Kills Me Dead

I’m having trouble with this movie because on the one hand it was absolutely hilarious in one of those “If you don’t laugh, you’re going to cry” kind of ways because the things people say in this film are awful and depressing and shocking, but on the other hand none of this ever goes anywhere.

I’ve never watched Bill Maher’s show so I can’t comment on that as a point of comparison, but the approach to the film is similar to Rick Mercer’s “Talking To Americans” segments, for those who are familiar with him. The problem with Religulous, just like the problem with “Talking To Americans”, is that while the questions asked of these people might be ground initially in genuine inquiry, ultimately you feel like Maher is just trying to trap people into saying stupid, offensive shit. If you give people enough rope, of course they’re going to hang themselves. It panders to the lowest common denominator and purposely seeks out extremism, which would be fine if this were a film explicitly about extremism. But it’s not, oh how it’s not: by the end of the film Maher goes out of his way to make it quite clear that he is talking about all religion and all its adherents, regardless of the degree of zealousness. I find this approach disappointing because they seem to have completely missed the opportunity to ignite some intelligent discussion on the subject of religion.

It’s funny because I didn’t feel terribly negative towards the film at all until the last five minutes. Throughout the movie, Maher — half Jewish but raised completely Catholic — asks a variety of religious people (mostly Christians) numerous logic-based questions about things they believe to be true about their religions. He’s attempting to appeal to their rational sides and frequently when they try to explain things, they’ll try to turn the questions back on him. Maher seems to find this reasonable but is willing to admit that he himself doesn’t have all the answers either. At the end of the movie, though, he goes from expressing healthy doubt and humility about the world we live in (and any possible worlds beyond) to essentially making a rallying cry for all atheists or otherwise non-religious people to raise their voices together in hopes of stamping out religion. Or something, I’m not entirely sure because he went on a zealous tirade for five minutes and sounded pretty damn similar to some of the other zealots he had interviewed earlier in the movie. It was a really, really big turn off for me and really soured what had been up to that point a rather enjoyable film.

I think the problem with this movie is that it was largely undertaken as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t like religious fundamentalists and you spend all your time looking for and talking to religious fundamentalists to be intellectually offended by, why get upset when people give you the exact behaviour you were hoping to coax out of them? It shouldn’t be shocking that televangelists are not going to be wholly representative of Christians in general (although that guy was absolutely hysterical). It shouldn’t be shocking to find evangelicals at a theme park that recreates the Holy Land in Orlando, FL where there is choreographed biblical dance and stagings of the Stations of the Cross. When the Catholic priests you interview are the most moderate and reasonable of the bunch of people who show up in the film, you know you have problems.

While I have my problems with the general approach to the film and the obviously skewed documentary bias (I think “documentary” is a somewhat inappropriate word for what this film is), there were some pretty hysterical moments that make it worth watching.

1. At one point they visit a place called the Creation Museum, a museum dedicated to presenting the “history” of the Bible as any regular museum would present natural history. One of the many things that makes this place special is how they present the idea of humans and dinosaurs cohabiting peacefully on the planet at the same time (because the Earth is only 5,000 years old and therefore dinosaurs could not have died out 65 million years ago). They actually have a huge and rather amazing display of animatronic dinosaurs, including two baby T-Rex, alongside animatronic children who happily play in the not-so-Cretaceous jungle. Freaking awesome. I’m going to start subscribing to Creationism if it lets me believe that dinosaurs and people were able to live together at one point in history.

   True fact: Michael Crichton was the ghostwriter for the Book of Genesis.

2. While at the Holy Land theme park, Maher starts pointing out similarities between the Jesus story and stories in other religions and mythologies that are hundreds or thousands of years older than the Jesus story. One woman starts to protest this idea when her son, looking thoughtful, says “No, I see what you mean. It’s just like Star Wars: Episode I. Anakin Skywalker was born to a virgin and they obviously based that on Jesus.” Wow, nothing gets by this kid. Maher momentarily seems happy that the kid has picked up on the idea of literary archetypes and says “Right, and the Jesus story is based on these other stories that came before it” but then he’s lost both the kid and the mother because neither can fathom or accept any other story coming before the Christ story.
3. One person was describing their concept of Jesus as including curly hair, at which point they inserted a clip of Jonah Hill from Superbad saying “Heyyyyyy… here I am” as if he was the second coming. It was pretty hysterical.

If anyone is keeping up on TIFF fashion trends, it should be noted that the director, Larry Charles, was wearing purple crocs during the Q&A that followed the screening.