au cinema!

It strikes me as odd that this thing gets a number of page views from China. I’d like to believe it has become some form of rallying-post for the disgruntled and disenfranchised, some clarion call that kickstarts a new Tianenmen Square. But it’s more likely to be some poor sods who have Googled what limited selection they're allowed to Google and been offered this as an alternative to whatever anti-Party subversion they were after. 

Still, it’s for their own good. 

Anyway: if I may misappropriate something from someone on Twitter: what if there was an upside to Orwell? What if, in 1984, that boot stamping on a human face, forever, was stamping on the face of someone who deserved it? Paddy McGuinness, say? Or that git who lights a bonfire every time I put washing out? Or the people who made the Green Lantern movie? 

I ask this because, despite my credentials as an Impeccable Liberal, I too can feel hate. Maybe 'hate' is a bit too much. 'Enmity', perhaps. 'Rather strong dislike'. 

I feel it for the people who deserve it; professional politicians of all stripes who screw the everyman while focussing on what’s best for their party; media moguls who profess innocence of their newspapers’ behaviour; media outlets that fill us with inconsequentialities and non-entities while steering us away - nothing to see here, move right along - from the things that we should be told about; bankers breaking laws and bankrupting nations, safe in the full knowledge that there’ll maybe be a bit of an outcry and maybe a slapped wrist or two, but no actual justice, retributive or restorative, for their crimes.

Sometimes, I want to stamp on somebody’s face. 

Sometimes, I want to take a gun. 

Yep, just like this. 

The film God Bless America feels the same way. It’s written and directed by the comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, best known for being incomprehensible in the Police Academy films, but it’s a different, far blacker form of comedy than those, and one unlikely to see a sequel. 

In it, an ordinary Joe reaches breaking point; fired from his office drone job for incomprehensible reasons, enraged and disappointed by the culture of greed and dishonesty, fed up with the celebration of that greed by the media, he takes a gun, intent on suicide, but decides to take one especially spoilt example of reality-show teen queen with him. When that goes slightly wrong, he finds himself travelling America in the company of an awed teenage witness. 

It’s a strange film, in that it doesn’t escalate in the way that, say, Falling Down - which shows a similar man reaching a similar breaking point - did. There’s a climactic scene at the end, but it doesn’t seem dramatic, pacing itself in the same leisurely way as the rest of the film. 

It’s also, for all its strengths and its superb central performances from Joel Murray and Tara Lynne Barr, something of a coward; it directs its anger purely at the media, taking scant aim at the social and political diseases that underly the current thirst for the reality and talent shows that lead to, and eventually finish, the story. I wouldn’t expect Goldthwait to burden his characters with the narratively impossible task of taking down the President or anything equally as cliched; he’s too good a writer for that. I would have liked something a little more astringent applied to the spots he chose to take on. 

God Bless America hits some unexpected targets: sympathies are very much with Murray’s character, but he has to stop - as do you - and question whether the humiliations visited on contestants on a TV show clearly modelled after America’s Got Talent are as much willing celebrants of the genre’s relentless appetite for simpleton as they are its victims. 

The film reminded me in many ways of James Gunn’s Super in terms of the dynamic between the two leads, but it doesn’t quite have that film’s bleakness of tone (both narrative and visual - the cinematography in God Bless America is, at times, positively vibrant) and possibly it suffers for that. 

God Bless America is released here in the UK on July 6th; it’s not perfect, but I’d say you should get to see it. 

Next: au cinema, bis!