The year's worst . . .
19 August 2007
I am feeling so much better now that I've seen September Dawn, an "inspired-by-true-events" fiction about the massacre in 1857 of Christian "immigrants" on the Mormon Utah land as they passed through to California. The Mormons did it, with the complicity of Native Americans. But whether Brigham Young ordered it is still arguable.

I feel better because midway through the year I found the year's worst film. This bastard child of Little House on the Prairie and Lifetime Channel is so full of clichés and obvious Mormon baiting that the descriptor "art" should never be uttered about it. "Inspired by" the true events of the Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857, in which 122 "gentiles" were exterminated, Almost every scene is larded with clichés, not the least being the shameless ones with the Romeo and Juliet knockoffs who exclaim more than once never to have "met anyone like you" before, or the progressive woman who wears pants and a gun who doesn't like the current rest on Mormon land and is the clear choice for hatred by the mad Mormon, Jacob Samuelson, played with scene hunger by Jon Voight (his bad-guy goatee is hilarious).

That the massacre occurred is not in doubt. That it happened on September 11 seems to enchant the producers as if this tepid melodrama could in any way be spoken of in the same breath as 9/11. Why this film was made at all is beyond belief. Perhaps I should ask Mitt Romney why.
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