This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: October 2, 2008 - For a man who doesn't believe in God, Bill Maher sure can get preachy. And he becomes positively evangelical in the last few minutes of "Religulous," a fairly funny if sometimes obnoxious "gotcha" film in which Maher travels around the country and the world confronting people who do believe in God with the seeming contradictions and absurdities of their beliefs ("Swallowed by a WHALE???"; "A talking SNAKE???").
Most of Maher's confrontations are with patsies, including a poor dope who plays Jesus in a Christian theme park and a couple of eye-rolling evangelists -- one of whom claims to be a direct descendent of Jesus -- whose appeal to their large and generous congregations is a bafflement. (On the other hand, if they're so dumb, how come they're rich?)
Fundamentalists suffer the most from Maher's wit, which tends to be delivered with sledgehammer blows. Catholics, on the other hand, mostly acquit themselves with intelligence and panache. A couple of priests, one an astronomer, the other somehow associated with the Vatican, laugh at literal interpretations of the Bible and generally give the impression that the freethinking spirit of the Vatican II reforms is not dead.
Muslims and orthodox Jews also come in for some not-so-gentle ribbing, Muslims for terrorist acts in the name of Allah, Jews for coming up with complicated Rube Goldberg devices so they can make phone calls on the Sabbath without pressing numbers with their fingers.
"Religulous" - I guess that's supposed to be a blending of "religious" and "credulous" - never pretends to be fair. Maher tells us at the outset that he doesn't believe in God - his mother was Jewish, his father was Catholic and he was raised a Catholic, but not, one gathers, for very long. The film was directed by Larry Charles, best known for "Borat," and like "Borat" it often sets people up to be punked, to be made fools of. If you can stomach that sort of thing, the movie is amusing - up to a point.
That point comes near the end, when Maher gets deadly serious and starts talking about how the world can no longer afford the illusion of religion because religion leads to violence and, these days, violence can lead to the destruction of all life on Earth. As Maher rails on, nuclear bombs go off in the background. Of course, a little thought - say as much as it would take to figure out that some of the stories in the Bible may not be literally true - would lead a person to realize that, although wars can be caused by religious differences, they can also be caused by economic differences, clashing political ideologies, the struggle for scarce natural resources, and sometimes just plain stubborn nationalistic pride, like, arguably, the First World War. Which was fought essentially by Christian nations.
You're not going to do away with war by doing away with religion or religious differences, and you have to believe that someone as smart as Bill Maher knows that. On the other hand, he had a movie to make.
Father, Daughter and Cultures Clash
Wayne Wang began his filmmaking career in the 1980s with such small, well-wrought tales of Chinese-Americans living in two cultures as "Chan is Missing" and "Dim Sum: A Little Bit of Heart." These days, Wang directs glossy Hollywood fare such as "Because of Winn-Dixie" and "Maid in Manhattan," but in his newest film, "A Thousand Years of Good Prayers," he returns to his roots.
A retired Chinese man comes to the United States and moves in with his unmarried daughter, who is busy all day at her job and often goes out in the evening. The father still thinks of his daughter as a girl in need of parental guidance. He also snoops into her private life and wonders incessantly why she hasn't married a nice Chinese boy. Inevitably, the two clash.
Eventually, after they both reveal secrets about themselves, they reach a kind of shaky accommodation, but nothing is really solved. The film is a sweet, perceptive and engaging look at a father-daughter relationship that is flavored by the Chinese heritage of the two principals, but that also achieves universality.
Opens Oct. 3
Harper Barnes, the author of Never Been A Time: The 1917 Race Riot That Sparked The Civil Rights Movement, has also been a long-time reviewer of movies.