drug smuggling, Bob Roberts is steadily shown to be the exact kind of right-wing political candidate that we’re very accustomed to today. As one journalist says after she interviews him, “He wants to rewrite the history of the progress done in the 60s. He’s Nixon but shrewder, more complicated. He’s adopted the mind of the free-thinking rebel and turned it in on itself—the rebel conservative—ha! That is deviant brilliance. What a Machiavellian user.” This was still the era of conservatism where republicans cared about their image(s), where their hatred and prejudice was kept mostly in private, where President George H.W. Bush was still the peak of far-right identity politics, but clearly, Tim Robbins saw an extreme, shameless, deeper shade of red coming, and that’s what Bob Roberts so aptly, hilariously, scarily captures. When Bob sings a fucked up rendition of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land”, with lyrics that just say, “This land is my land, you gotta be proud of it in the land of the free, this land was made for meeeeeeeee” we can laugh at the ridiculous, brazenly selfish parodying of this song of unity, but we can also recognize that this just isn’t far off from the ethos—or lack thereof—of modern day conservatism. I wonder if this film seemed outrageous back in 1992, in a naive “imagine if it were that offensively in-our-face” way, or if audiences were laughing through their paranoia of what might become of American politics and culture. All I can speak to is my own experience watching this incredibly prescient film in 2026, and I was completely blown away. I can laugh at the shameless, excessive corruption and cruelty on display in Bob Roberts because I am oh-so-familiar with it, and I think Tim Robbins’ handle on all of it was funny and entertaining and freakishly accurate to what American politics and its figureheads have transformed into. I also really enjoyed the fake country songs in this film, which Tim Robbins deliberately did not release as a soundtrack because he didn’t want the songs to ever be heard outside the context of the film. (Hot.) It was such a smart, scathing film that I’m fairly certain that I missed some political references, but I also totally missed the fact that several scenes were directly parodying D.A. Pennebaker’s revered Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back—effectively transforming this radical road movie into a satirical, intentionally-misguided mimic. One thing I didn’t miss though, is how stacked this cast is—every time the scene changed, we were inundated with stars large and larger. Bob Roberts features performances from Giancarlo Esposito, Ray Wise, Brian Murray, Rebecca Jenkins, Tom Atkins, David Strathairn, James Spader, Pamela Reed, Helen Hunt, Eva Amurri, Peter Gallagher, Lynne Thigpen, Susan Sarandon, Fred Ward, Jeremy Piven, Shira Piven, Fisher Stevens, John Cusack, Bob Balaban, Harry Lennix, Robert Stanton, Kelly Willis, Steve Pink, Anita Gillette, and a very young Jack Black in his on-screen debut. This film is biting and brutal without feeling like a self-righteous slog—it’s just funny and it’s just smart, and Tim Robbins continues to be a tall, intelligent, charismatic, but surprising entry into the grand pantheon of my celebrity crushes.
I had a feeling I would like Bob Roberts, but I had no idea I would love it so much, and the exact same thing could be said for tonight’s next film, an iconic piece of girly pop culture cinema that I have somehow never seen until now, this is Andrew Fleming’s 1999 film Dick. This is one of those pitch-perfect, gloriously-girly, secretly-brilliant comedies of the early-2000s where I have to go “I know I know I know” when I tell people I’ve never seen it, but that ends tonight! Dick follows two besties, Arlene (Michelle Williams) and Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) who we first meet as they are giddily writing a fan letter to their favorite teen dream, Bobby Sherman, in the hopes that one of them will win a Tiger Beat sweepstakes to go on a date with him. They carefully craft this letter in Arlene’s chaotically-colorful, frenetically-fuzzy, egregiously-groovy bedroom inside her mom’s apartment in the Watergate building in Washington D.C., on June 17, 1972, then sneak out so they can mail this letter by the deadline. They have no idea that in their very close vicinity, men who work for President Nixon are carrying out some of the sloppiest espionage in American history, but as they sneak back into the parking garage, they run into a suspicious and goofily-mustached gentleman they do not know is G. Gordon Liddy (Harry Shearer)—and it’s hard to say who is more afraid of whom. It’s not until the next day, when the girlies are on a school field trip to the Whitehouse, and they spot this goofily-mustached gentleman talking to Nixon’s people, that they realize his importance. The three have an awkward encounter as Arlene and