Screengrab Review: "Religulous"

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:55:00 GMT

One of the problems with being an atheist is putting up with the kind of people who carry the flag for you. Get annoyed at the likes of a Richard Dawkins, and there's a doofy polemicist like Sam Harris waiting in the wings. And hey, Camille Paglia and Marilyn Manson, don't do us any favors, okay? Back in the day, we had clever bastards like Gore Vidal to go on television and lay down careful traps for the likes of Jerry Falwell to step into; Gore would sit there, smiling his deadly little smile, while the defenders of various sky-gods would work themselves into a frenzy. It's good philosophy as well as good show business to make your target to all the work, while you just sit back and collect the laughs.

That's a lesson that could stand to be learned by Bill Maher, who, with Religulous, his new comic documentary about how religious people are a bunch of silly-heads, has done the unthinkable: he has made blasphemy boring. Maher, who, until he discovered the millions that could be made by playing to one side or the other in the never-ending culture wars, used to be little more than a hack comic with an unrequited love of bad puns and smirky asides. Those characteristics remain with him to this day (witness the title of the film, and his interminable playing to the camera as if he were an agnostic David Brent), but they'd be forgivable if he had an ounce of -- well, faith in the fact that his position is strong enough to let religious nuts hoist them by their own petards. Vidal (and Robert Ingersoll, and Clarence Darrow, and even David Cross) knew that religious people would say a lot of crazy bullshit if you just let them talk long enough; he knew better than to force the point. Maher has no such trust, and when the payoff doesn't seem to be coming fast enough for him, he kills the gag by adding subtitles explaining his real thoughts on the matter at hand, or by cutting to dopey stock footage which he then rolls into a tube and beats you over the head with it.

Maher may not know any better than this, but his director, Larry Charles, certainly does, and that's what makes the whole thing so unforgivable. Given such a wealth of material, all the two of them have to do is set 'em up and knock 'em down. But with the exception of a few scenes that can't help but work (hey, nobody can screw up a punchline as obvious as a gathering of gay Muslim fundamentalists), the whole thing is belabored, obvious, and telegraphed, and when Maher doesn't trust the nuttiness to come across without help from his screen crawls, he might as well be playing BOINGG! sound effects at us. As he might well have asked some of his Christian evangelist targets, if even you don't buy your premise, why should we?

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World Film Beat: "My Brother Is an Only Child"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 28 Mar 2008 17:00:00 GMT

The Italian director Daniele Luchetti's new movie, My Brother Is an Only Child, has a script that the director worked on with Sandro Petraglia and Stefano Rulli; Petraglia and Rulli co-wrote The Best of Youth, a sensational six-hour family saga, spanning four decades, that played American theaters in 2005. At first glance, My Brother could pass for The Best of Youth: The Portable Edition. Like the earlier epic, it deals with the political battles of the sixties, and their implosion in the terrorist-ridden Italy of the seventies, as reflected in the relationship of two brothers. The central figure is Accio, the brother who, as a boy teetering on the brink of puberty, wants to be a priest. For a few scenes I was afraid that the movie was going to be one of those European mood pieces that traps you in a monastery with some dumb cluck who takes the whole movie to figure out that he needs to get the hell out of there, but once Accio becomes both confused and emboldened by his hormonal urges, he rethinks his career plan gratifyling quick and moves back in with his family. Disillusioned from age thirteen on, Accio (who's played by Elio Germano from around the time that his skin breaks out), has little choice but to declare himself a fascist, especially since his older brother Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio) is both an announced Communist and a natural born heartthrob who effortlessly secures the undying romantic devotion of Francesca, played by Diane Fleri, a twenty-three-year-old French actress who could probably persuade Richard Dawkins to run for president on the Flat Earth Party ticket.

Despite its pedigree, My Brother Is an Only Child isn't in the same league as The Best of Youth, a brazenly unfair comparison if ever I've made one. But on its own more modest terms it's smart and affecting, with the conflicts of years ago treated with all the wisdom of hindsight but a minimum of sentimentality. (Luca Zingaretti, who plays the beefy older knucklehead who indoctrinates the hero in Mussolini worship, comes across as a likable sort of harmless eccentric--until he grows a contingent of thugs to order around.) The filmmakers' sympathies may be with the political left, but their funniest scene is a piece of campus lunacy where Manrico and his comrades perform a politically corrected version of Ode to Joy. (The performance is disrupted by Fascists who burst in yelling, “Leave Beethoven alone or we’ll bust your ass!”) Part of the charm of the movie, as with other Italian films such as The Best of Youth and Marco Bellocchio's Good Morning, Night, is that it carries the reassuring message that America isn't the only country that can't seem to get past arguing who was driven crazier by the sixties.

The Screengrab : richard dawkins

Screengrab Review: "Religulous"

World Film Beat: "My Brother Is an Only Child"