This weekend we at the Daily will be celebrating Presidents Day just like every good American - by going to the nearest car dealership and taking advantage of their great cash-back incentives.
When we get there you can be sure we won't see presidents like Garfield, Fillmore and Taft plastered across billboards and balloons. What we will see is Lincoln, Washington and FDR frisbees and t-shirts.
Why's that? Because America loves winners (almost as much as we love freedom). For a great president to be a winner there has to be a loser: a King George III, Jefferson Davis or Hitler.
Since we have already counted down our favorite presidents of film last year, here's a list of film's least lovable losers, the dictators:
10) Kim Jong Il in "Team America: World Police" (2004) - Never before has such a psychologically probing investigation of the tyrannical character been attempted as in the cinematic classic, "Team America: World Police." With writing that not only takes on "roneriness" and the desire for human love, but also an anatomy lesson with metaphorical impact, Kim Jong Il is given a sympathetic stage with no strings attached.
9) Idi Amin in "Last King of Scotland" (2006) - Forest Whitaker is currently hoping to garner Oscar gold for his simultaneously charismatic and brutal portrayal of the infamous Ugandan dictator. His jovial personality makes him one of cinema's most likable dictators - once you get past the fact his regime killed upwards of half a million people.
8) Scar in "The Lion King" (1994) - Combining every possible stereotype Disney could muster, this flamboyant, dark-furred (skinned?), British feline represents everything maniacal. With his bloodthirsty, cackling army of hyenas that goosesteps in tune with "Be Prepared!" the Nazi imagery is enough to leave any cartoon-loving child "scarred."
7) Capitán Vidal in "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006) - While only a fascist general, and therefore not technically a dictator, Vidal marches through director del Toro's visually masterful mixture of disturbing fantasy and gory reality, ruling over his small country estate in Franco's Spain with more malice than almost any other villain in cinema.
6) Emperor Palpatine in the "Star Wars" trilogy (1977-1983) - Sure, Darth Vader is the villain that everyone remembers from the Galactic Empire, but he goes soft in the final minutes of the trilogy. Emperor Palpatine, like all good dictators, goes down with lightning shooting out of his fingertips. Of course, we've got to ignore the prequels, where we learn that the Emperor took over the galaxy through yawn-inducing political maneuvers.
5) McDonalds in "Super Size Me" (2004) - After Morgan Spurlock's dangerous experiment with McFood intake, Americans were deeply affected, forever doomed to think twice about the ominous question, "do you want fries with that?" and the lingering suspicion that Ronald McDonald might have his sights on something more than fast food domination.
4) Sauron in "Lord of the Rings" trilogy (2001-2003) - Most dictators would give up after they've been killed, but Sauron showed true dedication. Coming back from the dead as some sort of amorphous evil spirit, he ultimately loses points for being defeated by Hobbits, widely derided as the wimpiest of Middle Earth creatures.
3) Commodus in "Gladiator" (2000) - Sometimes it's easy to know when a character is going to get killed in a movie. For River Phoenix's spoiled brat emperor, it was pretty clear from the minute he stepped on screen. Once he kills Russell Crowe's family, the next hour was just waiting around for him to get stabbed.
2) Adenoid Hynkel in "The Great Dictator" (1940) - The tyranny and oppression that comes hand in hand with dictatorships isn't much of a laughing matter - unless you're Charlie Chaplin. On the brink of World War II, Chaplin played a buffoonish Hitler clone that supposedly even attracted the real Hitler's attention. We'd venture a guess that he wasn't too happy with what he saw.
1) George W. Bush in "Fahrenheit 9/11" (2004) - Calm down, no one's calling Bush a dictator, though Michael Moore calls him just about everything else in his documentary. If he was, could we even be writing this? Then again, we haven't read the Patriot Act in a while.
- by Kristin Gorman, Sarah Cowan and Greg Connor
