Waste of an hour - just another movie that can't leave out politics

Rating: 1/10 (11 March 2017)

I really wanted to enjoy this, but I was saddened that yet again, a movie is used to gratuitously use politics against fellow Americans. Why? Tea Party members, according to the NYT, are more educated than the general population, not the ignorant boors portrayed in the movie. They are also ignorantly conflated by the protagonist with the Iraq war, when their movement was an outgrowth of "porkbusters," which was actually against the profligate spending of George Bush. This movie was made in 2010, when Bush had been out of office for two years, and President Obama was busy dropping drones on people and presiding over an unprecedented rate of military casualties in Afghanistan.
Communists, on the other hand, threw novelists like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn into a gulag to do forced, manual labor. And, of course, subtly but surely, Woody Allen praises those guys.
The roaring 20's were made possible by a thriving economy based on free-market principles. The Gilded Age, prior to that, saw unparalleled economic growth. It's so ironic that Woody Allen uses those periods as examples of his favorites.
It had a fun premise - it could have been written SO differently and I would have put it on my shelf as a keeper.