During the Friday night premiere of his new film “God Bless America,” writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait sat in an aisle seat in the middle of Toronto’s Ryerson Theatre. His elation and surprise were obvious as the audience responded with rowdy, pumped-up enthusiasm to the film’s wild rants and violent satire.
The movie itself is something of an oddball roadtrip comedy crossed with a furious social critique. After divorced office drone Frank (Joel Murray, recently of “Mad Men”) is told by his doctor he has a brain tumor, he sets off into a downward spiral. Having also lost his job and realizing his increasingly bratty daughter wants nothing to do with him, he projects his frustration out onto the world, setting off on a kill-spree rampage that targets meanness, rudeness and the coarsening of American culture.
Along the way he picks up teenage Roxy (Tara Lynn Barr, in a performance both sweet and psychotic) and takes her under his wing as the family he wishes he had.
Friday night’s audience loudly received Frank and Roxy’s rants on the state of what’s wrong in the world, which included the Kardashians, talk radio and anger-driven TV newcasts, people who say “literally” too much, phones in movie theaters, high-fives and other assorted annoyances. Even such unlikely targets as the writer Diablo Cody and her movie “Juno” come under fire. “How can we be a civilization if we can’t even be civilized?” asks Frank at one point. …
“I think people think that I hate and I’m angry at all these things,” Goldthwait said. “And that’s not really my point. It’s that there’s this weird undertow right now of people being disenfranchised, but they don’t know who to react against. And what we really need to revolt against is ourselves.”
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