The Screengrab

Greetings, Screenbag fans. William Shatner here to take you where no man has gone before. That is, no man besides that Steve Don Vodiak who usually does the Highlight Reel on Fridays. I thought it was important to step in today because I’m deeply troubled by the 21 Stars We Hate (Parts One, Two, Three and Four). Not because I wasn’t included – it would take a sick mind, a truly disturbed psychosis to even think of such a thing – but because I don’t see such names as George Takei, Adrian Zmed and James Spader on the list. God love them all, but they are truly unspeakable screen presences, whose lines and close-ups I was forced to cut – for their own good!

And speaking of Takei, this Star Trek Showdown post is greatly offensive to me, excepting, of course, the parts of it that confirm the dreadful mental illness that Sulu fellow has labored under lo these many years. I prefer to focus on the positive, such as these reviews of Six Man, Texas, Fear(s) of the Dark and Synecdoche, New York, rather than dwell in the sick cesspool of negativity where posts about The Big Fix, Turkey Shoot, Pride and Glory and Meet the Browns drown in their own repulsive bile.

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Full disclosure: I was raised Unitarian, which is technically a distant branch of Protestantism, but which (as my Christian friends used to scoff) is pretty much “just” a philosophy that cherry-picks most of the “be nice to people” bits of the world’s belief systems while jettisoning all the dogma and certainty.

So I’m very much the choir to whom Bill Maher is preaching in his current documentary, Religulous, which posits fervent religious belief as a potentially dangerous mental disorder that’s caused untold suffering and could easily lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy of man-made Armageddon if the rational atheists and agnostics of the world aren’t willing to stand up and be counted.

Of course, one topic Maher doesn’t cover in his fish-in-a-barrel interviews with “reformed” homosexual Christians and deluded Muslim rappers is the hypocritical dogma of many atheists, whose strident and absolute faith (ah, there’s that word) in a godless universe is just as annoying and potentially harmful as the religion they rail against -- the Khmer Rouge, Maoists, Stalinists and Manson Girls managed plenty of atrocity without benefit of supernatural holy books, after all -- and Stephen Hawking can Vocoder me ‘til he’s blue in the face about the Big Bang, but I’m still gonna wonder what came before that and what it’s all for...and until science can absolutely prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that my soul is nothing but chemical illusions and existence is essentially meaningless, I’ll happily continue to ignore THAT grim fucking view of things, no matter how much the atheists shake their heads and chuckle at my naïveté.

But far more conspicuous in a movie predicated on skewering religion is Maher’s near total refusal to criticize one important world religion centered in the Holy Land that's had an effect on recent (and ancient) Middle Eastern history...no, not the Christians or the Muslims but, y'know...

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We take no blame for the fact that Beverly Hills Chihuahua debuted at the top of the U.S. box office with a whopping $29 million weekend take. It’s true that I am the proud owner of a Chihuahua-American, but he wanted nothing to do with what he perceived as a showcase for offensive stereotypes. Eagle Eye was second with $17.7 million, and Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist took in a finite $12 million for third place. Blindness didn’t attract many eyes and finished outside the top 10, but both Bill Maher’s Religulous and the conservative coalition’s An American Carol made the lower reaches of the list, with Maher’s documentary boasting the higher per-screen average.

George Romero can’t seem to stop making zombie movies.

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One of the problems with being an atheist is putting up with the kind of people who carry the flag for you.  Get annoyed at the likes of a Richard Dawkins, and there's a doofy polemicist like Sam Harris waiting in the wings.  And hey, Camille Paglia and Marilyn Manson, don't do us any favors, okay?  Back in the day, we had clever bastards like Gore Vidal to go on television and lay down careful traps for the likes of Jerry Falwell to step into; Gore would sit there, smiling his deadly little smile, while the defenders of various sky-gods would work themselves into a frenzy.  It's good philosophy as well as good show business to make your target to all the work, while you just sit back and collect the laughs.  

That's a lesson that could stand to be learned by Bill Maher, who, with Religulous, his new comic documentary about how religious people are a bunch of silly-heads, has done the unthinkable:  he has made blasphemy boring.  Maher, who, until he discovered the millions that could be made by playing to one side or the other in the never-ending culture wars, used to be little more than a hack comic with an unrequited love of bad puns and smirky asides.  Those characteristics remain with him to this day (witness the title of the film, and his interminable playing to the camera as if he were an agnostic David Brent), but they'd be forgivable if he had an ounce of -- well, faith in the fact that his position is strong enough to let religious nuts hoist them by their own petards.  Vidal (and Robert Ingersoll, and Clarence Darrow, and even David Cross) knew that religious people would say a lot of crazy bullshit if you just let them talk long enough; he knew better than to force the point. Maher has no such trust, and when the payoff doesn't seem to be coming fast enough for him, he kills the gag by adding subtitles explaining his real thoughts on the matter at hand, or by cutting to dopey stock footage which he then rolls into a tube and beats you over the head with it.

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Wow, those crazy religious folks sure are funny, aren’t they?

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We were looking forward to, in light of the Friday premiere of Teeth, bringing you a Take Five featuring nothing but movies featuring a vagina dentata.  Unfortunately, the search for five such films proved rather, well, unsettling.  So instead, you get this list, about taxicabs.  Why taxicabs?  Because this Friday also brings us the debut, in New York and L.A., of Taxi to the Dark Side, a new film from Alex Gibney, the prolific documentarian who also brought us Enron:  The Smartest Guys in the Room, No End in Sight, and Who Killed the Electric Car?.  His new effort focuses on the dismaying tale of an Afghani hack who was caught up — in error — in the U.S. anti-terrorist net, shedding yet another angle on the seemingly infinite human stories that can be found inside the confines of a taxi.  Taxicabs and Hollywood films came into their own at about the same time, and ever since then, some of the most memorable scenes in cinema have involved having someone drive someone else around and urban area for cash.  Taxi to the Dark Side, like most things involving the terror war, is likely to be a bummer, so here's some further taxicab confessions to get you from point A to point B.

TAXI DRIVER (1976)

Well, you knew we were going here, didn't you?  There's no more indelible vision of life behind the wheel of a cab than in Martin Scorsese's masterwork, one of the greatest screen treatments of alienation and unfocused rage ever captured.  From the scenes of Travis Bickle's yellow cab emerging from New York steam-clouds to the look on his face as a murderous passenger (played by Scorsese in full mile-a-minute mode) spells out the grim fate that awaits his cheating wife to the final, anticlimactically calm chit-chat he shares with his fellow hacks after he's somehow emerged a hero from a maniacal bloodbath, Taxi Driver perfectly captures the banality of brutality that lurks on the mean streets of New York and only emerges in the scary moments of privacy that we think we share with cabbies.  For an excellent companion piece to this essential American film, track down American Boy:  A Profile of Steven Prince, a documentary biography Scorsese filmed at the same time of the unstable, hilarious, deranged young man who plays the gun dealer in Taxi Driver.  

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