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It's part of our national schizophrenia as Americans. Every year we bemoan the exploitation of Christmas, and every year we spend more and more money that we really don't have to buy crap to give to each other "in the spirit of the season." There's a great movie to be made about the overcommercialization of Christmas;
The documentary follows Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping as they embark on a cross-country tour of righteous disruption, staging protests at malls and shopping centers via megaphone preaching and the singing of Shopocalypse hymns such as "Starbucks and Disney." Rev. Billy, a wacky cross between Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Carrey, is actually performance artist Bill Tallen, who invented the character in an attempt to make us confront the bloated excess of spending that occurs every holiday season.
The gold standard of Christmas satire is still Stan Freberg's "Green Chri$tma$." It's dead on target, scathing, inventive and it doesn't let the audience off the hook. WWJB? takes the easy way out by having various talking heads soft-pedal messages of family and togetherness; and it minimizes our discomfort during the protest sequences by chopping each one into little, easily-digestible bits and stripping away context. The Christmas Day march down Disneyland's Main Street at the end ought to be a climax. But instead of letting the discomfort build, highlighting nervous Magic Kingdom guests, the movie mostly shows us Rev. Billy and his entourage quickly being whisked away.
Nevertheless it's an earnest piece of work that does have several hilarious moments, including an attempted exorcism at Wal-Mart's headquarters in Arkansas and a spirited parade through the Mall of America. And scenes of bratty kids ripping into their loot on Christmas morning after their parents have previously discussed maxxing out their credit cards can't help but make you cringe. According to a statistic in the film, 75% of us view the holidays with dread. But the dark humor of WWJB? (and some spiked egg nog) can help us ho, ho, ho a little more.
What Would Jesus Buy? opens this weekend; Rev. Billy will be present at tomorrow's 7:00 and 10:15 screenings at the Landmark Century.
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Wow. That's amazingly, deeply, insightful. I bet they are the first people to ever think that.
It's hard to parody American life because it's already a parody.
Have you ever had anything to say about anything that wasn't whining ever? I mean even your user name's a complaint about the site. Why do you even read it?
As for Reverend Billy I heard him on Tavis Smiley the other night, he's pretty funny. He's got the crazed snake oil salesman, preacher thing down.
i'd like it better if if he were a real, honest-to-god preacher...but then if he were, i probably wouldn't pay any attention to him. yup, i'm an american.
That was bitching, not whining.
What's wrong with deeply conventional recycled insight of 30-something hipsters, still rebelling against a caricature of the world around them?
I don't know...maybe people should be able to do better than burning straw men so they can bask in the warmth of their own "deep" insights?
Maybe they should ditch the adolescence and come up with something original to say before opening their mouths?
Or did I interrupt the whole "we're so sophisticated, smarter than those rubes who live in Naperville" circle jerk? If so, my apologies. Continue only talking to people who agree with you it is easier than thinking.
@Ferdy: it's like what Tom Lehrer once said, "Satire died the day that Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize."
Hee hee, Rob.
I dunno, Americans shop. We've been trained to since the 19th century. Why is that something to devote your life to fighting?
I haven't bought shit this year but it's not cause I read adbusters and listen to reverend billy. I just have no desire to. *shrug*
Hee hee, Rob. So true!
You notice how Newspeak really exists now?
Or did I interrupt the whole "we're so sophisticated, smarter than those rubes who live in Naperville" circle jerk? If so, my apologies. Continue only talking to people who agree with you it is easier than thinking.
I see, you just come around to break up the groupthink and tell all of us sheeple how it really is! A socratic gadfly rather than just a simple troll. Rock on!
I will agree that the premise for this movie isn't going to knock anyone out with its originality. I'm not sure it needs to, though, WMIR. Perhaps its aspirations are merely to entertain and make money (hmmm, the irony...). So why don't you stop bothering us and get back to that doctoral dissertation in philosophy you've been working on for 15 years.