Ex Machina is good, but not as interesting to me as Y: The Last Man. Like Fables, I would read it if it were free, but I don't really see myself buying future volumes.

Saved! is a limp satire about teenage intrigue at a Christian high school. It is hard to be very satirical when you can't quite bring yourself to make fun of anyone or anything. This movie shows how crucial connotation is in language. A thesaurus might tell you that "liberal," "left-wing," and "progressive" are all synonyms. But nuh-uh. This movie isn't really progressive. Nor is it notably left-wing. But liberal? Hell, it's Exhibit A.

Because it is a liberal movie, the heroes are the school outcasts. Sure, none of them is perfect — the main girl gets herself knocked up, the rebellious girl smokes and cusses, the guy in the wheelchair is Macaulay Culkin — but they're good at heart and the movie encourages us to identify with them rather than condemn them. So does that mean that the three popular churchgoing girls are the villains? Nah. One of them is something of an outcast herself because she's ugly, so the movie can't be too harsh towards her; one's a minority, so the movie can't be too harsh towards her; and while Mandy Moore's character does some pretty nasty things, she gets her comeuppance and learns the error of her ways, so all is forgiven and the movie likes her too. There's also a flaky mother, but she comes through in the end. There's a hypocritical pastor, but hey, he's only human, right? Now, I'm not saying that you can't have a good narrative without a bad guy. But a satire kind of needs, like, y'know, a target.

I guess you could say the target is intolerance. But Saved! doesn't even go so far as to suggest that evangelical Christianity is a source of intolerance; rather, it takes the position that intolerance is a foreign cancer upon Christianity, which is intrinsically a wellspring of tolerance. Because, see, Jesus loves everybody, maaan! Including gay guys and pregnant unwed teenagers and Macaulay Culkin! After the election, a lot of liberal commentators declared that the secular cause was hopeless and the only way to stay relevant in today's culture wars was to co-opt Christianity; this movie seems to be an effort in that direction. Hey, we liberals are into Jesus just as much as you are! Because we remember that Jesus was a liberal! Hippie Jesus! Free To Be You And Me Jesus!

The problem is, in the end, Hippie Jesus is irrelevant. Hordes of converts aren't flocking to Christianity because of Hippie Jesus. Nor, much as Bill O'Reilly might pretend this is the case, are they being won over by Philosopher Jesus — the way O'Reilly talks, you'd think people were carefully weighing the pros and cons of Heidegger vs. the gentleman from Nazareth. I have to think that's probably pretty rare. The title of this movie suggests that someone involved knew perfectly well which Jesus it was that has become the organizing principle of the lives of hundreds of millions of people. It's Savior Jesus. And Savior Jesus doesn't appeal to the heart, nor to the head.

When The Passion of the Christ made hundreds of millions of dollars, some movie critics complained that it focused entirely on Jesus's suffering and not really at all on what he taught; this is because what he taught is of, at best, secondary importance to most of his followers. No, Savior Jesus is all about fear. Christianity is the leading religion in the world because deep in the limbic system of our brains lurks an unreasoning paranoia that says, "I'M IN DANGER! PREDATORS ARE GOING TO TEAR ME APART! I NEED SOMETHING OR SOMEBODY TO MAKE ME SAFE!" Relying on that paranoia is a good way to keep yourself alive and pass your paranoid genes to future generations. But it also makes terror the center of your life.

This is what the evangelists play upon. Exoteric Christianity says, listen up — you are going to burn in a lake of fire forever. You are in grave danger! At any moment, you could be doomed! But there is one — only one — way to be Safe. Believe In Jesus. Of course, neither half of this command means much. If "Jesus" is supposed to refer to a Palestinian rabbi two thousand years ago, then what (as Saved! starts to ask before shying away) is with all the adoration bestowed upon portraits of a fine-featured Anglo-Saxon with hippie hair? This guy isn't Jesus the man. It's Jesus the meme. Jesus the magic word. And the "belief" that's supposed to activate the secret word — what's that? If it's orthodoxy rather than orthopraxy that counts, how do I measure whether I have enough? Okay, so if I want to win Eternal Life I have to Believe — how do I know if I'm doing it or not?

