Idiocracy

[Tathagata]

So I got a whole heap of movies and have been slowly going through them all.

Spotted this one called Idiocracy and checked it on IMDB to see if it was worth watching sooner or should wait till later and figured its worth having a look at.

 

I put it on and at first thought "omg this is going to be pretty bad"...but by the end of it (well ignore the last 5 mins or so) I was in tears.

 

Well worth a lookin.

[SoliSticS]

The funniest thing I've seen in ages was Religulous with Bill Maher debunking religion. Check it out if it's your kinda thing

[Nooby]

Idiocracy was the best flick of '07 no contest.

 

Religulous was just a compilation of cheap shots and deliberate manipulation of the subject matter to achieve the presenters predetermined outcome. If you like the Richard Dawkins/ Bill Hitchens style of religion-bashing them you might get kick out of it. If you're expecting anything deep and worthwhile or at least intellectually honest then forget it.

 

And some reviews from the web:

 

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.d.../810020306/1023

 

"I'm going to try to review Bill Maher's "Religulous" without getting into religion. Is that OK with everybody? Good. I don't want to fan the flames of a holy war. The movie is about organized religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Mormonism, TV evangelism and even Scientology, with detours into pagan cults and ancient Egypt. Bill Maher, host, writer and debater, believes they are all crazy. He fears they could lead us prayerfully into mutual nuclear doom. He doesn't get around to Hinduism or Buddhism, but he probably doesn't approve of them, either.

 

This review is going to depend on one of my own deeply held beliefs: It's not what the movie is about, it's how it's about it. This movie is about Bill Maher's opinion of religion. He's very smart, quick and funny, and I found the movie entertaining, although sometimes he's a little mean to his targets. He visits holy places in Italy, Israel, Great Britain, Florida, Missouri and Utah, and talks with adherents of the religions he finds there, and others.

 

Or maybe "talks with" is not quite the right phrase. It's more that he lines them up and shoots them down. He interrupts, talks over, slaps on subtitles, edits in movie and TV clips, and doesn't play fair. Reader, I took a guilty pleasure in his misbehavior. The people he interviews are astonishingly forbearing, even most of the truckers in a chapel at a truck stop. I expected somebody to take a swing at Maher, but nobody did, although one trucker walked out on him. Elsewhere in the film, Maher walks out on a rabbi who approvingly attended a Holocaust denial conference in Iran. I have done my job and described the movie. I report faithfully that I laughed frequently. You may very well hate it, but at least you've been informed. Perhaps you could enjoy the material about other religions, and tune out when yours is being discussed. That's only human nature."

 

http://blog.spout.com/2008/09/06/religulous-toronto-review/

 

"Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.

 

Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.

 

It would be easier to take Maher’s stated project on its face if he, Charles and their editors didn’t insist on undermining the sincerity of the mission at regular intervals with rapid-fire cutaways, usually to either a bit of “ironic” found footage, or to Maher himself, ranting from the back of a moving SUV. Most of the interviews in Religulous, all conducted by Maher, start out almost startlingly strong, with the star’s uncanny knack for cutting directly to the heart of the matter on full display. But whether because his inquisitiveness is in short supply, or because he was never really in the room to learn from his subjects to begin with, Maher almost without fail finds ways to subject his subjects to ridicule. It’s one thing when he and a person of faith get into a debate; it’s frustrating that Maher refuses to give anyone the benefit of the doubt, but at least there’s an honesty to an unmitigated conversation between people who legitimately disagree. The real cruelty comes when Maher is polite (or, at least, not aggressively derisive) in person, but then uses cutaways and/or subtitles to make it clear that we’re supposed to share Maher’s conviction that Religious Person X is a drooling idiot. Maybe this is just part of the rules of the post-reality TV game, but such mean-spirited recontextualization, at least in this case, doesn’t feel like the right path towards a greater filmed truth. It doesn’t even produce footage controversial or incendiary enough to justify the methods by which it was obtained.