Betsy try to warn him of the toilet paper stuck to his shoe, but when he storms off and leaves this paper behind, it is revealed not to be TP, but a list of donors and amounts of money. “Souvenir!” Betsy says as she giggles and puts this piece of paper in her purse, but then something really wild happens. Nixon (Dan Hedaya) is struggling to get his dog, Checkers, to obey him, and suddenly the dog goes running after Arlene and Betsy, who have a much calmer, friendlier attitude toward the pup. Nixon catches wind that these guileless girlies might know more than they should, so he decides to keep his jovial, juvenile enemies close by hiring them as the official Whitehouse dog walkers. They’re so starstruck by Nixon and so enamored with Checkers that they do not hesitate to accept this offer, even though everyone close to Nixon is already suspicious of them. Despite the turning heads in his cabinet, Nixon is charmed by Arlene and Betsy, and ends up adopting several of their groovy ideas in an attempt to improve his dismal approval ratings. He pulls out of the war in Vietnam, brokers peace with Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, and he even learns the peace sign from Arlene and Betsy—somewhat effectively helping his image as people begin to point fingers in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Arlene and Betsy are perfectly content walking Checkers and baking cookies for all the president’s men, until they stumble upon some tapes Nixon secretly recorded, wherein he uses prejudiced language, kicks and yells at Checkers, and implicates himself in the scandal he publicly claims he has no involvement in. After this revelation, Arlene and Betsy come to the shocking and devastating conclusion that perhaps they cannot trust their president after all, so the two girlfriends decide to give all of their intel to Woodward and Bernstein—and thus, Deep Throat is born. Dick was everything and more than what people sold it as. It is vibrant and cute and consistently funny—it’s not often that I laugh by myself watching a comedy, but I audibly laughed at a lot of this movie. I absolutely adore movies about girlhood, and when those movies are also whip-smart and full of feminist, political criticism, I can’t help falling in love with it. Much like the protagonists of this film, stories surrounding young girls are often underestimated and cast aside as frivolous, but Dick had just as much cutting wisdom as it did whimsy. The fashion—most of which was sourced from an untouched warehouse of authentic 1970s polyester—was absolutely to die for, and its cast—which included Teri Garr, Dave Foley, Jim Breuer, Ana Gasteyer, Saul Rubinek, Devon Gummersall, Ryan Reynolds, French Stewart, G.D. Spradlin, and Will Ferrell and Bruce McCulloch as a hilariously tight-pantsed and bitchy Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein—were all phenomenal. The soundtrack was also impeccable, and featured every early 70s hit you can dream of—minus “Love Will Keep Us Together”, because apparently the politically conservative Daryl Dragon and Toni Tennille did not appreciate the film’s “irreverence” and denied them permission, lol. Leonard Matlin described this film as a, “clever cross of Clueless and All the President’s Men”, and I wholeheartedly agree. I loved Dick’s alternative history lesson, and I love that this film has found a fervent fandom, many years after it flopped at the box office. Back when this film was made and released, we didn’t yet know the identity of Deep Throat, so I think the imagination of this film is fun and thrilling and endlessly entertaining. Writers Andrew Fleming and Sheryl Longin had several script ideas, but the backdrop of the Watergate scandal came from a real-life experience Longin had when her family stayed at the same hotel as Nixon. As a child, she and a friend allegedly pelted Nixon with ice cubes, which caused a minor disturbance. Fleming said that he was surprised at the attempts to rehabilitate Nixon’s image, and Longin cited the Watergate scandal as a defining political moment for their generation. She said she channeled the resulting anger and cynicism into the script, and though several executives told the duo that various gags went too far, Fleming, who believed Nixon got off too easily, said they fought to keep everything. Given the fact that American politics have only gotten more divisive and indifferent to the facts, films that can engage people in politics and history in an entertaining format like this one, seem more vital than ever. Shame on Richard Nixon for all of his lying, sniveling, self-serving corruption, and shame on every U.S. history teacher I ever had for never showing this film in class! Well, that’s enough politics for one night, but I’ll remind you that art (which includes movies!!) is inherently political, and the best art can help us make sense (or make fun of) the wild, wild west we’re living in. Toodles!
