I guess this must be my month for writing about showbiz-biztax connections (the Ben Kingsley story last week was fun). Anyway, on this tax deadline day there’s no way I’m going to pass up the chance to bring to your attention a new documentary that takes on the U.S. tax system in all its gore and glory. Released today, An Inconvenient Tax “sheds light on one of America’s messiest problems – a fundamentally broken tax code that affects every part of people’s lives,” the movie’s website proclaims.

Archive Clips:Pre-Post Teaser from Life Is My Movie Entertainment on Vimeo.

Yeah, I’m all over that, especially since the movie’s producers for some reason chose to dig up my old college idol Noam Chomsky. Seems they talked Noam into taking a break from revolutionizing, or re-revolutionizing, the theory of linguistics long enough to get his take on tax policy (in one of a half-dozen clips here). So we get some vintage Chomsky-as-political-activist: “Until there’s a conception of participating in a democratic society – a conception which is real, not just words – discussion of taxes is fiddling with technicalities,” he intones, thereby pretty much trashing the movie’s entire thesis.

Of the other talking heads, some are the ones you might expect: Steve Forbes droning on about the flat tax; the Tax Policy Center’s Len Burman being insightful and compelling; Mike Huckabee being, well, Mike Huckabee.

I totally understand the reason for the movie’s April 15 release date, but I have to say that it just doesn’t work for me, given my own deadline-challenged income tax return this year. By the time I’m done stuffing that thing into the envelope and slapping on the stamps, the last thing I’ll want to do will be to go watch a movie about taxes.

Give me a couple of weeks to recover, though, and I think An Inconvenient Tax will be at the top of my list of must-sees. ###