Issue 175

News: How not to do a Jesus biopic: Another long-term essay.
A few weeks ago, I saw the movie, The Passion of the Christ. My mother heard about it, and she said that she never wanted to see it (and she's the most religious member of my immediate family, although for her, it means self-identifying as Lutheran, and occasionally going to Church on Christmas or Easter, depending on her health), especially since she heard that it was little more than a glorified snuff film. Well, I ended up renting it from the library, and, it turns out, she was right. The fact is that it was almost entirely devoted to the torture and execution of Jesus, with surprisingly little focus on any other aspect of his life. And, even though they went through the trouble of translating the script into the languages that would have actually been spoken at the time, they even manage to get that wrong, especially since the Roman soldiers were speaking in ECCLESIASTICAL LATIN. Honestly, if you're going to translate your dialogue into a foreign, dead, language, make sure it's the right one. I like a bit of the old ultraviolence now and again, but really, when the entire point of the movie is devoted to one man's execution, it is not good. Even Funny Games took time out of showing the two men torturing the Yuppie family to break the fourth wall and play Naked City music. To keep the contrast to other religious movies, The Passion of Joan of Arc devoted itself to the last few hours of the life of a saint, but C.T. Dreyer focused the movie not only on the suffering itself, but also at least gave Joan some character development. However, Mel Gibson gives his Jesus very little room for such character development, and gives us no real reason to care about his suffering except that we're supposed to care about Jesus being crucified. Indeed, I think there can be, and actually have been, some great interpretations of Jesus' life on film, like Pasolini's Gospel According to Matthew (although a lot of my admiration can be due to its eclectic sountrack), Nicholas Ray's King of Kings, or, in terms of sheer comprehensiveness, Zefferelli's Jesus of Nazareth. I'd even recommend Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ, even if its casting choices are suspect, to say the least, and it isn't even based on the Gospels. While we're on adaptations of the Bible done by unusual people, I recently read R. Crumb's adaptation of the Book of Genesis, and, as it turns out, the man who created Mr. Natural and wrote the source material for the first X-rated cartoon film actually does a pretty good job of adapting the first book of the Bible. He even manages to make the "begats" interesting by actually giving the people being "begotten" a face, and it's actually surprisingly reverent for R. Crumb, and quite possibly the most oddly reverent adaptation of the Bible since Aphrodite's Child's rock opera of Revelation: "666."

Relevant Quote: "The New Testament tells two stories for two different sorts of readers. One is the old story of the achievement of our salvation by the sacrifice and atonement of a divine personage who was barbarously slain and rose again on the third day: the story as it was accepted by the apostles. And in this story the political, economic, and moral views of the Christ have no importance: the atonement is everything; and we are saved by our faith in it, and not by works or opinions (other than that particular opinion) bearing on practical affairs.

The other is the story of a prophet who, after expressing several very interesting opinions as to practical conduct, both personal and political, which are now of pressing importance, and instructing his disciples to carry them out in their daily life, lost his head; believed himself to be a crude legendary form of god; and under that delusion courted and suffered a cruel execution in the belief that he would rise from the dead and come in glory to reign over a regenerated world. In this form, the political, economic and moral opinions of Jesus, as guides to conduct, are interesting and important: the rest is mere psychopathy and superstition."
_______________________George Bernard Shaw, Preface to Androcles and the Lion.

Tract Reviews: The Little Sneak: a kid hides his parents' life savings and a preacher coerces him to giving up the money's location. For his trouble he is killed.
Is Allah Like You: A muslim father reads the Quran and finds out how much of an A-hole Allah is, and converts to Christianity. Jack is completely oblivious that many of these criticisms he makes of Islam can be made of Christianity, and can even be given scriptural citations.

Issue 174

News: Why I haven't been updating.
As you may have noticed, it's been two weeks since I updated the blog. Well, there are two reasons, and first among them is that I've spent a lot of it studying for my finals, the last of which I had yesterday. However, another thing has been distracting me for the past several weeks: a webcomic called Sonichu, and I'm sorry to say that, after discovering this webcomic, Billy the Heretic no longer deserves the title of the worst webcomic. After all, comprehension of that webcomic isn't dependent upon taking a journey into one autistic manchild's personal hell. If you want to know what the comic is like, there are audiobooks on youtube that help propel the crap into "So Bad it's Good" level, quite possibly making it seem like his work is similar to Daniel Johnston, except without the naive charm. From this, you'd probably notice that it's an astonishingly bad webcomic from its second-grade-art-project level art (the author is almost thirty), and its story. But combining Sonic the Hedgehog and Pikachu in the same way as old Reese's commercials do with Peanut Butter and Chocolate is just the beginning. Slowly, the plot becomes more depressing when it begins to focus on the life of the author himself, who is presented as Sonichu's actual father... somehow. In fact, according to some outside information, some of the villains correspond to a Community College dean who stopped him from stalking women, Walmart cops that did a similar thing, and (I'm not kidding here) his negative feelings about his High School graduation, which didn't recognize his art skills. I know that reading about life from the perspective of somebody with Autism can be interesting, like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, but our "Hero" is no Christopher Boone. From what I've heard, he's extremely arrogant and unpleasant (surprisingly enough, especially towards others on the Autistic spectrum and the few people who appear to genuinely be fans of his), refuses to get help for his problems, is selfish, extremely bigoted, and the real Chris isn't much different. For that matter, there is a wiki that contains an alarmingly exhaustive amount of information on his life, as gathered by the people who troll him, including a horrifying amount of information about what passes for his sex life. And for some reason, it appears that he has given up on actually working for the Sonichu comic in favor of just becoming the most genuinely horrifying internet phoenomenon.

Film Idea of the Day: After discovering that there is no rule that states that a man can't be part of a nominally all-female beauty contest, he manages to do whatever he can to win, but, in the end, he doesn't. Yes, it is a parody of all those sports movies where sports teams include an unusual player (like a 12-year old boy ot a dog) because there's no rule against it.

Film Review of the Day: Zardoz. Well, the movie begins as a giant stone head falls to earth, proclaims the Penis to be evil, and spits out truckloads of weaponry, and it makes much less sense from there. Well, from what I could gather, a lot of it was about Sean Connery killing the pilot of said stone head (a man with boxer shorts on his head and facial hair obviously drawn on with magic marker). It makes no damn sense, which is why I liked it so much.

Quote of the Day: "On the one hand you've got an absolutely vile person who's a racist, a homophobe and a borderline sociopath among other evils, but let's face it, his opponents aren't really much better than a gaggle of schoolyard bullies. Whoever wins, human decency loses. "
__________TVTropes on the conflict between the author of Sonichu and his trolls.

Link of the Day: I won't give a link to the actual wiki, but I will put a link that gives a little more insight into how far gone this guy is.