Religion Dispatches
Faith is completely redundant. It may take a long time for people to figure out it’s redundant, but given what we know about psychology and the way the brain works and the way evolution has taught us not to just battle each other into submission, but to cooperate and help each other, there will come a time when people see it as unnecessary, a philosophical distortion of reality.
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The paranoid few who seem genuinely disturbed by the possibility of the coming end of the world may be responding the most reasonably to current events. Or not. This ambiguity is at the heart of Jeff Nichols’ recent film Take Shelter. The film explores whether its protagonist is crazy, or a prophet, or both.
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At first, Michael McIntyre admits, he wasn’t sure why they weren’t making a documentary on yoga, as opposed to women and yoga. I wondered the same thing. Isn’t the stereotype of men that they are even more out of touch with their bodies than women; overscheduled and torn between conflicting demands that don’t allow a minute for introspection, contemplation, or the stillness from which groundedness is born? All these reasons are why the film claims women should do the practice. But Michael came to believe that they were documenting something momentous, and women were leading it. “As a man going to classes taught by men, I was getting the practice, but not the phenomenon,” he said. “Women are taking it to the next level.”
Read MoreFilmmakers Joe Fox and James Nubile, granted “fly on the wall” access during the 2009 initiative to repeal Maine’s marriage equality law, expose the myths promoted by its opponents.
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After treating the Vietnam War and the torture images of Abu Ghraib in his most recent films, Oscar-winning documentary maker Errol Morris turns to a 1977 scandal involving North Carolina beauty queen Joyce McKinney in his new documentary Tabloid.
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If bloodthirsty undead zombie action isn’t usually your thing, you might be temped to pass on Stake Land. But like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later and Let the Right One In, the brilliant reworking of vampire tropes by Swedish novelist-screenwriter John Ajvide Lindqvist, Stake Land upends many of the expectations moviegoers are likely to bring to a genre film. It also makes grimly imaginative and occasionally audacious use of some of the religious and political themes threading through contemporary American culture.
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The positive reception of Budrus in the U.S. says a lot about the political climate today. The right-wing “pro-Israel” movement is going through a tough time. It has always built its public appeal on one simple narrative: Israel wants peace, but it must fight to ward off implacable violence from its enemies. Anything Israel does is justified because it’s in self-defense.
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Two very different films about what happens after we die are in the theaters right now: Clint Eastwood’s gentle Hereafter and Gaspar Noe’s raw, hallucinatory Enter the Void. While covering the same cosmological territory, the films couldn’t be more different, stylistically, thematically, and religiously.
Read MoreAward-winning movie is perfect synthesis of Christian Right with Tea Party ideology.
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Many first learned of the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints when the polygamous group came into the media spotlight following leader Warren Jeffs’ arrest (and eventual conviction) as an accomplice to rape. Pictures of young women in “prairie dresses” were splashed on TV and the media rushed to try to explain who these people actually were. Were they Mormons? Were they a cult? Sons of Perdition, a documentary that premiered at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival, follows the story of a group of teenage boys who have left the FLDS church, and tracks their struggles in exile from their homes and families.
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