'RAUNCH FEST' Film role casts doubt on McCain judgment
SUSAN ESTRICH
Posted on Sat, Jul. 16, 2005
"McCain to Star in Boob Raunch Fest," read the headline in the Drudge Report. I don't even know what that is, but it certainly sounds like something that someone who's running in a process dominated by Christian conservatives would prefer not to be caught in.
It turns out McCain has a cameo role playing himself attending the big wedding in the raunchiest R-rated movie of the weekend, "Wedding Crashers." We've been exposed to the trailers and ads for weeks. My kids are eager to see it, all the more so because it is R-rated.
You know how that works: It must be good. I hear it's awful, with unnecessary montages of naked women's breasts, before they all sleep with our hero, for his endless meaningless sex - and, of course, endless swear words just for the sake of it, which is right up my son's alley (he's 12) and the sort of thing that bores and embarrasses my 15-year-old daughter and me.
According to the producers, they're "swimming against the tide" by making this "original R-rated comedy" in which, according to the previews, the stars get fondled at the dinner table and no pretense is even made of being family-friendly.
If John McCain were just another U.S. senator, you might say that it was quite a star turn, particularly for a Republican who is actually quite conservative on social issues. And since it's not just another senator, but John McCain, a man whose life story is of courage and service, maybe you'd say it's part of what makes him an appealing figure across generational lines. As he explained it, "It impressed my kids."
But McCain isn't just another senator. He is currently - according to the polls - the "front-runner" in the Republican race for the 2008 nomination, although Republicans are sharply divided as to whether that can hold in a process dominated by party regulars and Christian conservatives.
It was John McCain - the senator, not the character - who held hearings prior to the 2000 elections, as everyone is now pointing out, to take Hollywood to task for making R-rated movies and marketing them to teenagers. The result was a commitment by the industry to enforce more strictly the R restriction - with the unintended consequence, some would argue, that PG-13 movies got to be more sexual and more violent. This movie was conceived of as R-rated from the get-go, and McCain apparently is the only elected official to join the cast.
In 2008, one friend of Hillary's told me, he'll be 72 years old, he'll have had cancer twice, and he has a reputation for being erratic. Remember that Chelsea joke? It was a terrible joke - about Janet Reno being her father - that insulted both a teenage girl and her mother. Hillary has told off-color jokes, but sticking a knife in the back of a kid?
Will the right laugh off the senator's latest cameo as just that? Or will they ask what he was thinking when, having campaigned against R-rated films marketed to kids, he agreed to appear in one.
In the end, what may be at issue is not whether conservatives share McCain's sense of humor but whether they come to question his judgment.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Contact Estrich at Creators Syndicate, 5777 W. Century Blvd., Suite 700, Los Angeles, CA 90045. |
