I can just see the pitch meeting for this script. Director Paul Weitz (American Pie, About A Boy) walks in the executive's door at Universal and fires off this line:  “The Bush White House meets… American Idol!” 

Applause, laughter, handshakes and big checks abound. A cast of Weitz regulars (Dennis Quaid, Hugh Grant, Chris Klein, Jennifer Coolidge, and Jon Cho) meet up with other established stars (Willem Dafoe, Marcia Gay Harden, and Mandy Moore) and put their collective, artistic brilliance together to work on the project that will become American Dreamz. 

The film seemed, at least, to be pointed in the right direction, but it doesn't last. Hugh Grant (as the Simon Cowell) is the host of the wildly popular, amateur singing competition called American Dreamz. He has just launched the search for this season's new batch of contestants. At the same time, the President of the United States (Dennis Quaid doing G.W. Bush out of the Will Ferrell playbook) has just been re-elected for a second term. On the other end of the world, an incompetent, show-tune loving terrorist (Sam Golzari) is being shipped out to live with wealthy relatives in Southern California. 

The President is going through a deep, deep depression. He realizes that he is being manipulated, especially by his own Chief Of Staff (Willem Dafoe as a combination Carl Rove and Dick Cheney.)  Isolating himself in his living quarters, the President sets out to begin to educate himself by reading the newspapers and shunning his daily briefings. During this time, he has all but disappeared from the public, prompting his staff to enlist him as a guest judge on the American Dreamz finale in order to boost poll numbers. 

Among the finalists found for American Dreamz, there is sweet, girl-next-door Sally Kendoo from Ohio (Mandy Moore.)  Poised as America's sweetheart, we quickly learn that Sally knows what she wants and she knows how to get it. It seems that Sally isn't so sweet and she'll work to manipulate the system any way she can to win. Another finalist is Golzari's Omer (think a Middle Eastern William Hung.)  When Omer's handlers get wind of this, they order him to make it to the finals so that he can martyr himself and kill the President. 

As an idea, it has the potential to mix like chocolate and peanut butter. Unfortunately, as executed here, it is more like oil and water. We get two ideas that never properly blend and remain alien to each other for the span of 108 minutes. 

Perhaps I am being a bit unfair. Maybe I'm holding this movie up to where I want it to be, where it could be, instead of where it is. Sadly, where it is, is a place that most of America has grown to feel comfortable:  Safe, non-confrontational, spoon-fed, mediocre.  

The White House trio of Quaid, Gay Harden, and Dafoe deserve a better vehicle for these characters. Currently they are only sketches, but sketches with potential. A better movie with more meat on it would've better suited them. Also wasted is Jon Cho. I can't quite figure out why he repeatedly works for Weitz, as Weitz never quite knows how to use him. As he proved in Harold And Kumar Go To White Castle, Cho has a lot to offer. Just not with Weitz, it appears. Finally, Hugh Grant just missed the mark completely. Given the opportunity to do a character in the same mold as Simon Cowell, Grant completely undershot the mark. Cowell's television persona is that of the ultimate British villain; powerful, evil, and yet somehow completely non-threatening. In a movie so full of cartoony characters, a more accurate portrayal by Grant would've actually fit in quite well here.  

In the past, Weitz has shown the ability to be subtle, thoughtful, and even insightful. It is as if, since American Pie, he's grown through each passing film, gaining a defter touch. Any progress that Weitz has made as a filmmaker up to this point has been squandered with American Dreamz. Here, he had the opportunity to comment on American society as a whole. To use the conceit of American Idol, where anyone can be made into a star, and mirror it with the current administration, where seemingly anyone can be President of the United States. Within that sphere, there are a whole host of ideas rich for mining on screen:  The fact that more Americans vote for the American Idol than they do for President; the fact that these Americans invest more into who becomes the next Idol than they do who runs the country; the fact that the office of President is just as stage managed, manipulated, and fabricated as the careers of those American Idols. And what this whole display is showing to the world at large, especially to those who feel that the planet would be a far better place without America being the sole, dominant world power. 

No, Weitz misses all of this. Where the beauty of the idea exists in the particulars, Weitz instead paints with only the broadest of strokes. Instead of people, very real people who publicly seem to control great power yet are controlled themselves, we get cartoon characters and caricatures… empty shells filled with a basic outline, yet contain no depth or reality. 

Take a movie like the phenomenal Election. In it, director Alexander Payne takes enormous issues and places them in a typical American high school. Payne uses those issues to tell a story of great importance, but hides it within a story that has little general importance to the outside world. Payne never allows his issues to lose their weight and gravity, and never once goes broad to avoid the messiness of real life. Payne's characters were complex, were real, and had a life that seemed to exist beyond the screen and the story at hand. Perhaps Alexander Payne should've directed American Dreamz. Maybe then I would have gotten the movie that I wanted this to be. 

Picture & Sound
To quote a line I used earlier: Safe, non-confrontational, spoon-fed, mediocre. This is a thoroughly adequate transfer of a film that's probably more suited for home viewing than it ever was for the theater. Everything is clean, bright, sharp and clear. 

Extras
The extras here are quite few, and I am not the least bit disappointed. Well, there is no theatrical trailer and that always disappoints me (god please don't tell me that they plan a future SE release of this title). I would've liked to have seen the trailer again, only because I remember when it ran theatrically. I remember that the trailer made me think that this could actually be an interesting film. I want to see that trailer again and tell it that it is full of lies. 

In addition to the lack of trailer, we get deleted scenes. None of them were any better or any worse than the film itself, so I can only imagine that they were cut for time. There are also the fuller versions of the American Dreamz segments, shot on video, that we can see on the television screens during the film. 

There is a short segment called Center Stage: Sally Kendoo. In it, Mandy Moore is in character as Kendoo, showing us backstage of the American Dreamz (the fake TV show, not the vanilla movie) set. It's short, yet I still didn't watch the whole thing. 

There is a behind-the-scenes piece called Dance Dreamz with choreographer Jennifer Lee. It's also short, but I fast-forwarded through it after the first two minutes failed to catch me. 

Finally there is the Feature Commentary. What I wished this would be was a huge mea culpa to all the viewers as he explained how his original vision was slaughtered and how the evil studios watered it down to what we have here today. Instead, we get a very self-conscious Weitz (the nervous laughter every couple of minutes could either be teeth gnashingly irritating or one hell of a drinking game) who defends his film, wrapping it up in lots of pretty film-geek speak and a generous helping of name dropping. He also spends a good deal of time sucking the ass of his cast, which I suppose he should, considering they all have this scar on their resume now. 

Wrap-up
In Hollywood today, it seems that films with promise must be completely sanitized before they get the green light, and studio comedies seem to be the prime example of this. Whatever we have left here failed to find an audience (worldwide box office -- $10 million) and it isn't surprising. There is no clear target audience here at all, and that's a shame considering the fans of Mandy Moore, Hugh Grant, Dennis Quaid and American Idol (as well as those who love to loathe Idol). To play a film safe, especially one as loaded as this, in these times, is a mistake. It's actually more interesting to watch the manufactured “reality” of American Idol and/or CNN than to sit through American Dreamz.