Man of the Year (movie review)

Banking on his popularity as a TV host comic, a thinly veiled Robin Williams seizes the presidency, only to surrender it in a kind of King Lear moment, when he remembers he's just the jester -- and really, it's better that way (especially since he gets the girl).

Although in the guise of realism, it's completely a mindscape, in the tradition of Team America (South Park Studios) but a tad less horrific. A bored, stupid public denies itself access to the wheels of real power fearing cameras on its past (and ongoing) misdeeds. Silicon Valley can't code worth a dime. There's no hard data about anything. Hollywood runs Universe.

Laura Linney's nervous breakdown in the company cafeteria was a high point for me. Who couldn't love this highly strung nervous nellie, losing it in high style? You could plot twist it right there and make that she is crazy. That scene with the apartment attacker was just in her dreams, and no, the election results were not based on her paranoid delusion regarding the doubled letters in each candidates name, duh. So Robin Williams is president after all.

If they ever do Ellen Ullman's The Bug as a movie, I hope they consider Laura for a part. She'd make a dynamite Roberta Walton I bet, or maybe Joanna? -- s'been awhile since I read it.