Barack Obama gave a speech to the American Medical Association yesterday in an attempt to get the organization’s members on board with his plans for healthcare reform. The president’s appearance alone may have been good for his cause, given that it was the first such address to the AMA in 26 years, but many doctors are apparently still skeptical of the government’s ideas and how they’ll actually work.
Meanwhile, the issue of healthcare reform continues to be a difficult topic in Congress, and the road to legislation is sure to be long and filled with much debate. So, to help Washington in the process, or at least to keep the politicians sane with a little entertainment, we’ve come up with a little healthcare movie marathon.
The ten films selected are admittedly more left-leaning in their potential influence, but that’s not necessarily a political move on our part. We simply chose titles we like, and maybe it just so happens that we like movies that show charity as good, greed as evil and healthcare as a right that all humans should be afforded.
Due to the criticism and controversy of an alleged date-rape scene in Observe and Report, we bring you yet another list of sex scenes, this one focused on cinematic moments that stirred protest, censorship, bans and boycotts. Whether groundbreaking for their time or still questionable today, these scenes could probably have been included in our past highlights of films sold on a sex scene and films remembered primarily for a sex scene. But these are not leftovers. Many of them have merits and memorability outside of their “upsetting” depictions of a sexual act, though many of their objectors wouldn’t know since they never actually saw the films themselves.
One disclaimer must be made, because we’re sure commenters will jump in otherwise asking why A Clockwork Orange and other films with controversial rape scenes have not been included. Besides the fact that many readers will argue that such scenes are not rightly labeled “sex scenes,” there’s also the matter that too many films feature gratuitous rape scenes, and most of the time these are met with criticism. Of course, there are also a number of controversial consensual sex scenes that we’ve had to leave out, so feel free to name any excluded titles after reading the list. …Read more
This review originally appeared during the Toronto Film Festival. We’re re-running it because Religulous opens in theaters today.
“I’m on the street corner peddling doubt.” That’s how Bill Maher categorizes his personal attitude towards and mission against religion in Religulous, and that’s sort of how I feel about Maher’s professional schtick: I am aggressively, even evangelically, skeptical. I’ll stick around and watch his HBO show when I catch it whilst flipping channels, mostly because impressed by his ability to make the quick change from sub-Leno, pun-dependent one-liners to actually asking hard-hitting, legitimately provocative questions of his panelists. On Real Time, Maher uses (mostly bad) jokes to soften up both his guests and his audience for the serious discourse that inevitably follows, and even though much of Maher’s humor is unbelievably hokey and old-fashioned, there’s something admirable about the marriage he’s arranged between his desire to entertain and his compulsion to interrogate and lay blame.
Hopeful that his feature-length collaboration with Larry Charles would offer a similar balance writ large, I went in to Religulous with an open mind –– which is more than can be said of Maher. The comedian-turned-political pundit/committed agnostic, and star and producer of this non-fiction film, explains early in the picture that he thinks organized religion of any kind is “detrimental to the progress of humanity.” Writing off the contents of the bible and all historical narratives of faith as “fairy tales,” he says he’s on a journey in search of an explanation as to how otherwise rational adults can buy into this kiddie stuff. “It’s too easy,” he complains.
Unfortunately, this last line turns out to be auto-critique: as Maher and Charles hop from backwoods America to international holy hot spots and back again. Maher continually flips the script, here using serious questioning not as an end, but a means to immature, unenlightening mockery. It quickly becomes apparent that Maher’s journey is not about finding out what makes religious people tick, but about using the tics of mostly fringe religious people to prop up the thesis Maher came in with. Which is––in a nutshell, but totally without irony––that everyday religious practice will soon result in global apocalypse.
With Steve Carell hitting theaters today as a modern-day Noah to Morgan Freeman’s God in Universal’s biblical gamble Evan Almighty, I thought it would fun to look back on a time when Mr. Carell made a living by playing devil’s advocate … almost literally. In this clip of Carell and Stephen Colbert’s recurring Daily Show segment Even Stephvens, the two breakout stars debat Islam vs. Christianity. Colbert, who is a practicing Catholic in his personal life, argues for the Christian God. Carell’s response? “Stephen, what part of ‘there is no god but Allah and Muhammed is his prophet’ don’t you understand?”
With all of the effort to sell Evan to faith-based groups, you’ve got to wonder why this little artifact hasn’t sparked a totally overblown backlash.
We’ve had a bit of trouble getting this episode to go through the iTunes feed, so we hope this re-post will fix the problem. The original post, with episode description and embedded player, is here.
filmcouch-114
