C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America (2005)

Overrated and overhyped

Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

After playing with our expectations, this turns out to be a very different sort of film.

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

A fine mockumentary production which reflects faith in good old, down- home, painstaking hard work and passion.No idea why this languishes in the IMDb 6.x ratings doldrums; I can only guess it has to do with a kind of genre "offset"; like there's a ceiling for the cred due to any mockumentary.This is a marvelous production; and I'm not just trotting out that word gratuitously: I literally marveled ceaselessly from beginning to end. Productions of this nature are burdened with an expectation of almost supernatural ingenuity, and this flick carries that burden with a kind of iron-fisted grace. It's tough satirical medicine, reaching over the wall of your sensibilities to surprise you and get a dark chuckle out of you, and seems to do so with finesse and agility. It's a rollicking cavalcade of expositional ingenuity.Lovely tech work; sound, editing, emulation of "period" media, and all the rest of it.The only (possible) remonstrance might be in the area of acting: There's lots of either bad acting, or skillfully rendered bad acting by wonderful actors. And this contrasts with direction of "real" persons (typically on-screen historical experts, or politicians) which is done with aplomb.Check it out!

I generally like "alternate history" stories: I enjoy studying history, and alternate history stories are a great way to discuss what happened and why, and it's just plain fun to kick around what-if's.But I found this one generally disappointing. I think to make an alternate history story interesting, you have to have some kind of twist. Something unexpected has to happen. But here ... The South wins the Civil War, and so slavery continues and the whites are all racist. And then slavery continues. And then the whites do other racist things. And then slavery still continues. And then whites do more racist things. And on and on. Yes, I agree that racism is bad. If someone recited case after case of real racism, maybe it would get tedious, though of course I'd hope it would stir us to action. But this is someone reciting case after case of make believe, fictional racism. It's obviously intended to make us mad at these evil racists, but sorry, I'm not going to get worked up about hypothetical crimes that never happened.The premise of the movie is that the South won the Civil War because they got help from Britain and France. They certainly tried to get such help, so it's at least a marginally plausible idea. But then they say that the South conquers the North. This is VERY far-fetched. It would have been a stretch for the South to survive as an independent nation, even with European help.They do almost nothing to explore how history might really have been different if the South had won, other than slavery continuing. There are a few scenes about Confederate leaders being friendly with Hitler and comparing notes on how best to oppress minorities. But then does that mean America does not get involved in WW2 in Europe? So what happens? Do the Allies still win, or not? There's a quick clip of an astronaut planting a Confederate battle flag on the Moon. (Unlikely, actually. Wouldn't they plant the Stars and Bars, not the battle flag?) So is there still a space race with Russia? Is there a Cold War? They never say. I don't recall them saying anything about World War 1. What was supposed to have happened there? They don't even try to discuss anything that isn't specifically about race and slavery. Well, except for the curious, unexplained interludes where they toss in religious discrimination and wife beating.The acting is pretty lame. Especially in the scenes that are supposed to be clips from historical movies. Maybe that's deliberate: when movie-makers put a "movie within the movie", they often seem to deliberately have bad acting in the "inner movie". Maybe they want to make sure that the acting in the inner movie doesn't end up better than the acting in the outer movie and thus looking incongruous. But wow, did they push it far here. I've routinely seen better acting in high school plays.This is a highly political movie so I'll include one political comment. At the end they reveal that many of the parody advertisements scattered through the movie were in fact for real products. They solemnly inform us that even today many advertisements use "slave imagery, like Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima". Except, umm, Uncle Ben is based on a real person, who was never a slave, but a 1940s rice farmer. And Aunt Jemima is just a picture of a fictional woman. I've never seen any ads that portrayed her as a slave. One of their fake ads in the movie is for Gold Dust cleaning powder, which had many ads featuring two black children, called "the Gold Dust twins", performing household chores. There's no indication that they're slaves. Plenty of advertisements, before and since, have had pictures of white people preparing food or performing household chores, from Betty Crocker to Chef Boyardee to Little Debbie. Apparently the position of the film makers is that it's racist to include pictures of black people in advertisements. I'd think that if they never used pictures of black people but only showed whites using their product, that would be racist.

From start to finish, it's a satire on American history and TV documentaries. The real history is deliberately twisted to show viewers what America might have been like today if the South had won the Civil War. Fake historians recite fake commentaries; fake visuals show action that never occurred or is taken out of context; actors act out characters that never lived. Even the commercial breaks are fictional and presume that slave life is part of America in the twenty-first century.I thought the commercials were funny and clever. Examples include a TV sitcom called "Leave It To Beulah", about a Black maid in a White household. Another commercial advertises "The Shackle", an electronic product put on slaves so that their owners know where they are, at all times. The funniest, though, is "The Slave Shopping Network", where two bubble-headed White ladies advertise Black people for sale; the commercial is funny because it is so outrageous.The history lesson, however, I found boring. Structured like a documentary, its visual images and its various commentaries go on and on in excruciating detail. I'm just not that much of a history buff to spend all that time trying to digest a history that never happened. Further, the viewer really has to know the real history in order to know which characters, scenes, and legacies are bogus, since this false history is a twisted version of real history. In particular, I found the "John Ambrose Fauntroy" character annoying.The film's visuals and sound compare favorably to real documentaries. Background music is appropriate. Casting is generally acceptable, but the narrative suffers from some overacting. The cast is very large, consistent with a long drawn-out historical drama, showing lots of different people from different historical periods.Even though the South lost on the battleground, its values seem to be still embraced by many Americans; that, I think, is the theme of this film. I just wish the satire could have been presented more succinctly and with less confusion. "C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of America" is built on a clever premise. It will be most appreciated by viewers with a thorough knowledge of the real American history.

I've always loved alternative histories (i.e., "The Man in the High Castle", the first 2 seasons of "Sliders," etc.) and this movie is another great example of this genre.The movie is presented as a BBC documentary written in the present day of this "parallel universe" about the history of North America starting when the South won the American Civil War. The thing that makes this movie so great is how realistic it is. With a few minor exceptions, the screenplay resists the temptation to caricaturize its characters and instead presents them in a way that is believable and historically appropriate.This movie also does a very good job of making slavery more "real" to a modern audience by placing it in a more familiar setting. It can be easy to dismiss some of the horrors of slavery because they occurred during a "less civilized" time. By translating these to their modern equivalents, that psychological distance is virtually eliminated.With the exception of some low-quality special effects and green-screen work (due to the fact that this was a relatively low-budget film), I have no reservations about recommending this movie to everyone.