GOD SAVE THE QUEEN

Produced, Directed, and Photographed by Joseph F. Alexandre
Edited by Nathan Anderson and Joseph F. Alexandre

I freely admit to making a mistake in 2000 by openly supporting George W. Bush. I knew McCain was by far the better choice for the party, of which I'm not a member, but I do lean slightly right of center, especially on financial matters. When Dubya was given the nomination, I was reading one of Al Gore's books on the environment and found him to be a hypocrite. Combine that with his and Lieberman's platform of cinematic censorship, and you had one angry would-be filmmaker who wanted to make sure that Gore sat the next game out. At the time I thought, "seriously, how bad could it ever be?"

Needless to say I didn't make the same mistake twice.

To this day, I still think McCain is the best candidate for the highest office in the land. When McCain jumped on the censorship bandwagon with Lieberman, I felt betrayed. When the planes flew into the towers, as well as my own backyard of D.C., I felt outraged. At that moment, I knew there were more important issues than censorship, and I also learned that there were certain characteristics I required in a President. Leadership, being the primary, is nowhere what it needs to be.

Dubya, as President, is about as easy a target as it gets. His large head, bad hair, lake of charisma, and inability to articulate in a public forum paint a picture akin to a child with Down's Syndrome. It's easy to pick on Down's kids, as easy as it to pick on Dubya. Too easy.

You can't walk past a college corner without seeing some bushy-haired intellectual wanna-be standing on his soapbox sounding off about "no war for oil," or some such nonsense about "ze facists in ze office taking away our freedoms." They're uninformed simplifications of complex problem stemming from complex times. Most of those bushy-haired intellectual wanna-be's are often also soapboxing about the dangers of genetically altered food and how it will make us all grow third eyes in the middle of our forehead. Also, a wildly uninformed viewpoint.

Now that you know my views politically, you need to know where I stand musically - I love The Sex Pistols. Never Mind The Bullocks is what got me through filmschool, the anger channeling my need to need to make film. Although, for me, it was a reaction of anger aimed that lack of common sense I saw in extreme leftist students. At least the far right-wingers knew their party's rhetoric was bullshit, but the lefties always seemed clearly deluded. I'd like to think that the Pistols saw eye to eye with me in that all politics are bullshit, and just getting shittier.

In Joseph Alexandre's experimental short GOD SAVE THE QUEEN, Alexandre takes that famous song by the Pistols and applies it to George W.. There's no denying Johnny Rotten's (a.k.a. John Lydon) words were a rallying battle cry to everyone fed up with the administration of the United Kingdom in the mid to late 1970's. Calling for a change in government, the phrase "a fascist regime" underscored a sense of irony to the words directly preceding them - "God save the Queen."

Of course we all know that Socialism is a far cry from fascism, but the implication is that the stricter governmental rule impedes freedoms of choice and expression, the very things the young punks required to define what and who they were. Of course, it's the stricter governmental rule that have led to tougher gun laws in the U.K., and reducing violent crime in the process. More governmental control is what got the country national healthcare. It's also what regulates the drug trade, helping to eliminate drug syndicates and insuring that addicts receive pure product not laced with rat poison.

The downside is that unemployment is comparatively high in the U.K, and they have true governmental censorship over cinema (although somewhat relaxed in the last 20 years).

GOD SAVE THE QUEEN opens with the tranquility that only sunrises and sunsets on isolated beaches can provide. Schubert's German Dance #1 in C Major scores the scene. Bird fly over fields of green. To most, this was be a utopia. A place free from the worries of the world where inhabitants would live only for themselves in peace and happiness.

The music stops. Soldiers marching fill the soundtrack. Oil tankers line the oceanic skyline. Then the familiar angry chords of The Sex Pistol's "Holiday in the Sun" shred the last glimmer of hope for a new world viewers might have maintained. The holiday is effectively over. That's the kind of irony Rotten would have been proud of.

There are only a few scant lines of "Holiday" before Alexandre abruptly shifts focus to his real agenda, attacking the President and illustrating how Rotten's words are just as potent today as they were nearly 30 years ago. We know this because whenever Rotten screams the lines "God save the Queen," Alexandre cuts to Dubya's great big bobblehead. Alexandre reaches for a reference as obvious as mine regarding our cranial challenged Commander in Chief. When the line "a fascist regime" is uttered, the audience is shown images of tanks rolling through Iraq. Our fascist Queen has led his troops where they don't belong, overstepping his rule in order to extend his empire.

The images that follow are familiar ones: Bin Laden, Sadam, and oil wells. I get it; we're at war for oil.

Unfortunately, I don't agree - at least not completely. As I said before, it's an oversimplification of what's taking place in the Middle East. But I don't disagree with Alexandre's underlying message that something needs to change in America. We're far from fascist, but there are more things to consider than oil, or cinema, or abortion, or equal rights, or war. It's all the above. I certainly don't agree with Bush regarding most of his policies, and the ones I do support him on are small parts of the big picture. Unfortunately, those few don't outweigh everything else that's wrong.

Alexandre makes use of religious imagery as well, but what he's saying with their inclusion isn't clearly discernible. There are repeated shots of the crucifix, one of the most sacred images in Christianity in that it represents the bases for the religion. Christ, the Son of God, died for our sins. Alexandre repeats images key to the Muslim faith. Without a proper context, it's impossible to decipher if Alexandre is implying that there's no difference in the religions (essentially, both are religions of peace - something Dubya's handlers have had him repeat on television numerous times), or that the Bush administration is playing a game of "us against them" between the two. After all, America is a country with a predilection towards xenophobia. Being that GOD SAVE THE QUEEN is such an anti-Bush film, I'm going to venture with a guess and go with option 2.

Alexandre could have had a far more effective movie with GOD SAVE THE QUEEN if he wasn't so narrow focused on the single topic. We've seen that topic a thousand times and he tells us nothing new. The repetition of images becomes tired, that's where Alexandre could have mixed it up some more. The big picture is lost.

Alexandre also looses sight of Rotten's sense of irony, a tool that works best with subtlety rather than blunt force trauma. Even the same image of Dubya is used whenever Johnny cries for us to save the Queen. The message was made clear the first time. For those that didn't pick up, it was reinforced the second...and the third.

It's obvious that Alexandre is speaking with his heart. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN is a passionate portrait of his political views, something I wish more microcinema filmmakers would follow his lead regarding. It pains me to come down so negatively on such a personal piece of filmmaking when I've often praised mindless exploitation genre pictures. Something finally comes across my desk that's exactly what I ask for and it doesn't work, at least not for me. That's not an assessment based on my differing politics, mentioned here only so that viewers might know where I'm coming from politically, but one stemming from a need for something more from Alexandre. Something more biting, something not so "been there done that." Something that can't be simply parroted by those who also extol about third eyes caused by wheat grown in the desert. Alexandre is far smarter than that, and far smarter than the film he made.

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