In Review

A collection of notes from my notebook about films I saw once.

World's Greatest Dad (2009)

Bobcat Goldthwait is a filmmaker interested in asking questions both consequential and otherwise. 2006's Sleeping Dog's Lie asks the latter. World's Greatest Dad however tackles something very large and universal. The idea of creating histories, which suggests, more importantly the existence of multiple histories. Goldthwait acknowledges that history belongs to time not simply to a finite space; that it is ever evolving; that our histories belong to a larger social discourse.

From there he goes on to discuss the ways in which society will ultimately fetishize that history, which delivers it all the more to discourse, all the more to time, because we attach ourselves to objects from that history based on an arbitrary worth tied to nothing more than a sense of belonging. A moment is finite, a moment remembered, or more specifically a moment tied to an object is infinite.

Where Mr. Bobcat fails is in his attempt to fit his grand ideas into a plausible narrative language. So much in the film happens simply because it has to. The words in 'Kyle's' 'diary' effect society so deeply, not because they are beautiful, but rather because they need to in order for the plot to continue. Lance's confession occurs because the film needs to come in at ninety minutes, not because what we have seen up to that point had been building (psychologically or otherwise) to necessary catharsis. Goldthwait know his cinema history. He knows that films in which a character holds a deep dark secret must ultimately end in a confession, and so he ends him film as such, but does so without emotional context.

What ultimately ends up on screen are many thoughtful ideas, but ideas in the hands of a filmmaker not yet capable of adequately translating them.