BuzzFlash Reviews

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You can watch the trailer for Maher's well-received "Religulous" by clicking here.

You can watch him talking to Harry Smith about "Religulous" by going here.

Joe Neymaier of the New York Daily News Writes: I'm only asking questions," says comic/professional provocateur Bill Maher in "Religulous." The host of HBO's "Real Time" says it to a group of truckers at a roadside trailer chapel in North Carolina, because what he's putting under the microscope is unexamined beliefs. And, as might be expected, someone feels like their faith is being crucified.

It's not. The truth is, what Maher attempts in his new comic documentary is an examination of how those topics once avoided in polite company - religion and politics - are now linked in a way that benefits neither, pollutes both and endangers us all. He also makes the point, often hilariously, that the very act of saying one has serious doubts about religion is, despite a mini-trend in atheist chic, America's last taboo.

To get to the heart of a favorite target on his TV show, and give Christianity, Judaism and Mormonism all a fair shake, Maher travels from New Jersey, where his Jewish mother recalls why his Catholic father stopped going to church, to the mosque at the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, to the home of former Mormons in Salt Lake City and a Holy Land theme park in Florida. He hits small churches, the Vatican, a "cannabis church" in Amsterdam and the Creation Museum in Kentucky.

Maher speaks to everyday folks as well as scientists, church leaders, a "neurotheology expert" and a Jew for Jesus. And despite being perfectly partnered with director Larry Charles (a veteran of "Seinfeld" and the director of "Borat"), he doesn't openly mock; statements spouted as fact are disputed, but Maher tries for a dialogue.

He doesn't get the answers he seeks - how can creationists ignore science? Is anyone bothered by the similarities in various savior stories? Isn't magical thinking an enemy of rational thought? Unsurprisingly, he's unsuccessful in making his interviewees doubt their long-held views. And while he finds hypocrisy, he's after bigger fish.

David Edelstein of New York Magazine writes: Bill Maher might well be a flaming asshole, but more often than not the flame burns brilliantly, and his documentary-demolition job Religulous has an unholy fervor that should start many bonfires. Maher’s thesis, articulated at the outset from the spot in the Israeli desert where the world (according to Revelation) is supposed to end, is blunt: “Religion is detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Maher’s is no big tent: Believers, he says, have been sold “an invisible product”—the uses of which are often selfish and murderous. He does not know if God exists, but neither do you.

Religulous is directed by Larry Charles, who made Borat, and this movie, too, is a mock odyssey, a series of encounters with the bamboozlers and the bamboozled. A militantly lapsed Catholic (his mother was Jewish), Maher engages with fervent truckers at a makeshift parking-lot chapel, confronts a once-gay minister who works to make gays see the error of their “choice,” and challenges Evangelists on their un-Christ-like flaunting of riches. He is openly aghast at Senator Mark Pryor’s assertion that there’s scientific disagreement over evolution. Using shock cuts to florid religious spectacles (and, in one case, footage of an Islamist suicide bomber), he questions the existence of Jesus and lumps Christianity with Mormonism and Scientology.

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