MOVIE REVIEW: Religulous
© A.J. Malouin 2008
(Rating: 16 by The Film Snob.)
(See our side-bar page “How Caryl & Al and The Film Snob Rate Movies”)
(2008/USA. Directed by Larry Charles, and written by Bill Maher.)
What is the point of making this quasi-documentary movie??? We don’t know. It is bound and determined to offend *anyone* who has *any* religious beliefs, and the people who aren’t religious are already at the destination to which the movie attempts to take them.
Religious people are filmed here going around in verbal circles trying to give rational explanations for things which they believe *solely* on faith.
Non-religious people will probably squirm at the discomfort these attempts at explanations generate.
No one’s position changes one whit, and the laughs are far and few between the long stretches of squirming discomfort.
Bill Maher was born to a Roman Catholic father and Jewish mother. He and his sister were raised as Catholics until he was 13, at which point the whole family stopped going to any church of any kind. In this movie Maher calls everyone who preaches *any* religion to *anyone* an “intellectual slaveholder.”
In one set piece, Maher enters a small church in North Carolina (we think it was.) This church has a sign identifying it as “Trucker’s Church.” It is no more than 25 feet wide. Inside it, Maher questions several members of the congregation.
We feel sorry for these obese deer frozen in the headlights of Maher’s questioning of their faith. Why would he do that? One of the congregation confesses that he used to be a Satanist before finding this church. “A real Satanist,” he explains, “With drugs and girls and the whole thing.”
Maher interviews Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda, a preacher wearing shoes made of lizard skins and a two-thousand-dollar suit. Miranda claims to be a direct blood descendent of Jesus. “And not just because your name is ‘Jesus,’ right?” Maher needles him. “After all, your name is also ‘Miranda.’ You could be a direct descendent of Carmen Miranda!”
Throughout the movie, Maher makes derogatory remarks about “the talking snake” conversing with Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He laughs derisively at anyone who buys into the story literally. “C’mon!” he snorts. “A talking snake??!”
Maher points out that one survey reports that 16% of American are “not religious.” “That’s larger than America’s black population, and larger than America’s Jewish population, yet these ‘non-religious’ Americans are not organized to make any impact on American government.”
He points out that America’s Founding Fathers, Jefferson, Hancock, and Franklin among them, favored neither religion nor, even, the existence of God.
He stops short, however, of saying that “non-religious” Americans must organize themselves to counteract the impact of large blocks of voting Religionists who are unified in attempting to put their religious beliefs into Federal Law.
Maher also points out the event-by-event parallels in the life of Jesus Christ and an Egyptian religious leader who lived 600 years before Christ: Virgin birth, baptized in a river, father a carpenter, crucified by the government, reported resurrected three days later…and on and on.
One technique The Film Snob admired in all this mishing-mash??? It’s the humorous subtitles placed over some of the movie’s conversations, commenting on the action taking place on the screen. The Film Snob is not familiar with Bill Maher’s body (of work) and therefore does not know if this technique is Standard Operating Procedure, or serendipity. The humor of the subtitles, however, helped him make it through the night.
All in all, not many discussion points were made in this movie, and the movie seems to “go” nowhere. People are repeatedly asked to give hard evidence that the beliefs they hold on faith are true and factual.
Guess what??! They can’t!
The film opens and closes with Maher standing on the exact spot where he says that Christianity believes Christ will appear again and the world will end. We are then shown wars, and chaos, and nuclear bombs exploding, as Maher hints that the world will end not with The Rapture but with the opening of bomb-bay doors.
The Talking Heads’ “Road to Nowhere” then plays over the credits. Maher’s People probably intended this song to be a summation of the religious beliefs that people hold on nothing more than blind faith.
Unfortunately for us, the audience, it’s a summation of this movie, as well. To repeat? “Why Bother?????’
(1 hr 41. Rated “R” in the USA for some language and sexual material. In American, with some humorous sub-titles. With Bill Maher all over this as himself, Steve Burg as himself, Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda as himself, and Andrew Newberg as himself.)