How To Write A Will Ferrell Movie In 8 Easy Steps:

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Mike Myers grew up next door to Weasie's in Scarborough. I think they may even be related. (Or maybe I'm thinking of Steven Page? )

"Land of the Lost."
Coming out next summer.

Give me a fuckin' break!

Well we've got some help here:

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Meatballs II.

Actually, Meatballs I wasn't all that good, either.

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A shame.

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TIFF 08: The Divine and the "Religulous"

By Jim Emerson on September 9, 2008

The only real blasphemies in Bill Maher's anti-religion documentary, "Religulous," are that it's not terribly smart and only sporadically funny. Three or four big laughs and a lot of snide, pompous misfires and fish-in-a-barrel potshots do not make for much of a movie, or a coherent case against the incoherence of faith or organized religion. Maher's line is that he is pro-doubt, that he really "doesn't know," that he's "just asking questions." That's a big ol' load of crap (he's not really promoting doubt any more than anti-abortionists are "pro-life"), but what makes it offensive is that Maher's smart-ass tone sounds as certain, smug, smarmy and self-righteous as Jerry Falwell or Ted Haggerty.

But I kid.

No, I don't.

If you're going to preach to the converted you need to be smarter. If you're going to try to appeal to a larger crowd, you need to be funnier.

When a movie that haughtily inveighs against End Times fervor concludes with an apocalyptic montage of blood, violence and mushroom clouds, that's hypocrisy on the level of Pat Robertson. Yeah, it's supposed to be scary -- to, you know, really make you think. Maher, shot from below against the sun (if there's irony here, I don't think the filmmakers know it), gives his fire and brimstone sermon, railing against the evils of intolerance, and tolerance of intolerance, and... he's digging the pomp and rhetoric of his own dire Revelation moment so much that he just looks and sounds like another wacko preacher.

"Religulous" (a neologism of "religious" and "credulous" that maybe sounds like "ridiculous," I think) is Maher at his worst, condescending and self-aggrandizing. It's directed by Larry Charles . Adopting roughly the same format as "Borat" (staged "conversations" and ambush interviews, pieced together with travel footage of Maher talking and driving), the movie is guilty of almost all the sins "Borat" was accused of but did not commit. Some of the interviewees clearly know who Maher is, so he's not putting anything over on them in that sense. But he doesn't let them talk, either. At least Borat was genuinely interested in what people had to say, giving them plenty of rope with which to hang themselves. Maher can't resist derailing them with snide little zingers.

Take, for example, the anti-Zionist Hassid who was one of several Orthodox Jews (of the small Neturei Karta sect) to attend the Iranian "Holocaust denial" conference. I really wanted to hear this guy try to justify his point of view, but Maher kept deflecting and interrupting him, so that mostly he just sputtered, "Let me finish! Let me finish!" What he does say is that, despite the Holocaust, he does not believe that God gave the Jews Israel for all eternity. Why? We don't know. Maher gets in a few Holocaust jokes and then walks out on his own interview in a theatrical huff. It doesn't play. Maher's performance just seems like a calculated piece of phony drama, with a sly wink to the camera.

Other interviews are interrupted with mocking subtitles or aren't-we-clever cutaways to zany old biblical epics. Which is not to say that there isn't some solid research and information on display here, just that most of it isn't well displayed. Still, I'm intrigued that, even perhaps the most religious nation in the modern world, 16 percent of Americans are non-religious -- a larger minority than Jews, African-Americans or many other politically influential segments of the population. And yet, in this country founded on the principle of keeping religion and government independent, how many of our elected officials are openly atheist or agnostic?

In a too-brief interview, a cleric from the Vatican observatory explains, with considerable wit, that science and religion are two very different things and that one cannot be used to justify the other. How can scripture be said to have been based on science (the Adam and Eve chronology of history, for example) when the scientific method would not be invented for hundreds of years?

That's the good stuff. "Religulous" is guilty of the same kind of distorting selectivity that Maher (rightly) accuses religion of promoting. He criticizes a controversy-courting British Muslim rapper, Propa-Gandhi (Aki Nawaz), for hypocritically advocating "dissent" while refusing to condemn the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. The movie shows some of Propa-Gandhi's incendiary videos extolling the virtues of suicide bombing, but doesn't quote even a line from Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" to give the audience any idea of what that was all about. There's a double standard here, and in the movie's sanitized portrayal of murdered filmmaker Theo Van Gogh's more outrageous, even anti-Semitic, views -- while, at the same time, criticizing the Dutch for being too tolerant and Islam for being too intolerant. My point is that if you're going to make a case for dissent and free speech, you can't be so selective. Nobody should be subjected to death threats or assassination for anything they say or write or film -- but their views shouldn't be bowdlerized or censored, either. It's not free speech if it only protects speech that we feel comfortable with.

(Unfortunately for us all, Maher seems to think of himself as a First Amendment Martyr, after his post-9/11 comment about how President Bush's term "cowards" was not sufficient to describe murderous suicidal religious fanatics who flew planes into buildings. His network TV show, "Politically Incorrect," was canceled not long thereafter. He spoke a self-evident truth in a scary, difficult time and was crucified for it -- along with Susan Sontag and many others -- but it's soured his excessive self-regard ever since.)

I think the best moment in the movie comes when Maher interviews a non-collar-wearing priest just outside Vatican square. What can you say to get people to see the truth? Nothing, the priest says, they'll just have to live and die with their dumb beliefs.

Amen. For a movie that strikes out at dumbness and narrow-mindedness, "Religulous" too often stoops so low that it practices what it preaches against.

"Underdog."
I could only last 10 minutes. Man, what a stinker.
I mean, you know going in it ain't gonna be great art, but come on!

They should have left off the 'under.'