Come on Down: Searching for the American Dream

America may top exports in arms, entertainment and neo-colonialism, but Canada will always be the world leader in smug self-regard. Proving that point is Adamm Liley, whose Come on Down is a ridiculous hour-long journey to a place any well-informed person had arrived without ever crossing the border. Acutely aware of his childhood fascination with American culture (particularly The Price is Right), he paints a car with a Canadian flag and charts a course through the States in search of that world famous dream. But his highly scientific method is to ask people, "Hey! What's the American Dream?" and then marvel at the inarticulate results. It's the kind of "point and laugh" grotesquery that would immediately be identified as American were it not for Liley's offensively false self-deprecation. To say that 62 minutes isn't long enough to scratch the surface of his thesis is putting it mildly, but that doesn't stop him from making selective stops in a Nevada brothel and shooting range, a Texas ghost town, a Los Angeles mansion and, in one of his last interviews, visiting Hunter S. Thompson at his favourite watering hole. In that last instance, Liley's only really after Thompson's approval of his feebly subversive enterprise — another example of Canadian self-worship disguised as social conscience and intellectual inquiry. By the end, he hasn't proven anything more than that the American dream is what you want it to be, which should have been obvious to everyone other than cattle and vegetables from frame one. Extras include nine deleted scenes, a commentary with the director and brother/sound recordist Walter Liley, which is genial enough without being particularly informative, crew bios, production stills and the trailer. (Manifestation Television)