Dear Baader-Meinhof Group,

The Marxist Revolutionary Council (all hail the Eternal Lenin, blah blah blah, Doris put in some boilerplate here) thanks you for you submission This is 40 as a furthering of our worker’s revolution.

It is, in a word, breathtaking. If the mass release (pun intended!) of this film does not bring the capitalist system to its knees, I give up (kidding, of course, all hail Trotsky’s monocle).

This bloated narcissistic family would make Warren Buffet agree to collective bargaining. These cruel, terrified and inexcusable BCBGs, wanting for nothing, and perpetually wanting everything, actually torment a young child, then lie about it to blame the mother. Brilliant!

I’ll confess I was concerned that the utter lack of structure might be unnerving. A series of characters, working out, worrying about their weight, talking about their weight, talking about worrying about their weight, worrying about having to sell their seven million dollar house and move to a six million dollars to pay for therapists to talk to about their weight is certainly disgusting. But the workers are pretty stupid (it’s okay when I say it), and might need some kind of plot. How about a third Graham Parker song, in its entirety? On the other hand, the utter lack of gratitude on the part of the characters certainly sells it, so we’ll leave this for next Thursday’s ouija board with the Scientific Ghost of Engels.

And don’t think I missed your very insouciant touch: having one of the children play the theme to The Office. This film, the ‘infant version’ of a sitcom, leaves no doubts the cheap bits (men act stupid around girls! The wife is controlling! The husband lies!) on which to hang this four and a half hour hammerfest lack the material for even a 22 minute episode. Even season 9.

That’s right. Season 9.

(Yes, Doris, I’m aware that season 9 has its moments, but introducing the sound guy as character is more ‘clever’ than clever. We’ll talk about it about after the party cleansing).

The crowning touch, of course, is your utter lack of even the most primitive joke telling ability.  No sense of humor is a vital part of Marxist tradition, but you take it just a step farther than that, don’t you? Having Ms. Megan Fox talk about her escort work ‘four or five times a year, ten max’ might have accidentally turned into a decent joke. But to do the callback right away, and then one more time, and then one more time after that, not only destroys the joke, but the very concept of the joke itself, and its ‘jokeness’ (Doris, check if Deleuze already trademarked that).

We have got to get the worker to try out these bourgeois art cinemas.

The release of this film could not come at a better time for the party. After the brilliant Al Qaeda recruitment film Zero Dark Thirty, we are really hurting. This film could grow our ranks by dozens. Seriously, if it doesn’t overthrow the oligarchy, please finish the work on your proposed ‘sort of’ sequel, This is The Making of This is 40. You can almost imagine a fictional filmmaker, call him Mr. Apato-X, who would think that this behavior is acceptable or even normal. I’m concerned that the workers might be too stupid to get this level of meta, but that’s why we’re trying to save them after all. Ah, to be so simple, and die a martyr’s death at the front lines of the revolution. But this is the burden of knowing what ‘meta’ means.

All hail the worker, at least in ‘theory’ (see what I did there!),

Bob

Party Co-executive-director-in-charge-of-the-vice-directorship