Sweet dolts and best friends Luke (Luke Barnett) and Tanner (Tanner Tomason) live in Los Angeles, where everything is bullshit, from Hollywood action heroes hawking sugary breakfast cereals and baristas waxing lyrical over artisan coffee to self-help entrepreneurs spouting motivational nonsense and the “weight-loss tea” pyramid scheme Luke is miserably failing to scramble up. Perhaps the most honest thing either of them has is Luke’s despair over his lack of success, and Tanner’s happy embrace of his humble life: he works as a bartender and is content merely to “make money to drink and hang out with [his] friends.” They’re like a 30something Bill and Ted, but with slightly more self-awareness, and quite a bit less luck greasing their way through life.
And then, in a fit of inspiration, Luke hits on what can be their own scam: They’ll make a “Christian” movie, because “the genre is a gold mine.” Luke and Tanner are huge movie fans, but neither one knows the first thing about filmmaking. No biggie. As the exec at a distributor of so-called faith-based movies snarks, these movies “don’t have to be bad. They just don’t have to be good.” (My experience with them as a critic is that I have yet to see one that is more a film than a sermon.) The guys are confident they can make a not-good movie for Jesus, and then sit back and watch the riches roll in. And they’re off…
I am here for the cynicism with which Faith Based launches itself; Margaret Cho (Bright) as that exec, for instance, is glorious with her contempt. But I was rather delightfully surprised to find that I am also here for the sincerity and the good cheer it ultimately ends with. The satire is gentle, and in a script — written by Barnett — full of zingers, even those are affable and often even underlain with kindness. The very funny movie-riffing insults Luke and Tanner regularly exchange are nothing so much as expressions of the deep devotion and long-term friendship the two men enjoy. And the critique of faith-based cinema attacks its commercial crassness and its dubious craft, but never the more personal impulses behind it. What starts off as, perhaps, a mild knocking of the earnestness of the members of the small church that Luke and Tanner hit up to fund their movie becomes a full-on embrace of their genuine, unforced niceness.
That’s not to say that religion is entirely off the cards for ridicule — “Christian rock” gets a bit of a skewering, too — but it’s punching up, not down. Through the relationships, old and new, that Luke and Tanner have with the members of the apparently nondenominational evangelical congregation, we see that this is most emphatically not a group of phony Christians who are racist, sexist, homophobic, or operating from any other place of hatred, as some who call themselves followers of Jesus clearly are. With the United States so fractured right now, and some of it along religious (or faux religious) lines, an oblique reminder that not all religion is toxic and not all those who follow a faith wield it as a weapon is very welcome indeed.
Really, Faith Based isn’t about Christian cinema at all… or at least not in any way that distinguishes it and its fans from any other genre and its fans. (The fact that the guys make a faith-based science-fiction flick — a terrible, terrible science-fiction flick — leads to a well-deserved kick at how plenty SF geeks don’t seem overly concerned with quality, either.) Even the swipes at the clichés of low-budget genre filmmaking are ones that Faith Based is willing to dole out itself, too: Luke is determined to get one of his childhood heroes, schlock-action star Butch Savage (David Koechner: CHiPs), to cameo in his and Tanner’s movie, because a B- or C-list star with retro appeal helps big up a little project… but Faith Based also has, right here, Jason “Seinfeld” Alexander (Wild Card), sending himself up but also lending the movie’s biggest name as Nicky Steele, the aforementioned self-help entrepreneur, smarming out ridiculous motivational aphorisms in snippets of his cheesy informercials. (Luke is a big fan of Steele, too.)
Nope, this charming comedy is about friendship, finding your own purpose in life, and — here’s me being cheesy — having enough faith in yourself to dare to try something audacious. That’s another fitting message for desperate times, and a tougher one to hear. But Faith Based makes it go down easy.
I think I have something for my viewing list this weekend! As an atheist, I’m not a big fan of religion or Christianity, and I have nothing but contempt for the many obvious charlatans and hypocrites among nationally-known “Christian leaders.” But I also can’t help noticing that virtually all of the practicing Christians I know in my actual life are genuinely nice, genuinely good, people who seem to get a lot out of their faith.
I can’t really say I’m pro-religion these days, but as I grow older, I’m maybe becoming anti-anti-religion, at least? And I find “let’s all get together and sneer at the stupid Christians!” behavior to be increasingly tiresome.
And especially these days, good people should try to find common ground wherever they can, even if that’s not everywhere.
I’m in the same Ark when it comes to politics and religion. Large chunks of people that are supposedly on my “team,” seem to motivated by a need to make fun of and put down others to make themselves feel better, rather than any wish to provide clarity and compassion.
Most of my Christian, conservative family members and friends are good, kind, generous, empathetic people, just trying to make their way through life as best they can along with the rest of us.
As long as a person appears able to perform the mental gymnastics required to ignore the horrible, inhumane, evil bits of their ideologies, and doesn’t try to force their religious beliefs into the government or onto me, I try to live and let live.