In Charles’ Borat, oblivious yokels were set up to believe that they were talking to a journalist, and in Religulous, interviewees are made to look like just as much of a stooge. Let’s say Borat’s biggest crime was offering a society lady a bag of his feces; it’s unspeakably offensive, and yet so gleefully absurd that you can’t really file it as cruelty. Like Borat, Maher approaches each subject as if in a sincere attempt to gather information, and then –– both in the room with his verbal mockery and attacks, and on a super-diegetic level with the cutaways and after-the-fact on-screen titles illuminating what Maher’s thinking in the moment –– turns the situation into an opportunity to gather comedy at the unwitting subject’s expense. While Sacha Baron Cohen’s fake reporter was armed with a faux naivete that essentially let him off the hook morally, even when he was been ejected from a building, Maher telegraphs an extremely hostile self-rightousness about what he’s doing. Either way, it’s still a film in which we’re supposed to cheer for the guy handing out sacks of shit."

 

 

http://www.christianitytoday.com/movies/re...religulous.html

 

" Let's face it: most documentaries these days don't bother to document anything in an objective, journalistic sense. We can thank Michael Moore for re-conceiving the documentary film as something akin to a sensationalistic, cinematic op-ed piece. If you have something you hate, or something you want to humiliate in as public a way as possible, make a documentary! And this is precisely what Bill Maher does in his new anti-religion film, Religulous.

 

Maher, who grew up Catholic (with a Jewish mother), loathes religion. This film doesn't make it clear why he hates it so, aside from some comments about how Catholicism "wasn't relevant" to his life as a child. But hate it he does. Religulous is Maher's attempt to sell the idea that religions are the most dangerous threat facing mankind, that "religion must die for mankind to live."

 

 

Maher spends the film traveling all over the world, along with Borat director Larry Charles and a small camera crew proficient in the art of "sabotage interview." The first half of the film is mostly focused on evangelical Christians, how they believe in things like a 5,000-year-old earth, etc. Maher takes a trip to the Creation Museum in Hebron, Kentucky, where he interviews creationism guru Ken Ham against the backdrop of animatronic dinosaurs with saddles (for humans to ride on). And he also interviews young-earth evangelical Mark Pryor, a democratic senator from Arkansas who creates some of the funniest moments of the film. To be fair, Maher also interviews Christian evolutionist Francis Collins, but he too comes out looking a bit buffoonish.

 

Ever the equal-opportunity atheist, Maher spends the second half of the film undermining religions and cults of every shape and size. He goes to Utah and skewers Mormonism, interviews Puerto Rican cult leader Jose Luis De Jesus Miranda (who claims to be the Antichrist), and even gets high with a leader of a religion based around marijuana. He goes to the Vatican and interviews some crazy Catholic priest, and Jerusalem to deconstruct Judaism and Islam. Maher is particularly hard on Islam, offering somewhat surprising pronouncements about the inherent violence and barbarism of that most touchy of all world religions. At moments like these, Maher might actually find allies in conservative Christian circles.

 

All along the journey, Maher and Charles jazz up the images with achingly sardonic voiceovers and music, and some very clever quick-cut editing (inserting 2 seconds of Charlton Heston-as-Moses at opportune moments, for example). It's stylishly presented, to be sure, but for all its panache, Religulous is ultimately a very predictable movie. It borrows from the usual suspects (Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock) in formatting the agitprop docu-comedy template for this particular crusade, and we can almost see the punchlines coming as a result.

 

What do you expect to happen when Maher stops at a truck-stop chapel in North Carolina to quiz long-haul truckers about biblical inconsistencies? What else but exploitative ridiculousness can result when Bill "religion is too easy" Maher spends a day in Florida's Holy Land Experience—where the Passion of the Christ is reenacted with cheap props while a Sandi Patty wannabe sings "Via Dolorosa"?"

 

And one from a fanboi, just to be fair.

 

http://goldderby.latimes.com/awards_goldde...ulous-jesu.html

 

""Religion is the easiest thing to sell because it's an invisible product," "Religuous" star Bill Maher tells Gold Derby in this video chat. "Which, by the way, you can't test it out until after you die. So no one's there to complain after you drive this thing off the lot and it breaks down — because you're dead. So what salesman doesn't want a piece of that territory?"

