Movie Review: The Last Party

Robert Downey Jr travels across the country vistiting both Democratic and Republican national conventions. He brings along his sense of humor and political views interviewing many residents of the areas he stops by. On top of that, he interviews such people as Oliver Stone, Spike Lee, Jerry Falwell, Sean Penn, Willie D of the Geto Boys and his own father. I was very impressed by Sean Penn's knowledge of politics and he said some interesting remarks. For example, when Downey asked him what some of the song titles of "the CIA's greatest hits record" would be, he cleverly remarked "well, firt off you would have 'the ballad of the bay of pigs'". The documentary also shows us the most frightening thing I've ever seen in a movie: Republican Conventions. Take a bunch of highly conservatives and christian fundamentalists, throw them in a room and give them all flags and balloons and have a party. It was very scary looking. There was footage of a group of neo-facists (as the Young Republicans are referred to in 'Igby Goes Down) teenagers chanting conservatice slogans and such. One of the teenage girls in the group was yelling "you look at MTV and see how they view politics. they don't show the right and the left! they show the left EVERY TIME!". I couldn't help thinking about how dissasterous of an effect this must have on our country. I know that FOX and CNN and ABC and Times magazine and all of those media sources are continually right-wing focused, but that doesn't mean shit because everybody knows that if you want to get your current political news you turn on MTV. The girl definately had a point.
Another great aspect of this movie is that Robert Downey Jr developes this great hopping technique in which he uses both his legs and his arms to hop off the ground up and down. He shows this talent off at the conventions, but nobody seems to be impressed. A lot of the movie's halarity isn't the type of humor that can be explained, or even makes sense... it's just funny.
The only problem I had was at the end of the movie, Robert Downey Sr (an apparent liberal) seemed to hint at it being a good thing that America had Bill Clinton. But, to be fair, this was only 1993 and the population that voted for Clinton had yet to see how bad he would screw them over and do everything he promised not to.
This movie was a tyte documentary. I wouldn't say it's better than Micheal Moore's style, but I think it was more interesting and probably funnier.
4 Stars