pogoism

I don’t normally need a lot of convincing that religion is a load of baloney, but this “documentary” annoyed me.

I use speech marks, as Bill Maher did a *really* bad job. For one, he’s not that funny. He might have been in the 80s, possibly the 90s, but he’s not anymore. Rather than it being a serious, well thought-out piece about religion, it became more of an attack on anyone who dares hold any belief about anything. He interviews a whole list of people, but almost every time, before he showed the interviews, he set them up as comedy characters. For instance, he would show footage of them pre-interview saying “testing testing” into their microphones and so on.

He chose some poor subjects for interview, clearly just for comedy purposes. I don’t want to sound like a boring git, but if you’re going to try and do a documentary about a contentious subject like religion, you should at least try to show some balance and give your participants a fair chance to express their views. In one scene with Mohamed Junas Gaffar, of the Taiban Mosque in Amsterdam, he showed him receiving a text message. On the screen appeared some mock captions, which show the imam plotting to kill Bill after the interview. A pretty cheap shot, and a total stereotype.

In another, he interviewed Rev. Ferre van Beveren, of the First Universal Church of Cantheism – a religion based on the inherent goodness of the cannabis plant. When Maher got bored of the conversation, he pretended that the Reverend’s hair was on fire. Hilarious.

He showed the extremes of religion (such as anti-Zionists, people claiming to be Jesus Christ, and ex-gay ministers), and never showed us the more moderate sides, constantly bombarding us with images of war. He clearly hadn’t done his research well either, because at one point he showed images from the Troubles in Northern Ireland, which, if he’d looked into it a little more, isn’t to do with religion.

Finally, and probably the biggest thing that bugged me about this movie, is that he doesn’t have the balls to actually confront the people he interviews directly. He attacks religion through smarmy captions or during his monologues. The one saving grace of this film is his genius reaction when, after interviewing the Democratic Senator from Arkansas Mark Pryor about his creationist beliefs, he says “you don’t have to pass an IQ test to be in the Senate, though”. Comedy gold.