Jackson Free Press

Like most people, I'm sick and tired of Iranian abortionists having gay sex with flag-burning illegal aliens. Why hasn't Hollywood, America's No. 1 exporter of culture, done something about this by making a film about redemption and the power of completing a high school education and the importance of families?

Well, finally, they have. Noted "conservative" television host Stephen Colbert (of Comedy Central's "The Colbert Report," and some other people who I'm sure are strong supporters of Western Values, have written a film called "Strangers With Candy." This film (or "movie") tells the important story of a young woman who returns to school after dutifully serving some time in an American penal institution for prostitution and drug-dealing.

But this film isn't simply a boilerplate recital of the great conservative values that have kept our country so free of such French evils as baguettes and oral lovemaking. No, it's about universal, human values as well. Like, for example, the school's principal (Greg Hollimon) is an African-American, showing that race is not a factor in attaining high social standing in our fine country.

And many of the students are dweeby science nerds who should have their underwear pulled over their heads by the athletic types whom we like to elect to high office. (Our current president was once a college cheerleader, performing vigorous exercises in full view of the public!) But these nerds are not treated shabbily, but rather shown to have the kind of dignity that you find in Asian immigrants who come to the United States and learn to speak our language properly.

So there's something in this for the "liberals" who insist on viewing films. But mostly, it's about the powerful virtue-goodness that is the father-led family.

Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris) returns to her ancestral home after her prison term to find that her father is in a coma. But instead of selling his organs for money the way most people from the Southern Hemisphere would, she decides instead to try to make him so proud of her that he'll wake up and once again take his proper, patriarchal role.

So she returns to the high school she left 35 years earlier and does all she can to get on the honor roll, which is doubly courageous because she's a girl, and girls are not very good at math.

Her science teacher, though, is not supportive of this move. He is, with tremendous courage, played by Mr. Colbert. It is courageous of him, because this science teacher, like most science teachers, is easily seduced by evil.

He has righteously given up the fallacious teachings of Charles Darwin and begun to tell his students the true story of the Christ-created universe, but no doubt the many years he spent under the tutelage of scientists, who believe that fetuses are merely factories for "stem cells" to be used by aging actresses to plump up their already fattened lips, has warped his mind, because he is also engaging in homosexual lovemaking with an art teacher. An art teacher.

So deranged by this experience is he, that he cannot offer proper support to the female Jerri Blank, who nonetheless tries as hard as possible to win the school science fair by working with her new friends Megawatti Sacarnaput (Carlo Alban), a person of Southeast Asian descent, and Tammi Littlenut (Maria Thayer), who shares with Jerri the handicap of being a girl or non-male person.

I won't say if Jerri and her special-learning friends do win the science fair, because that would spoil the wonderful surprise that this family film has to offer. I will say that they are not afraid to laugh, even at themselves, and to share that laughter with the movie-going audience. I, amongst that audience, laughed audibly on many occasions during this film that can only, and truly, be described as a "comedy," in virtually every sense of that complicated term.

Should you see this film? I don't know. Do you care about America? Do you care that one in four Americans is unable to find God on a map? Do you care that fewer than 100 million American fathers are currently in comas or otherwise absent from the home? Do you care that we are at war with forces that want to impose strict Islamic law on us and allow gay marriage in New England?

I hope you do. Because if you do, then yes, you should see this film. It will reinforce everything you believe, and tell you nothing that will scare or upset you. What more can we ask from our films? I will tell you: nothing.

This review originally ran in the Tucson Weekly. "Strangers With Candy" opens at the Malco in Madison on Sept. 15.