Like fellow bad-taste satirists Monty Python (when they felt like it) only not nearly as cleverly or with as much ease, Kevin Smith is both expressing some deep, heartfelt opinions and laughing his A$$ off at the same time. Also like Monty Python, he’d like it to make people think and he’d like it to make a difference, but if it doesn’t, and it doesn’t…and you don’t like it, what the fck does he care?
So I have to admire the man’s attitude, at least. He’s an individual, you’re an individual. This is how he thinks (and laughs). And suggestions that this movie is in any way “offensive” are absurd: you know what it is beforehand, if the subject matter would offend you, don’t watch it. It’s called freedom of expression. He expresses his by making it, you express your opinion that it’s a pile of sh1t by not watching it.
Is it heretical and blasphemous? Of course it is. Is it “offensive”? *Shrug* I don’t think so.
If you pay close attention, you’ll see that Smith is not attacking faith: he’s attacking blind faith, he’s attacking intolerance, he’s attacking hypocrisy. What his faith is, or is not, I couldn’t really care less about…that has no impact on me (since I am my own person) or on the film (since it is an entity of itself, formed in Smith’s head but made well outside of it).
In terms of the actual QUALITY of the MOVIE, I’d have to say it’s not nearly as good as Smith wants it to be, but still good enough to be worth watching. He’s just not a good enough writer to fully pull off a ‘Life Of Brian’. So it lags in parts and is downright boring and stupid in other parts. But there are GREAT moments, and if you just concentrate on those I have faith it will get you through the entire movie. I don’t BELIEVE that…but I have a good idea.
Some of the moments are truly funny, and some (surprisingly) are truly moving.
Fav characters, paired up in a “Good” vs. “Evil” tag-team match:
Metatron and Jay vs. Loki and Bartleby
Inspirational Quote: “Do you know much, about voodoo? It’s a fascinating practice…no real doctrine of faith to speak of, more an arrangement of superstitions…”
Grade: B
5/25/16: I did not underrate ‘Life Of Brian’, nor did I overrate this. I just made a comparison based on somewhat distant memory. They both possess periods of tedium, but here it’s more of the “get ON with it…” variety; overly wordy in the Tolkien sense. This is clearly better, overall. I suppose in twenty years this could reverse, but I don’t think either one of them is good enough (or bad enough) to really worry about that. Grade: B