Death to Smoochy
Robin Williams plays a kid’s show host out for revenge in Danny DeVito’s sinister black comedy. Smoochy the Rhino is the object of Williams’ wrath, a hapless comic played by Edward Norton. The 2002 film co-stars Catherine Keener as the hard-nosed exec who ends up smooching Smoochy and Jon Stewart is on board as a shady kid’s show producer.
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About J. D. Lifshitz
J. D. Lifshitz is the co-founder and producing partner of Los Angeles based production and sales company BoulderLight Pictures. Their most recent credits include The Vigil (TIFF '19, SXSW '20), Becky (Tribeca '20), and Wild Indian (Sundance '21). BoulderLight's upcoming slate includes Rodney & Sheryl, to be directed by Chloe Okuno and starring Anna Kendrick, and The Cow, written and directed by Homecoming creator Eli Horowitz and starring Winona Ryder, Dermot Mulroney, and John Gallagher Jr.
Help me to understand: this was a comedy?
Folks ran away from this because, like the classic ‘A Face In The Crowd’, it openly questioned what Pop Culture means.
Uh, yes. It’s a black comedy, just like Monsieur Verdoux and Dr. Strangelove.
Talking about his role in A Face in the Crowd, Andy Griffith said that he never wanted to play that sort of role again, because playing it brought out something evil in him. It just shows what a self-serving, amoral individual Lonesome Rhodes was. If only people had paid attention to that movie, we might’ve never ended up with all these ranters on talk radio.
After appearing in back-to-back schmaltzy movies in 1999, Robin Williams probably realized that he needed to play darker roles if people were going to take him seriously, so he played three sinister roles in 2002 (in addition to Death to Smoochy, he played a killer in Insomnia and a stalker in One Hour Photo). He also had a tour, which I saw when he came to my city. By the end of it, I was hoarse from laughing.