Bozell: Mighty Maher Strikes Out

Bill Maher's new alleged "docu-comedy" came in tenth at the weekend box office. Brent Bozell's culture column noted that the God-mocking HBO star can't seem to scare up a controversy (despite appearances on ABC, CBS, and NBC shows):

The film is called "Religulous" – a lame merger of "religious" and "ridiculous." One reason it’s not urgently mentioned is that while everyone knew "The Passion" was going to be an enormous box-office hit, Maher is hearing the sound of crickets in the fields of controversy, which may match cricket sounds at the box office.

Frank Rich of the New York Times attacked Mel Gibson and "The Passion" with a feverish pitch, but he hasn’t penned a word about Maher. Maher can mock Hasidic Jews as subhuman monkeys in his Internet ads, but Frank Rich is too busy chasing after Sarah Palin with his flamethrower. He has a problem with orthodox Christians, but certainly not with Hollywood atheists who think the Jews are as silly as any other faith community.

The New Republic was another fount of scholarship and outrage against Gibson’s cinematic vision of Christ’s crucifixion, but they’ve offered no Maher critique.

Time film critic Richard Corliss, who scoured "The Passion" as "The Goriest Story Ever Told," can only say of Maher: "Even the affronted Christians who gathered to oppose Bill Maher's docu-comedy ‘Religulous’ (one sign read MAKE PEACE NOT MAHER) looked more like a welcoming party – what would an antireligion movie be without protesters?"

Newsweek, which has passionately displayed an ongoing love affair with atheism, has failed to notice any controversy in the Maher film.

Maher’s pseudo-comic jeremiad can’t even score a positive review in The Village Voice. That’s in Greenwich Village. In the most bohemian corner of New York City. Their film critic J. Hoberman decries the movie in the headline as an "adolescent case against religion." Hoberman wants to like it, but scorns Maher: "Still, as a polemicist, he's hardly fair – more than a few exchanges are recalibrated in the editing, and too many end with Maher flipping Pascal's Wager, rejoining a believer's ‘What if you're wrong?’with an emphatic ‘What if you're wrong?’ Such one-sided encounters are more depressing than fun."

Bozell concluded that Maher's exchanges with religious people weren't just edited. The interview subjects were misled:

None of these [network TV] forums even located any controversy for all of Maher’s dishonesty in filming. “We never, ever used my name,” Maher told Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times when asked about how interviews were arranged. "We never told anybody it was me [sic] who was going to do the interviews. We even had a fake title for the film. We called it ‘A Spiritual Journey.’”

It is amazing that Maher thinks it’s religion that’s the “supreme hustle,” and not his lying movie.

Check out our Culture and Media Institute's web page. Bob Knight, Kristen Fyfe, and Colleen Raezler all offer reports on the Maher madness.