 

Maher and director Larry Charles take on quite a few of those dubious salesmen of religious beliefs in their sacrilegious documentary now in theaters. Because it's made by such notable showbiz folks, I ask Bill Maher, "Doesn't this documentary epitomize godless Hollywood in a way?"

 

"I hope!" he roars. "If I have anything to do with it it will."

 

Bill_maher_religulous_jesus_christ

 

"How many people at award shows do you see thanking God?" pipes in Larry Charles. "Hollywood is also using God for its own purposes as well."

 

"Religious people look at me as you might look upon a retarded child," Bill Maher adds, quoting them, "'He's unenlightened. He needs to be saved. He needs to be cured.' I respect all human beings and I would like them to see my version of enlightenment. And mostly I want them to laugh."

 

Reviews have been quite good from top media. Variety hails "Religulous" as "brilliant, incendiary," while Entertainment Weekly adds, "It's a film that's destined to make a lot of people mad, but Maher, for all his showy atheistic 'doubt,' isn't just trying to crucify religion — he truly wants to know what makes it tick. He leaves no stone tablet unturned." Other raves come from the New York Times, USA Today, Hollywood Reporter and from Roger Ebert at the Chicago Sun-Times. Among the pans is the Washington Post.

 

If you'd like to pursue the questions raised by "Religulous" further, I recommend reading this interesting article at Atheists.org, which builds the case for the assertion that there's no credible evidence that Jesus Christ existed. Uncontested is the fact that no one alive during the time Jesus is said to have lived wrote about him, which is strange considering that there are plenty of historic accounts of other messiah figures of the era. The first two mentions of him don't come till more than a half century after the date given for Jesus' execution, and the authenticity of those texts by Josephus in AD 93 and Tacitus in 120 are questioned by many secular scholars."

 

 

Peace.

[ceren]

idiocracy is a really funny film, besides th hyperbole that goes along the movie.

The film can be studied in the sense that our society is greatly consumed by entertainment and people have stopped thinking and just reacting to this multimedia extravaganza we call Western society. Its great to watch a film with a lil' philosophy behind it.

[GIY]

Idiocracy best film extemely clever and saddly true although maybe not that extent

[SoliSticS]

Religulous was just a compilation of cheap shots and deliberate manipulation of the subject matter to achieve the presenters predetermined outcome. If you like the Richard Dawkins/ Bill Hitchens style of religion-bashing them you might get kick out of it. If you're expecting anything deep and worthwhile or at least intellectually honest then forget it.

 

Sure, it's not everyone's cup of tea and I'm assuming (perhaps incorrectly) that you have faith of some kind. I personally do not and maybe it's for this reason I found it more entertaining than most. That said, it scores a very respectable 7.8/10 on IMDB with over 13,000 votes and that says a lot!

 

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815241/

 

Each to their own as they say

[GIY]

RE - religulous

I am anti the concept of religion. Yet i found the film to be in very poor taste. In short i completely agree with the reviews posted above.

 

i most disliked how he used munipulative film editing methods to enhance his point, "micheal moore" style creating a sensationalised comedy doco. However, if his point is as obvious as he claims that all religion is crazy than why did he require the use of such micheal moore, today tonight esc methods to enhance his point? ultimately this just detracts from the point corroding his message. PLUS he was just a plain cunt to some of the religious folk

Edited April 25, 2009 by GIY

[kulak]

That movie was too close to home. It's made me question whether or not i truely want to have kids now. I don't want the world to be run by retards, but if I don't do my part I guess I can't complain.

[Nooby]

That movie was too close to home. It's made me question whether or not i truely want to have kids now. I don't want the world to be run by retards, but if I don't do my part I guess I can't complain.

 

 

Wow, epic bump.

 

Yeah the only thing they got wrong with idiocracy was the date, it's not 500 years in the future..it's right now. Still a classic flick that we put on every now and then.