Planetarium - politics/music/culture/smarts

If you're anything like us here at Planetarium, even an affection for Katie Holmes and Marc Blucas isn't going to get you to go out and see "First Daughter", the PG-rated tween-fest released nationally today. BUT- that said, after reading this review of it by the New York Times' Manohla Dargis, the film sounds so deeply weird and unsettling, we just might see it after all. Here's some excerpts from said review- and damned if it isn't just bizarre.

"It takes a little over an hour for "First Daughter," a wish-fulfillment fantasy about the only child of an American president, to go from deeply weird to full-blown subversive. At that point, the title character, a blank slate named Samantha Mackenzie (Katie Holmes), has moved from the White House to college, where she has encountered the typical freshman dissonance, or at least its PG-rated manifestation, including a sassy roommate and the dreamboat down the hall. So far, so formulaic, even despite the occasional ripple, like the cute guy in the Amnesty International T-shirt spiritedly delivering a speech against Sam's dad (Michael Keaton).

....Despite the overblown music, fairy-tale trappings and sugarplum narration that bookends the story (read by the film's director, Forest Whitaker), "First Daughter" plays more like a nightmare than a dream, and an exceedingly unnerving one at that. Sam isn't just a prisoner of her parents' ambitions; like nearly everyone else in this film, she's a zombie, sleepwalking through life while Rome burns.

...As Sam steps out of a limousine, wearing a long white gown and an Audrey Hepburn upsweep, she begins walking in slow motion, afloat on a cloud of happiness and perhaps antidepressants. Behind her, protesters are angrily waving signs — "Free H.I.V. Drugs for Africa," reads one, "Protect Medicare," reads another — but the first daughter is too busy drifting toward her happy ending to notice. "