God Bless America
Posted: Tue Jun 03, 2014 11:15 pm
I don't know how many of you have seen this movie yet, but I don't really care. I finally got around to watching it and I'ma rant.
This movie was terrible. I'm not talking about pacing of writing, acting, or cinematography. It's all pretty standard fare on that level. No, the core of the movie is so eye-rollingly bad, you would find yourself in seizures, drowning in your own phlegm as your eyeballs race across the floor having freed themselves from the confines of your skull, which would now unfortunately house memories of this movie, and blasting as far away from you as their angular momentum can carry them.
I mean, it's not the worst movie, but it's bad.
I'll sum it up. It's a movie about terrible people from the eyes of even more terrible people.
The premise is pretty clear from even the trailer. The protagonist Frank, a man terminally ill and with nothing left in the world, and his unlikely sidekick, a begrudged teenage girl whose name I forgot, so we're calling her Face, go on a killing spree taking out who they see as the worst of humanity.
Not, like, rapists and murderers, but the more everyday jerk. The girl who complains that the car she got isn't the right one. People who talk in theaters. The double parker. Bill O'Reilly. You know, general ***holery, but nothing that'll get you the chair.
So, they go on their spree, and have their final showdown at an American Idol show. I stuck with the movie and the involuntary vomiting to see if they could stick the landing at the end.
Okay, I'm going to ironically warn you about spoilers right now.
I was waiting for a moment of self-realization for Frank and he offs himself. Full circle. He does have a realization, but it's that people are even worse that he thought and he and Face go out in a blaze of glory. I use glory as loose as possible, mainly because any foul language would be censored.
It's hard to conceive that the movie would be unaware of the irony of bemoaning the lack of civility in between shots of gunning a man down, but it gives no evidence that it gets it. It's almost as if they tried to on purposely ignore the irony.
And that's the thing, it failed a dark comedy. It was neither funny, nor meaningful in anyway. Either of the two would work, but we're treated to terrible people being shot by other terrible people.
And that's the thing, Frank and Face are genuinely terrible people, brimming to the top with unbridled and lazy cynicism. The movie really seems to never go any deeper than a surface level cynicism of society. Does it bother dissecting the psyche of killing spree killers? Or analyzing our society any deeper than complaining about pop culture? No, there is no acknowledgment of anything more profound than the easiest route to pretentiousness.
You know the people constantly complaining about how people are stupid, but you've never really seen much from then that even breaks average? Yeah, this movie is for them.
And that's probably really what gets me, it's just lazy, sociopathic cynicism. If you're going to be cynical or pretentious, put a little effort into it. It completely misses the irony in what I can only imagine is a 2 hour long complaint from Bobcat Goldthwait on society.
Maybe the movie is so meta that it brings you around to hate it and it's message, urging it's viewers to go beyond the simplistic view it presents and consider a more nuanced and multi-faceted view of humanity... but... yeah, I doubt it.
This movie was terrible. I'm not talking about pacing of writing, acting, or cinematography. It's all pretty standard fare on that level. No, the core of the movie is so eye-rollingly bad, you would find yourself in seizures, drowning in your own phlegm as your eyeballs race across the floor having freed themselves from the confines of your skull, which would now unfortunately house memories of this movie, and blasting as far away from you as their angular momentum can carry them.
I mean, it's not the worst movie, but it's bad.
I'll sum it up. It's a movie about terrible people from the eyes of even more terrible people.
The premise is pretty clear from even the trailer. The protagonist Frank, a man terminally ill and with nothing left in the world, and his unlikely sidekick, a begrudged teenage girl whose name I forgot, so we're calling her Face, go on a killing spree taking out who they see as the worst of humanity.
Not, like, rapists and murderers, but the more everyday jerk. The girl who complains that the car she got isn't the right one. People who talk in theaters. The double parker. Bill O'Reilly. You know, general ***holery, but nothing that'll get you the chair.
So, they go on their spree, and have their final showdown at an American Idol show. I stuck with the movie and the involuntary vomiting to see if they could stick the landing at the end.
Okay, I'm going to ironically warn you about spoilers right now.
I was waiting for a moment of self-realization for Frank and he offs himself. Full circle. He does have a realization, but it's that people are even worse that he thought and he and Face go out in a blaze of glory. I use glory as loose as possible, mainly because any foul language would be censored.
It's hard to conceive that the movie would be unaware of the irony of bemoaning the lack of civility in between shots of gunning a man down, but it gives no evidence that it gets it. It's almost as if they tried to on purposely ignore the irony.
And that's the thing, it failed a dark comedy. It was neither funny, nor meaningful in anyway. Either of the two would work, but we're treated to terrible people being shot by other terrible people.
And that's the thing, Frank and Face are genuinely terrible people, brimming to the top with unbridled and lazy cynicism. The movie really seems to never go any deeper than a surface level cynicism of society. Does it bother dissecting the psyche of killing spree killers? Or analyzing our society any deeper than complaining about pop culture? No, there is no acknowledgment of anything more profound than the easiest route to pretentiousness.
You know the people constantly complaining about how people are stupid, but you've never really seen much from then that even breaks average? Yeah, this movie is for them.
And that's probably really what gets me, it's just lazy, sociopathic cynicism. If you're going to be cynical or pretentious, put a little effort into it. It completely misses the irony in what I can only imagine is a 2 hour long complaint from Bobcat Goldthwait on society.
Maybe the movie is so meta that it brings you around to hate it and it's message, urging it's viewers to go beyond the simplistic view it presents and consider a more nuanced and multi-faceted view of humanity... but... yeah, I doubt it.