Countless people have spent their lives trying to answer these questions. If you think that understanding the meaning of life and winning a ticket to heaven will be your reward, I can see why you'd put in the time. But to me it all sounds like the Time Cube. I don't believe in Hippie Jesus, Philosopher Jesus or Savior Jesus. I believe in Schizophrenic Jesus. What I have read about his speeches and his behavior seems to me very much in keeping with accounts of other schizophrenics. But he launched a set of memes that, two millennia later, are only gaining strength. I'm living in a country, the most powerful in the world, whose culture is increasingly founded on mental illness. That's a pretty juicy target for a satire. But Saved! responds to this trend with a bit of gentle mockery and a hug.

Speaking of hippies, it's Billy Jack.

(By the way, these are all movies Jennifer received for free, or more likely on someone else's tab, from Netflix. This experiment is now in its eighth month.)

The title character of Billy Jack is, basically, Wolverine. He's a violent guy who turned to non-Western spirituality and became a defender of a special school whose students are under siege by a world that hates and fears them. In this case they're hippies rather than mutants, but who can tell sometimes?

The curriculum at the school (called Freedom School, which I think is also the new name of the Lycée Français) seems to revolve around improv — there's a lot of improv — and folk songs with names like "A Rainbow Made of Children." (One of the folk songs early on, I will confess, has a really beautiful melody.) The school is on a reservation, so the students also learn a bit of Native American culture; many are NAs themselves. Billy Jack isn't, but he has adopted their ways, to the point that he lets himself get bitten by a rattlesnake a few times in a tribal ritual. He doesn't seem to have an official role at the school, but he's basically there to deal with The Man. Early on he protects a bunch of wild horses from being slaughtered by the deputy sherriff's gang; later, after some of the kids have been attacked by racists, he responds by kicking a bunch of the people responsible in the head. Eventually things go really bad with the raping and murdering and what have you, and it's time for Billy to really go kick some ass — except this isn't a summer movie trying to cash in on the audience's collective roid rage. Billy, cornered by the law, is about to go out with guns a-blazin', when the hippie who runs the school dismisses his boilerplate action movie speech and makes him consider that, hey, maybe heroic last stands are actually kind of stupid.

This is not really a good movie, but it raises some interesting issues, which is more than most movies can say. Chief among them is: how does a non-violent society avoid being crushed by a violent one without resorting to, well, violence? The answer is not so simple as "it doesn't." For every case in which military force prevented more suffering than it caused (say, the Allied effort in WWII), there are countless others in which the reverse has been true. And non-violent movements often succeed. Look at Ukraine: peaceful demonstrations brought about an ideal result while an armed insurrection would have led to nothing but a bloodbath. Or take the case of Canada vs. the United States. I once read a book that contended that the chief difference between these two countries, historically, has been temperament: the US is full of Billy Jacks whose response to British oppression was to load up on guns and take to the woods, while Canada achieved independence only incrementally and still has the damn queen on its money. But both are sovereign nations today, and while the US is exponentially more powerful, a strong case can be made that Canada is more civilized: its citizens have guaranteed health care even if they're poor, its religious zealots actually lose elections, its history with its native inhabitants has been less genocidal than America's despite the efforts of the Saskatoon police, and despite what Ann Coulter may think, it doesn't have the blood of tens of thousands of Vietnamese and Iraqis on its hands.

On the other hand, Wolverine is himself Canadian. It's all so confusing.

Best in Show is a mock documentary about a dog show, though of course it's not really about the dogs but about the behavior of the owners. You've got a screaming yuppie couple, a pair of schlubs from Florida, a southern goober, an Anna Nicole Smith stand-in, and so forth. They are all thrown into the stressful atmosphere of the dog show, and as people under stress tend to do, they respond poorly. Man, the film seems to be asking, isn't it painful to watch people behave this way? Yes. Painful. Not funny. There are a few chuckles along the way, but most of the humor is supplied by the cheerfully inappropriate commentary by the dog show announcer in the second half of the film.

(also, I probably shouldn't say this, but I thought Parker Posey was pretty hot)

Return to the Calendar page!