God Bless America (Bobcat Goldthwait)

[EyesWideOpen]

God Bless America (Bobcat Goldthwait)

imdb link (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1912398/)

http://i213.photobucket.com/albums/cc261/gothamcentral79/god_bless_america_ver2.jpg

[Sxottlan]

Pretty fun. Lots of preaching/pandering/proselytizing to the choir though. There were a number of speeches that started to get groan-worthy, no matter how much I agreed with it. However, the number of laugh-out-loud moments far exceeded those. The film sides with the protagonists even as it seems to show that ultimately what they're doing really isn't accomplishing much. In a couple years, this film could have a real expiration date. The fellow presenting this at the museum where I saw it said it's very much a film for now. The film is refreshingly free of any news montage hyping them up.

Haven't seen any of Goldthwait's other directorial efforts. There's a couple of effective shots, like an ambush in a tee-pee motel room. Joel Murray's effectively flat performance as Frank is appropriately numb. Roxy is more the cipher. I suppose we should have anticipated a revelation about her and it does indeed make her all the more disturbing. Larry Miller in a cameo seems in on the joke.

Their discussions about who they'd like to kill are dementedly juvenile ("People who high-five!"), but Frank tries to take on more of a moral high ground. "I want to kill the people who deserve it," he says. Pretty shifty ground there. Ultimately is that not just a more fancy and dressed up way of saying who you want to kill because you just don't like them? Like people who high-five?

Lots of broad swipes, but they're understandable. Nothing gets too edgy except for...

Frank fantasizing about killing a baby with a shotgun and it more or less pops like a tick. Or when the mentally disabled person Frank feels is being taken advantage of on American Superstarz turns out to be just as conniving and shallow as anyone else.

The story jumps around quite a bit geographically. Kudos for filming in upstate New York and even if it wasn't where I live, it was still nearby (Syracuse).

[Pop Trash]

I have a hard time with some of these pitch black comedies. Even when I enjoy them, they leave me feeling depressed. I feel this way about Todd Solondz these days as well.

It's strange, because I used to love stuff like this. I think as I've gotten older, what I desire out of films has changed.

[Mr. Pink]

I couldn't get behind this one. I finished about an hour of it, so maybe it addressed some of the problems I had with it, but what I saw was pretty lame.

Yes, a lot of people suck. That doesn't mean people who give high-fives deserve to die, though. It's hard to get behind someone with such a low standard for who deserves to die. In reality, someone who wants to kill people for giving high-fives is the one who really deserves to die.

It got annoying when I realized it was just Bobcat basically using his characters to complain about dumb shit. Wasn't surprised to hear, word-for-word, the same rants in his latest stand-up special.

After about the fifth "these sorts of people deserve to die" rant, I turned it off for being too repetitive and not going anywhere story-wise.

I like Bobcat, too, but this was pretty weak.

[Yxklyx]

Fairly disappointing - just a very mild yea. I've loved two of his other films.

[D_Davis]

It's strange, because I used to love stuff like this. I think as I've gotten older, what I desire out of films has changed.

Totally.

[Rowland]

An Angry White Man movie, made with only a hint of self-awareness that does little to offset the despairing, hypocritically shallow nastiness Goldthwait wallows in to uselessly numbing ends. I briefly wanted to follow his surrogate's death-dealing lead for his continued and apparently inexhaustible predilection for montages set to nauseatingly twee and/or on-the-nose soundtrack cues, but reconsidered my brash judgement upon acknowledging that his directorial sense is otherwise continuing to mature. Also, a hat tip to Murray for giving what is probably the best performance possible given the material.

[Biff Justice]

The film is too on the nose for the audience most likely to watch it.

And, yes, it goes way too far with its rants - it should have focused on the dangerous like fear-mongering, promotion of greed and willful ignorance and stayed away from what is merely annoying or a pet peeve.

The film loses what impact it could have had by straying into those territories.

I did enjoy the film, but it gets a very mild "nay" from me for these reasons. A film needs to get its theme across effectively when it's a message movie, and this one is only preaching to the choir and would actually actively turn off the people who most need to hear it.

[number8]

This film doesn't ridicule its awful protagonist enough.

[Thirdmango]

The parts I liked most about this movie were when the two main characters had interactions which weren't about who to kill.

[Boner M]

On a dramatic level this film lost me pretty early when he didn't turn off the TV after a few seconds of channel surfing, and I thought the film would be impossible to recover from the rant delivered to his co-worker... but there're some pretty good broad laughs once the two pair up. Still not very good for most of the reasons outlined above, but there's value in this kind of blunt all-out soapbox cinema, if only to measure one's own frustrations against, et al.

[Winston*]

On a dramatic level this film lost me pretty early when he didn't turn off the TV after a few seconds of channel surfing, and I thought the film would be impossible to recover from the rant delivered to his co-worker... but there're some pretty good broad laughs once the two pair up. Still not very good for most of the reasons outlined above, but there's value in this kind of blunt all-out soapbox cinema, if only to measure one's own frustrations against, et al.

Any interesting comparisons to Sightseers?

[Boner M]

Any interesting comparisons to Sightseers?
Not really, except for that Sightseers is far superior every way (doesn't use its characters are mouthpieces, has moral ambivalence, is formally interesting, etc).