Writer/director Bobcat Goldthwait walked a gossamer-thin line with the excellent 2009 comedy “World’s Greatest Dad.”

How many auteurs could spin gold out of a father profiting off the accidental suicide of his son?

The “Police Academy” alum will have to be even more delicate with his upcoming film, “God Bless America.” (Warning: Attached trailer is the red band version meant for mature audiences).

The coal black comedy stars Joel Murray (“One Crazy Summer”) as a fed-up consumer who takes action against our debasing pop culture. Think trashy celebrities, sexually voracious reality show stars and the like.

Easy pickings, no doubt. But sometimes it’s impossible to parody material as over the top as Maury Povich, “Jersey Shore” or any “Real Housewives” scratch-a-thon. And the clip, while humorous at times, hints of the same faux civility debate the Left manufactured to silence dissent in the wake of the 2011 Tucson shooting. We also get a Fox News-like bit where a host paints President Barack Obama as a Nazi.

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L.A. Times:

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. …

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Scrooged (1988) has the exact opposite problem of our 25th greatest Christmas film, White Christmas. Whereas the Bing Crosby musical ties a couple hours of mediocrity into the kind of perfect holiday-bow finale that leaves you wanting more, Scrooged is cursed with one of the worst third acts in cinema history; a horrible, wretched, awful televised confession that not only leaves a nasty aftertaste but might be guilty of setting a cheap cinematic trend second only to the shaky-cam — especially in romantic comedies – the horrible, wretched, awful, third-act public confession we see utilized time and again to lazily wrap things up.

The rest of Bill Murray’s modern (well, 80’s) spin on Dickens’ classic “A Christmas Carol” is absolutely terrific. Taking the story into the world of entertainment for a Network-esque skewering of television is inspired and so is the perfect casting of Murray as the Scrooge character. Murray’s good in both type of roles, but I much prefer when he’s the straight man reacting to the zaniness around him as opposed to creating it (Caddyshack being the ultimate exception).

You drop an understated comedic genius like Murray into a wild story that allows him to be constantly caught off guard by marvelous characters and character actors like Carol Kane, Buster Poindexter (David Johansen), Jamie Farr, Bobcat Goldthwait, Brian Doyle-Murray, Michael J. Pollard, Buddy Hackett, Robert Goulet and a very funny and memorable Robert Mitchum as Murray’s slightly addled boss, and it’s hard to go wrong. (more…)

Some guys never seem to catch a break in life. Lance Clayton is one of them. 

In “World’s Greatest Dad,” the recently-released, extremely dark and sometimes perverse new comedy from writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait (we know, we’re just as surprised as you), Clayton (Robin Williams) is the epitome of the put-upon, browbeaten modern middle-class American man. He’s a high-school poetry teacher with hardly any students, a girlfriend who’s afraid to be seen in public with him, and a son named Kyle (played with an amazing level of scorn by Daryl Sabara) who surely must rank as the foulest, most awful teenager in the history of movies. 

Lance does have dreams of greatness, however. In fact, he’s in the middle of sending off his fifth novel for agent consideration, even though he’s never been published before. But ** SPOILER ALERT ** one night, after finding his son dead from a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation that occurred while watching porn on this computer, Lance suddenly feels a unique burst of inspiration: in order to cover up the shame of his son’s actual cause of death, he moves Kyle’s body, re-hangs him in his closet and writes the perfect suicide note so that the policeman who finds him will think that it was just another, normal teenage suicide.  (more…)