Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I'm really, really, really super curious about this project from Bill Maher and Larry Charles. Gotta admire the balls on Maher for putting himself in the crosshairs like this. Politics is touchy, Religion is explosive. I've always enjoyed his thoughts (even the ones I don't agree with) on POLITICALLY INCORRECT and REAL TIME WITH BILL MAHER, so count me interested in this.

Thanks for all the great coverage, Anton!

Just some disjointed thoughts on the Mavericks presentation of Larry Charles and Bill Maher's Religulous from earlier in the week, and my brief chat with them afterwards. All told they showed about 15-20 minutes of footage, although not all of it will necessarily appear in the final cut.

I think, when the film is released and the shitstorm from religious groups begins brewing, it'll be important to keep in mind just how brave it was for them to make the movie. Unlike with Borat, there's no comedic 'character' for them to hide behind and say "Ha ha, it's only a joke." It's just Bill Maher being Bill Maher, caustic and skeptical and not giving a damn who gets offended by his questions. Hef may have to build a bunker under the grotto for him...

Underneath the humor, Maher and Charles are quite serious in their attempts to try and figure out why so many people need the crutch of religion, in any form. This isn't even atheist propaganda. As Maher himself said at the Q&A, he doesn't understand why he gets accused of arrogance when he's the one admitting he doesn't know the answers to the big questions. He's arrogant for saying "I don't know what happens after we die", but people who say "I do know what happens after we die" are considered humble...

One thing Charles and Maher realized in making the film was how, at their core, the belief systems of all religions are pretty much equally crazy. The adherents of 'kooky' younger religions like Raelianism or Scientology don't really believe in anything 'kookier' than a giant space daddy who created the entire universe in six days...

This is not going to be Borat part two. The humor in Borat primarily stemmed from his outsider status. Cohen's character was ye olde funhouse mirror being held up to America. Here, Maher is being more directly confrontational. The point doesn't seem to be seeing how far you can subvert the subject's beliefs before they catch on to what you're doing; the point is to expose the flaws in their beliefs right out in the open and see how they react. So while structurally it's very similar (small crew traveling around talking to people) the buttons being pushed are very different. Also, no nude wrestling from Bill Maher. At least not in the footage we saw...

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Dainipponjin (2007, directed by Hitoshi Matsumoto)

The easy tag line for this one: Ultraman Bites Dog. And I'm not sure it deserves much more of a review.

The film, from Japanese TV comedian Matsumoto, is a mockumentary. An interviewer follows around sad-sack Daisato as he goes about his daily life, which includes occasional calls from the Department of Defense for him to transform into Dainipponjin, giant defender of Japan from various extremely bizarre giant monsters. Modern Japan seems to have no use for Dainipponjin, though. The TV ratings for his battles are in the toilet, he can't get sponsors, and his house gets vandalized by environmental activists. He continues fighting Squeezy Baddie (a monster with an elastic band for arms and a bad comb-over) and Mean-Look Baddie (a monster with one eye on an extendable stalk, located at its crotch) and accidentally dropping Little Boy Baddie, which is a bit of a PR nightmare.

Like Takeshi Kitano's Glory to the Filmmaker!, the film is wildly uneven. The funny bits (especially the giant battles, although they are done with deliberately cheap-looking CGI instead of Man In Suit style) are very funny, but the mockumentary gag wears thin after a while. And the ending, while very silly, breaks your brain. Although to be fair, the ending does set up the scene that plays during the credits, which is arguably the funniest thing in the entire movie.

Dainipponjin is the best kaiju spoof I've personally seen, but it's also the only kaiju spoof I've seen (unless you count Emmerich's Godzilla). I don't think it's going to be a particularly high bar to clear if someone else wants to take a shot at it.