Two days ago I wrote that Bill Maher and Larry Charles‘ Religulous (Lionsgate, 10.3) “hasn’t [been] shot with an especially vivid sense of style or panache of any kind,” and that Charles has “made it look and sound more or less like Morgan Spurlock‘s Where In The Hell is Osama Bin Laden?” That wasn’t entirely fair. The final 10 minutes of this vital and absorbing documentary — a serious summing-up that reiterates how religious fairy-tale beliefs are keeping humanity from progressing — have been edited like gangbusters.
Here, incidentally, is a Yahoo video piece about the film that includes a good quip from Maher. America is so under the grip of yahoo religion that the presidential race is being degraded and diverted into absurd places. Sarah Palin being one manifestation of this. “Faith and family and faith” and so on. But then, as Maher says, “Americans are not great at connecting the dots.”
This 9.9 Reuters piece by Cameron French, posted yesterday afternoon, explains the Maher press conference in more detail.