God Bless America (2011)

Not too much trouble deciding what to discuss this week, since the above movie from the annoying comedian Bobcat Goldthwait is a gem of black-laced satire. Goldthwait the entertainer may not delight me, but in his role here of writer-director (not his first shot at directing incidentally), he manages in this low-budget diatribe to hit a number of sitting targets from our self-centred, celebrity-obsessed, and generally dumbed-down society.

Playing like the love-child of "Idiocracy" and "Natural Born Killers", our Everyman hero Frank, embodied by Joel Murray -- primarily a television actor -- rants and rages at the media-obsessed world in which he finds himself. Plagued by his noisy neighbours and their screaming brat, he daydreams of splattering their brains, but it takes the combination of being fired from his long-serving job for supposed sexual incorrectness and being diagnosed with an actually non-existent brain tumour by his blase physician for him to decide to end his empty existence. However, rather than committing suicide, he is distracted by a reality television report of a spoiled-rotten teenager berating her parents for buying the wrong sports car for her Sweet Sixteen. Stealing his neighbours' flashy yellow roadster, he tracks her down to her high school where he proceeds to blow out her brains.

Watched by Goth classmate Roxy (Tara Lynn Barr, another TV performer) who is delighted that he has taken out 'the bitch', she spins a story of her abuse at home and begs to be taken along with him on his mission to rid the world of people who just don't deserve to live. Unfortunately this includes nearly anyone who is full of themselves and inconsiderate, like the chatty, cell phone-using patrons of a movie audience; the pair have no problem finding suitable targets on their cross-country trek to rid society of its worst offenders. These are not, let it be said the politicians and attorneys who may blight our society, but rather the commentators on and judges of humanity, whose opinions are accepted as gospel by the rest of society.

For example, a fat, tone-deaf, talentless contestant on "American Stars", brilliantly played by Aris Alvarado, becomes a media sensation because everyone enjoys laughing at him. He too considers suicide, not because he is the wide-spread butt of a bad joke, but because he thinks he may eventually cease to be the television personality that he has become. Naturally Frank and Roxy put him out of his misery with their own brand of justice, along with the television judges who mocked his hubris in the first place.

Having started with a brilliant first half, the satiric joke does begin to wear a bit thin by the final bloodbath. Goldthwait's betes noires may be begging to be exposed and mocked and the film amusingly manages to do this, but no one would believe that he is seriously encouraging us to take up arms to right them. It's only a movie, folks, and an on-target exercise of black comedy at that.