Most people have a vague notion of their own system of morality that’s more guided by social norms, personal interest, and capitalism than any official dogma anyway, so even if a person claims to be a member of a particular religion or nonreligious, it means nothing until you get to know them well.
I do enjoy a well executed brutally acidic satirical takedown (I finally watched some of SBC’s Who is America to mentally prepare for Borat 2), but it’s also cool to sometimes see a gentle comedy that acknowledges our common humanity and good intentions like this film. Also, a truly terrible, faith-based, scifi flick sounds like my jam and juice. I am off in search of some at this very moment – if anyone knows of any unintentionally hilarious ones, please let me know.
Well, after a little searching, here are some initial candidates (other than the obvious Left Behind and Dan Brown stuff and actual good religious scifi/fantasy like The Truman Show and Groundhog Day):
1) A Thief in the Night (1972) and A Distant Thunder (1978), pre-Left Behind scifi films about the Rapture.
2) The Omega Code (1999), a Jewish scifi hacker thriller about secret prophetic codes in the Torah.
3) Six: The Mark Unleashed (2004), three men decide whether or not to side with Christ before Armageddon.
4) The Moment After (1999), another pre-Left Behind Rapture flick
5) The Mark (2012) and The Mark: Redemption (2013), a scifi thriller about a secret biometric chip called The Mark of the Beast.
6) A Path in Time (2005), A Biblical time travel adventure (this one looks promising)
Honestly, I’m a bit disappointed. None of them look as potentially funny as the fake movie in Faith Based, but I’ll see if I can find A Path in Time, The Omega Code, and The Mark movies. The others look like they might be only boring bad instead of funny/interesting bad.
And I realize “laugh at bad religious movies” undermines my point about being compassionate instead of putting others down, but please understand how much I love watching really bad scifi movies – I watch them with great affection, genuine awe, and curiosity.
Some of them are so bad they transcend known human social interaction and land in some weird alternate dimension of communication that never existed. It’s exciting when you find a movie that terrible, pregnant with mysterious nonsense that you suspect has some profound meaning for someone, but who and why? Religion and bad sci-fiction have a lot in common, as Mr. Hubbard realized, and the idea of cinematically smushing them together sounds magically delicious.
I can vouch for the Omega Code being delightfully entertaining. MaryAnn has a great review of it, too.
https://www.flickfilosopher.com/2000/05/the-omega-code-review.html
Oooh, the review suggests hints of delightful cheesiness. It apparently was successful enough to get a sequel, Megiddo: The Omega Code 2. Maybe I’ll make it a double feature.
You talk as if only conservative Christian indulge in those kinds of mental gymnastics. My experience tells me otherwise.
Oh definitely, we all perform mental gymnastics in some way or another, at the very least to avoid seriously contemplating the likely permanent end of our existence. Religious people occasionally do some Gold medal winning floor routines though, chief of which being:
“There is an omnipotent, omnipresent being (or beings or force or energy) beyond the laws of physics and time as we know them who works in mysterious ways beyond the understanding of mere humans…. oh, and by the way here’s a list of the stuff It does and doesn’t want you to do that I am 100% sure is correct and accurate. Don’t worry, this book about talking snakes, impossibly huge boats, magical hair, breadception, and perpetually justified incest, murder, rape, abuse, and slavery will tell you all you need to know about this Being that no one can understand.”
Either they can understand it, or they can’t and are tossing another guess on the pile, and that thing at the beginning of the sentence is, by definition, completely beyond human understanding. The only thing meaningful we can say about it is, “wild idea dude, maybe, maybe not?”
Also, this isn’t directed at you specifically, but why do people who struggle to understand the humanity and life experiences of another person in their own country (sometimes their own house), feel the need to confidently tell me about the desires of omnipotent beings outside of space and time? It’s as if an amoeba tried to somberly tell another amoeba that the mating songs of prehistoric Whales contained instructions for effectively extending pseudopods and what time of the day was best for mitosis.
If people want to make guesses and contort their brains so it makes sense, I can’t stop them, but they can’t tell me it’s not a guess when the foundation of the entire concept is a being utterly beyond human comprehension. The religious people in my life are nice and kind, and I respect the fact that they’re living the best life they can, but it will never make sense to me, and when the aliens finally get here, it’s going to be super embarrassing.
When the aliens finally get here, I suspect that both of us will be embarrassed by something neither of us can see coming at this point. Maybe it will be religion but I doubt it.
After all, human tourists in the real world find plenty of things to complain about in foreign countries without getting into religion. (“It’s too hot! It’s too cold! The food tastes weird! The natives do strange things!” And that’s just from people who visit the U.S….)
Personally I’ve always had this bizarre vision of the first alien visit going immediately downhill the minute the aliens come across an old copy of E.T.. But that’s just me. .
Why, though? Honestly, an eternity — an eternity — sitting on a cloud playing a harp or whatever the fuck Christians think happens in their Heaven sound intolerable.