Friday, March 15, 2013

Life Without America or God Bless Principle

That sounds like a really heavy political post title, but it's actually just a flashy way of saying that I reviewed a couple more things for the good folks over at Cinemania.

God Bless America is Bobcat Goldthwait's* cultural revenge porn movie. Basically, he has a couple of characters talk about everything he hates about American pop/political culture at length, and then go and bloodily murder people who are thinly veiled caricatures of the stuff he doesn't like. On one hand it makes me a little uncomfortable, because "just murder every last motherfucking one of them" seems like such an American-movie solution to a problem (surely it would have been more subversive to come up with something shaped less like the things you're criticising?) but on the other, it's ironically a more honest approach than Michael Moore's just-an-outraged-regular-guy-for-reals pose.

Life Without Principle is a weirder and in some ways more interesting fish. I had a hard time writing the review, and am having similar trouble here because I really enjoyed it but all my attempts to describe it make it sound kind of rubbish. Theoretically a thriller, it's also a dark comedy and a complex and sometimes very slow meditation on avarice and the positive and negative power of money. I'd recommend it if you have patience and you're down with subtitles.

* As a side note, it makes me immensely happy that "Bobcat Goldthwait" is a real person's real name.

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