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There was a time when religion commissioned great and wondrous art. Awe-inspiring cathedrals were built by the most grand and innovative architects. Beautiful music for masses were composed by the greatest musical minds in history. Religious paintings were created with skills and passion that have yet to be matched, even hundreds of years later. Art was the bright silver lining to the otherwise horrifying and cataclysmic storm cloud of religion. However, that was long ago and that silver lining has since been swallowed up by the black abyss. All that is left is a shit-storm of horribly lame, morally reprehensible, and just plain awful media that is christian pop culture.
The religious will rip off and bastardize anything in order to push their message, with no regard for or understanding of the source material. Whether it be a nauseatingly horrendous christian rock band or an offensively clueless rally video, only one thing is clear. There is no limit to how objectively bad something is, as long as a church can get behind the message.
For your consideration I present two new low points. Be warned. These are so very terrible that I was convinced they were fake at first. Please do not eat for 30 minutes before or after watching these. Your stomach may not be able to handle it.
First we have a trailer for an upcoming Romantic Comedy. The trailer shows neither comedy nor romance, instead it focuses on a cameo by Mike Huckabee talking about legislating anti-abortion laws. The Friendly Atheist has written up a few more details if you’re interested.
Just in case you still have your lunch down, I’ve saved the worst for last. Imagine the most awkward, desperate to be considered ‘cool’ by the kiddies, palm-through-the-face-into-the-back-of-your-skull bad PSA you’ve ever seen. Increase the uncomfortable embarrassment by a couple orders of magnitude. Multiply it by some unbelievable cultural insensitivity, then again by a massive helping of asinine theistic delusion. It should give you something wrong on so many levels, that it may have gone fractally wrong. Something like this:
I think the worst part is I want to have hope. I’d like to think that, given the right circumstances, people could see their religion for the hoax that it is. That their blinders could be removed and the atrocities in the name of religion would stop. But if they are so far gone as to think putrid ass gravy like this can pass as entertainment, I don’t think that hope has a chance.
“Rape/revenge is replete in tension and bloody cathartic release; there is terrifying violation, and then there is revenge you can feel good about. The films use women’s trauma to justify stereotypically male pleasures of hyperbolic violence. So Thelma and Louise get to pick up guns and shoot people like they’re in a Western, while Furiosa drag races across the desert and then gets to murder and take the place of the evil patriarch. Rape/revenge fits feminism into male genre narratives that Hollywood can embrace.
…rape/revenge films are designed, often quite consciously, to let everyone in the audience experiment with, and experience, different gender roles, whether as trauma, empowerment, or both. That instability leads to a wide range of responses—and perhaps explains why rape/revenge is responsible for both some of the most critically lauded and most viscerally derided films of the last 40 years. For better and worse, the rape/revenge trope reveals how violence squats upon our understanding of gender—and how rarely, and timidly, that is confronted in popular culture.”
-Excerpts from the article by Noah Berlatsky found on The Establishment.
Many thanks to Elizabeth Bear for today’s comment on our culture.
“My Least Favorite Trope (and this post will include spoilers for The Lego Movie, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Matrix, Western Civilization, and—cod help me—Bulletproof Monk*.) is the thing where there’s an awesome, smart, wonderful, powerful female character who by all rights ought to be the Chosen One and the hero of the movie, who is tasked with taking care of some generally ineffectual male character who is, for reasons of wish fulfillment, actually the person the film focuses on. She mentors him, she teaches him, and she inevitably becomes his girlfriend… and he gets the job she wanted: he gets to be the Chosen One even though she’s obviously far more qualified. And all he has to do to get it and deserve it is Man Up and Take Responsibility.
And that’s it. Every god-damned time. The mere fact of naming the films above and naming the trope gives away the entire plot and character arc of every single movie.
I thought for a minute that Guardians of the Galaxy was going to pull off a subversion. They were so close. All they had to do was have somebody make the point that We Survived The Magic Radiation Because We All Worked Together, but no, it’s the pure fucking light of Chris Pratt’s Y chromosome that rescues the day again.”
Hmmm… a mainstream movie that has an atheist hero? What next? A politician that does not have to believe in fairy tales to be elected?
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…