For Christ's Sake:
Forgive me lord, for I am about to sin all over this mother, touted on the DVD cover with the tag line, "finally, a funny church sex scandal". It's worth noting that this is not a comedy about Catholic Priests raping altar boys, although I'm sure that in the right hands that might be a disturbingly funny shocker. In the hands of screenwriter Jeff Lewis, director Jackson Douglas, and seven producers, this "quirky indie comedy" with a merely tolerable lead actor has been smoothed-out into bland tedium.

Oh, Jesus, it's not that I don't like comedies about your flock, I just wish those members weren't so dull, and believe me, it looks like it would be pretty hard to make a bland, boring comedy about a small town priest, Robert, (Galaxy Quest's Jed Rees) tricked into providing a bridge loan between his secretly porn-producing brother and the mob (one of se...Read the entire review

In 10 Words or Less
Fun cast powers a quirky indie comedy

Reviewer's Bias*
Loves: Quirky comedies
Likes: Jed Rees, Sara Rue, silly cameos
Dislikes: the decline of the church in modern America
Hates: the concept of the celibate priest

The Movie
As a Lutheran, I've always viewed the priesthood in the Catholic church (along with other denominations) with a questioning eye, because I could never understand why they had to remain unmarried and celibate, when the pastors in my religion seemed to be doing a fine job tending their flock while maintaining their families. If anything, they could offer a more knowledgeable view of the human experience because they had a wider realm of experience ...Read the entire review

There's nothing wrong with quirk. Life is full of quirks, and the movies reflect life. Still, before the year 2000, quirk wasn't much of a presence in mainstream cinema, unless you count being extra down-home Southern as a quirk. Then, all of a sudden, as if all the misfits and oddballs of the world were summoned at once, a tidal wave of quirk broke over Hollywood, bringing films like Little Miss Sunshine and Juno to surprising peaks of box office success. Since then, however, quirk has been pissing in Hollywood's gene pool, turning every other movie into a freak flag-waving display of detached irony. Now when I hear about films that include whimsical flights of outside fantasy, I get a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. I guess that means it's a good thing that nobody tried to describe Anywhere USA to me before I watched it.

Split into three segments (Penance, Loss, and Ignor...Read the entire review

H.P. Lovecraft, one of the creators of horror literature as we know it, was a tall, skinny, long-faced racist/xenophobic recluse - a man who was demonstrably afraid of the world, and transmogrified that fear into stories of the uncanny that define "weird fiction." He lived in Providence, RI, for most of his life, often in long periods of solitude and seclusion. His stories pit protagonists of learning and science - often Providence-area natives - against unspeakably horrific creatures of godlike power and omnipotence. These creatures - who appear in a loosely connected group of stories known as "The Cthulhu Mythos" - observe humanity with utter dispassion, and Lovecraft's characters are powerless before them. In these stories, Lovecraft envisions a world where the ultimate terror goes hand-in-hand with the ultimate knowledge - the human confrontation with previously unknown powers that totally c...Read the entire review