Tuesday, July 10, 2012

A Bobcat Goldthwait addendum

Bobcat Goldthwait's God Bless America, which I previously reviewed here, has just come out on DVD and Blu-Ray, and I re-watched it with a friend tonight (from an actual rental copy, from a video store, which I will have to return on Wednesday; already there's a sort of nostalgic quaintness to the practice, with perhaps a smidgen of the feeling of seeing an endangered species while hiking). It holds up to a second viewing quite well, and seems quite a bit more self-aware about its "Lolita" elements than I'd previously acknowledged, but alas, watching it a second time explained why I ended up anticipating the use of The Kinks' song "I'm Not Like Everybody Else" on the soundtrack; it echoes a line of dialogue earlier in the movie, where one character tells another, "You're just like everybody else." While it's still kind of pleasing that I anticipated based on that one line of dialogue that that particular song would pop up, the presence of so obvious a cue makes it seem far less a synchronistic/ psychic phenomenon and more like an accident borne of my sharing certain cultural touchstones with Mr. Goldthwait. Any other Kinks fan in the audience might have had the same song come to mind, so I guess I'm not so special after all (Ray Davies really gives a remarkable vocal performance... I must track down what version it is, find a recording of it somewhere). 

By the way, this is a rather charming recent bit of standup from Bobcat, which contains at least one routine he adapts for the film...

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