Call Me Lucky is a shocking, brilliant new documentary. It's about a man, few have known, but many really should discover. He's an American treasure, despite hating his own country so very much. Barry Crimmins is the subject of the piece. He's said to be "a cross between Noam Chomsky and Bluto". He is a giant fireball of communist rage. No matter how much you think you hate the United States, and the Catholic Church, trust me, you don't hate it as much as Barry does. He's seething anger personified, but it didn't just come out of a vacuum. As a young child, he was subject to a series of unspeakable, disgusting sexual assaults. How much of it that he discloses will make your jaw drop. It is devastating. Once you take it all into account, you suddenly understand his resentment for his surroundings. As a man, and in-between his stand- up gigs, he dedicates his free time in a heroic journey to save children who have been at the hands of sexual abuse. Through this journey, he exposes the darkest underbelly of the pedophilia ring, during the dawn of AOL. I'm spilling way too much about this documentary, but it's brilliant, and I have to just spill all of my thoughts here. It's Bobcat Goldthwait's masterpiece, and what should be, and won't be, an Oscar contender. It's too cool for the establishment to like. If the day comes and the Oscars don't nominate "Call Me Lucky", I hope to see Crimmins rail against the "capitalist, old, white, wrinkly, pig f******" that screwed him over again… sorry to paraphrase.

At the risk of sounding cynical, the fact that this was made before Barry Crimmins' death makes the testimonies more credible, in a way. People are celebrating and stating the importance of this man, and it's not because he's passed away and because you "have" to be respectful to the dead. Of course not all interviewees in documentaries about the dead are lying or embellishing, but it's something that's often on my mind when I watch them.

Anyway, this is a very good documentary with one possible downside: I felt a little strange about Crimmins' abuse as a child being a plot twist of sorts, at least at first. It seemed a little tacky to build suspense to this "revelation" through showing snippets of interviews with his sister. In the end it works, and it does lend the second half of the film a sense of power and emotion, but maybe other survivors of abuse would want to know the documentary is going to cover that stuff beforehand. I think it's a good approach for viewers who aren't victims of childhood abuse, to jolt their systems and make it more impactful, but there is a chance this sudden shift at the halfway point could prove difficult and too confrontational for people who have survived abuse and don't know it's coming within the documentary.

In this case, the somewhat comparable halfway plot shift in Goldthwait's excellent World's Greatest Dad probably works a bit better, thanks to the story being fictional.

3/15/18. Wow, what a biopic! Never heard of him but now that I have watched this I will never forget him. A caustic, sarcastic comedian who had a good reason for being that way - he was sexually abused when he was a small child. Eventually he took all that energy and channeled it into activism against Internet child porn. More than anything he raised awareness of how prevalent child molestation is, and it's scary. Parents, protect your children!