interesting, though very melodramatic
CSA: The Confederate States of America (2006)
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Reviews Counted: 64
Fresh: 50
Rotten:14
Average Rating: 7/10
Consensus: Through the eyes of a British "documentary", this film takes a satirically humorous, and sometimes frightening, look at the history of an America where the South won the Civil War.
Synopsis: Kevin Willmott's funny and alarming mockumentary, C.S.A.: THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, springs from an ingenious premise: the South defeated the Union army and won the Civil War. The film... Kevin Willmott's funny and alarming mockumentary, C.S.A.: THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA, springs from an ingenious premise: the South defeated the Union army and won the Civil War. The film presents itself as a British television series about the history of the C.S.A. In Willmott's faux history, British and French troops joined with the Confederates to rout the Northern armies. With Lincoln jailed and Jefferson Davis in the White House, the C.S.A. goes on to invade Mexico and South America, sides with Hitler in World War II, and builds a giant wall between itself and Canada. Breaking up the "history" lesson are commercials from the modern day C.S.A., slick ads for the Slave Shopping Network (imagine QVC pitching "pickaninnies"), and Coon Chicken Inn (an actual 1950s restaurant). Presented by Spike Lee, C.S.A.: THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA clearly has done its historical homework. Though the film will invariably be linked with such mockumentaries as WAITING FOR GUFFMAN and THIS IS SPINAL TAP, Willmott's film is not character-driven (with the exception of the privileged and smug presidential candidate, John Ambrose Fauntroy V, played to perfection by Larry Peterson), and the jokes are much more historical and even academic in nature. Willmott clearly knows the hidden truths of the real African-American experience, and the movie's most startling and disturbing moments are when the "parallel universe" seems awfully familiar. One of the most unnerving scenes is an advertisement for "Runaways," a TV show about catching runaway slaves that looks almost identical to COPS. Other times, the humor is so broad and audacious that the film shares similarities to the should-I-laugh-or-grimace comedy style of SOUTH PARK. However, unlike SOUTH PARK, Willmott has a real agenda: beneath the wit and the quips, he launches a powerful attack on both the C.S.A. and the U.S.A. [More]
Starring: Charles Frank, Shaun Toub, Jeris Poindexter, Rhonda Stubbins White
Starring: Charles Frank, Shaun Toub, Jeris Poindexter, Rhonda Stubbins White, Gloria Stuart, Sean Blake, Ryan L. Carroll, Rupert Pate
Director: Kevin Willmott
Director: Kevin Willmott
Screenwriter: Kevin Wilmott
Producer: Rick Cowen
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Reviews for CSA: The Confederate States of America
a satirist's distorted reflection of today's globe-mastering US, as presided over by a god-fearing Southerner with imperialist tendencies and a penchant for warmongering.
Unrelenting in its cleverness but repetitive in hammering home this message of shameful black oppression.
If you've ever wondered what the course America history might have taken if the south had won the Civil War, you might like to check out this infinitely creative, alternately sobering and humorous look at America's lingering legacy of racism.
As funny as it is provocative, this is a startling film on every level.
Its attack on American racist capitalism is provocative, disturbing and powerful satire . . . shows us through fiction what Katrina has already revealed in fact.
The film's decision to incorporate genuine examples of human horror (photographs of the Wounded Knee Massacre and Southern lynch mob violence) are thoroughly out of place in a movie that tries to score satirical points.
Its central notion is so very promising that Willmott's failure to properly run with it only compounds the eventual disappointment.
By slyly nudging both history and the language of television, this mock documentary about an America won by the Confederacy ... manages to be both shocking and strangely banal in equal measure.
The satire comes to feel strained and the whole premise gets awfully precious, reducing social subtleties to cinematic simplicities.
There are droll comic flourishes in this very brave film, to be sure, but all you really want to do after watching CSA is hang down your head and cry.
Here, technique interferes with the film's argument because it's attempting to satirize a history that didn't occur.
A sometimes incisive, sometimes amateurish look at race in America, the things we do and tolerate as a nation that are really no different from an America ruled by unrepentant slave-holders.
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by: REEL_REVIEWER 8/13/06
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